Le Morte D’Arthur

Thomas Malory

Le Morte D’Arthur — Thomas Malory did not invent the stories of Arthur, King of Britain, but it is fair to say that he reinvented them. Although the legends were already hundreds of years old by the fifteenth century, the contemporary stories of Arthur in Malory’s day were primarily French. The French had added many of the elements familiar to modern readers, among them Lancelot, and the search for the Holy Grail. Malory combined, edited, and added some of his own material to the stories available to him, and in the process created a uniquely British work. (It was his printer Caxton who gave it a French name.) Le Morte d’Arthur is a major source for many modern retellings of King Arthur and his knights, from Hollywood movies and musicals to Nobel-prize winning writers. Malory’s identity remains disputed, since several men with variant spellings of the name have been proposed. The work is usually attributed to Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire. He faced accusations of rape and repeated theft, raising questions about the relationship between his biography and the book’s chivalric ideals. The author’s own notes indicate that he wrote as a prisoner. Whatever the circumstances of its composition, the work gave new life to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.