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Introduction: Many Malorys

The work you are about to read is most commonly referred to as Le Morte Darthur, “The Death of Arthur,” but it is much more than that. Here you will read an account of Arthur’s death, certainly—in fact, it is one of the most moving and dramatic renderings of the final moments of the king of legend—but more significantly, you will read the story of King Arthur’s conception, birth, rise to power, and the deeds of his knights; you will, as William Caxton, the first printer of Malory’s text put it in his preface, find “chivalry, courtesy, humanity, fellowship, endurance, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin”—in short, the full scope of human emotion and action.

The legend of King Arthur had been popular throughout the Middle Ages, yet, although it is the story of a British king, by the fifteenth century Arthur’s legend had been most thoroughly chronicled in French; it is French writers who added what many think of as the most central characters and elements of Arthur’s story to legend—Sir Lancelot, and the Holy Grail, for example. But in the late fifteenth century, an Englishman by the name of Sir Thomas Malory reclaimed Arthur for England and the English (an ironic move, as the original Arthur figure was most likely a Romano-British Celt who rose to fame fighting against Anglo-Saxon invaders, the ancestors of the “English”). Drawing on a variety of source texts (most of them French) Malory rewrote the story of Arthur in English while he was serving time in prison during the 1460s; scholars estimate that he completed the work sometime in 1469 or 1470. He died in 1471, perhaps while still a prisoner.

I have titled this introduction “Many Malorys” in part because the identity of this Sir Thomas Malory was not always a surety; there are at least two other Thomas Malorys who have been identified as possible authors of this document. The work of renowned Malory scholar P.J.C. Field, however, seems to have established to a certainty that the minor nobleman Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel is the author of the text we have come to call Le Morte Darthur. Even with the identity of the author established, however, the title of my introduction is still apt; this Thomas Malory seems a man of remarkable and occasionally stunning contradictions, whose own personality encompassed the range of behaviors Caxton identified as being found within the text itself.

Although a nobleman by class, Sir Thomas Malory engaged in some strikingly non-noble behavior. He was charged with many crimes, and among them are cattle stealing, ambush, rape, and assaulting an abbott, to name just four. To be fair, Malory was living during the turbulent period of the fifteenth century known today as “The Wars of the Roses,” and his politics may have played a significant role in these charges being brought against him. In the mid-to-late fifteenth century, the throne of England changed from the Lancastrian Henry VI to the Yorkist Edward IV, and then back, and then back again. Noblemen at this time routinely switched allegiances, depending upon who was in power. Malory himself seems initially to have been a Yorkist supporter, but it was his implication in a Lancastrian plot that landed him in prison near the end of his life. While his politics certainly played a part in his incarceration, he was by no means a saint, or even like to one of the noble knights about whom he wrote; some of the charges leveled against him appear to have credence, and it is firmly established that he ambushed his former patron, the Duke of Buckingham, on a winter’s night in 1450.

Remarkably, while in prison for such unknightly behavior, Malory chose to produce a text that many have seen as a “hymn” to knighthood. Although some might find Malory’s decision to engage in this activity as smacking of irony, I would argue that his decision to compose a story about a “golden age” of chivalry while living in an age devoid, for all intents and purposes, of the loftier chivalric values, is no accident. For while Malory’s work is hardly original in the modern sense of the word in that he relied so heavily on source texts, there are original moments in Le Morte Darthur—moments when Malory the author speaks up—and on these occasions, one can sense Malory’s distaste for the customs of his own day and his desire for a society more like to the one he depicts in his text. Most frequently, these are moments in which Malory feels compelled to voice some opinion about the actions of the characters—as near the end, when he comments upon the decision of many of Arthur’s subjects to side with Sir Mordred against their king:

Lo, you Englishmen! Do you see what a bad situation this was? He who was the greatest king and noblest knight in all the world, and who most loved his fellowship of noble knights, and whose honor raised that fellowship up—he was ill treated by his subjects. These Englishmen were not happy with him. Lo, such was the custom and behavior of the people of this land, and many men say that we have not lost that custom. Alas, this is a great fault in us Englishmen—to never be wholly pleased (p. 1023).

Even more important to any attempt to determine why Malory chose to write the story of King Arthur is an addition that he makes near the beginning of the text. The moment is the swearing of the Pentecostal Oath; none of Malory’s known sources have anything similar, and thus, most scholars agree that the articulation of values here most likely is an expression of what Malory himself thought to be the ideals by which chivalric knights should live. King Arthur, Malory tells us, orders his knights

never to commit outrage or murder, to always flee treason, and to give mercy to those who asked for mercy, upon pain of the forfeiture of their honor and status as a knight of King Arthur’s forever more. He charged them to always help ladies, damsels, gentlewomen, and widows, and never to commit rape, upon pain of death. Also, he commanded that no man should take up a battle in a wrongful quarrel—not for love, nor for any worldly goods (pp. 110–111).

Le Morte Darthur, I believe, is one man’s response to the fallen world in which he found himself—a world in which the loyalty of knights was changeable and personal gain was a stronger motivator than a just cause. Although Malory himself was guilty of violating the ideas expressed in the Pentecostal Oath, his behavior was no more than one might expect in a society where two cousins and their entourages wrangled over the right to sit on England’s throne. With such a poor model, it is no wonder that those further down the social ladder behaved in similar dishonorable fashion. With the composition of his text—and specifically, the insertion of the code of knightly conduct into it near the beginning—Malory seems to be conducting an experiment; here, he says, are ideals of knightly behavior. The rest of his text tests those ideals in a variety of circumstances—in matters of love, of adventure, and of religion—as if to attempt and offer a solution to the discombobulated society in which he was living. Whether or not his experiment was a success—or of any lasting value—I will leave to the individual reader to determine; no matter how one judges the outcome, however, I feel strongly that one must admire the effort Malory expended on his endeavor.

Malory’s work is a watershed moment in the development of the legend of King Arthur, for his text is the most coherent, comprehensive, single-author treatment of the Arthurian legend before the modern period. Malory picks and chooses, blends and reworks, unlaces and joins parts of his source texts to tell a story of Arthur that moves from the very beginning to the very end. In the middle, his focus moves away from Arthur himself to tell the stories of his knights in whose adventures the king is always immanent. He carefully rearranges episodes from his sources to tell the story of Arthur that he wants to tell, and it is his work that stands as the monumental and definitive Arthurian text in English, the source from which countless later writers sought inspiration.

My redaction of Le Morte Darthur reflects this strongly-held belief that Malory’s work is a unified one—more akin to the modern novel and less like a collection of tales related to one another by their common subject. In this respect, I part company with the most famous and revered editor of Malory’s work, Eugène Vinaver, whose scholarly edition based on the Winchester Manuscript has long been the standard in the field. The title of my introduction—“Many Malorys”—fits not only the problem of who Malory was but also the presentation and availability of Malory’s text. As a man living in the Middle Ages, Malory of course wrote his text entirely by hand; that manuscript has long been lost, and until 1934, any handwritten version of the Le Morte Darthur was unknown. Malory’s text was known only through the version printed by William Caxton, England’s first printer, in 1485 (and reprinted periodically thereafter by his own printing house and others). In 1934, however, a handwritten manuscript was discovered (called the Winchester Manuscript because of its discovery at Winchester College) and scholars were forced to reconsider the nature of Malory’s work. Caxton, it seems, had divided Le Morte Darthur up into Books and Chapters (presumably to make the process of negotiating the text easier for his clientele), and had given admirably descriptive, suspense-deflating titles to those chapters. For example, Chapter Eight of Book XVII is titled by Caxton, “How Galahad and his fellows came to a castle, and how they fought before the castle, and how they slew their adversaries, and other matters.” Caxton the printer added to Malory’s manuscript material that has a certain charm but also at times some obtuseness.

The Winchester Manuscript, which scholar Lotte Hellinga has conclusively proved was used by Caxton as a guide when he set Malory’s text into print, contains no such divisions. Rather, its divisions are marked by the use of capital letters, spaces between lines, blank folios, and the occasional comment along the lines of “Now we leave Sir Galahad and turn to Sir Lancelot.” When the Winchester Manuscript was first edited by Vinaver, however, he produced a version of the manuscript that was divided into eight tales or books; this was because Vinaver did not regard Le Morte Darthur as one unified text, but rather, as eight separate narratives that are loosely connected by their subject matter. Thus, Vinaver chose to title his edition The Works of Sir Thomas Malory to signify his belief that what the Winchester Manuscript contains are texts, and not a single text. Although the locations of Vinaver’s divisions make a kind of sense—the narrative sections he identifies are arguably discrete in terms of plot and tone, a result in large measure due to the different sources Malory drew on for each section—the types of divisions are not those of different books, but rather, more similar to those of chapters within a single book. Although the story may seem at times to wander, Malory shapes his material into a single story about the rise and fall of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

In producing this translation, I have returned to the Winchester Manuscript, and, as far as possible, have relied upon it as a guide for structuring this edition. It follows Malory’s intention to craft a single, unified narrative, while also showing contemporary readers that Malory’s method falls somewhat short of the sort of the writing process we associate with the modern novel. I find the general idea of Caxton’s approach—to divide the text up into smaller, manageable units—to be a useful guide in theory, but a bit excessive in practice. Thus, I have walked a line somewhere between Vinaver’s and Caxton’s treatment of the text; I have divided Le Morte Darthur into 90 Chapters, all part of a single “book,” relying first on stylistic and material divisions within the manuscript as a guide, and next dividing the text based on episodic units within the narrative. Because most readers who have already encountered Le Morte Darthur are familiar with either Caxton’s or Vinaver’s editions, I have keyed this translation to both of these versions of the text; thus, there are three Tables of Contents—mine, Vinaver’s and Caxton’s—and within the body of the text, Caxton’s and Vinaver’s Book and Chapter divisions are noted in the margins. I believe that readers will agree with me, however, that my chapter divisions more accurately represent naturally occurring story units in Malory’s text and help make clear how Malory chose portions of his French sources to translate. Many of these sources can be found in the notes to Vinaver’s great edition, and I hope that readers who develop a taste for Malory here may turn there to investigate further how Malory managed to add his magic to his French originals. I should add that as I write this, the pre-eminent living Malory scholar, P. J. C. Field, is putting the finishing touches on his own critical edition of the text; once in print, this monumental work will surely supplant Vinaver’s and become the standard scholarly edition.

No matter how one regards the Le Morte Darthur, however—as one text or many—there is no denying the extraordinary quality of Sir Thomas Malory’s accomplishment. The story of King Arthur’s rise and fall has proved enduring in its popularity and the lessons it can offer, for a medieval as well as a modern audience. It is my hope that this translation makes this remarkable narrative accessible for those who might otherwise be daunted by the late Middle English of Malory’s prose.