“The Arthur of the Britons”
In the second half of the fifteenth century, Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) wrote a mammoth prose account of King Arthur and his knights, called the Morte Darthure. Malory was not the first Arthurian writer: his problem was precisely that by the time he set quill to parchment, there had been so many Arthurian stories, about so many characters, in so many languages and traditions. Even in Britain, where Malory was writing, Arthurian poetry and prose – in Latin, Welsh, English, and French – had been circulating for centuries. So while Malory’s Morte is in some ways an encyclopedia of the medieval Arthurian tradition, it is also inevitably a partial glimpse of that tradition, as Malory had to pick and choose in order to create a coherent, compelling story that centred on Arthur himself as a great British king.
Malory’s version of the story was enormously influential in later literary history in the English-speaking world, and so a good deal of our popular lore about Arthur and the Round Table comes to us, ultimately, from Malory. For this reason, we will start our exploration with Malory, with a story whose outlines might be familiar to you already. We will then move backwards to consider earlier Arthurian texts from medieval Britain, some of which Malory certainly knew, and some of which he most likely did not. Our reading will include the “fairy” romance of Sir Lanval (in both Marie de France’s French version and Thomas Chestre’s Middle English one); the great fourteenth-century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the Welsh prose romances of Gereint son of Erbin and Peredur son of Efrog; Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Latin History of the Kings of Britain; the strange Welsh prose story called How Culhwch won Olwen, and the handful of cryptic Welsh poems that might contain the earliest seeds of the legend.
In his 1938 Arthurian novel The Sword in the Stone, T. H. White explained Merlin’s abilities by saying that the magician lived backwards in time: he could prophesy the future because he had already seen it. By reading backwards through medieval British Arthurian narrative, we will be able both to appreciate Malory’s craft, and see the many forking paths he did not take.
The Morte Darthur, Sir Launfal, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight will be read in Middle English. The Latin, French, and Welsh material will be read in translation.