Abstract
Sir Thomas Malory hammered together many sources to forge his Morte Darthur, from English alliterative poetry to French romance, but he did not seamlessly integrate his material. Instead, he leaves the welds visible, revealing the diversity in his sources. C.S. Lewis damns the resulting style with faint praise:
Malory’s greatest original passages arise when he is most completely absorbed in the story and realizes the characters so fully that they begin to talk for him of their own accord; but they talk in a language he has largely learned from his sources. The very ease with which he wanders away from this style into that of some inferior source or into a language of his own … suggests that he hardly knows what he is doing …. He has no style of his own, no characteristic manner …. In a style or styles so varied, everywhere so indebted to others, and perhaps most original precisely where it is most indebted, one cannot hopefully seek l’homme même. Here also Malory vanishes into a mist.1
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Notes
“The English Prose Morte,” Essays on Malory, ed. J.A.W. Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 23–24.
Mikhail Bakhtin, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” The Dialogic Imagination, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 47–49. Emphasis in the original.
Catherine Batt, Malory’s Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 376–86.
Caroline A. Jewers, Chivalric Fiction and the History of the Novel (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000).
Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
See Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
Constance Brittain Bouchard, Strong of Body, Brave and Noble: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
Juliet Barker, The Tournament in England, 1100–1400 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1986);
Richard Barber and Juliet Barker, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry, and Pageants in the Middle Ages (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989).
Notably R.M. Lumiansky ed., Malory’s Originality: A Critical Study of Le Morte Darthur (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964);
Charles Moorman, The Book of Kyng Arthur: The Unity of Malory’s Morte Darthur (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965).
Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).
Knighthood in the Morte Darthur, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 1992).
Donald Hoffman, “Perceval’s Sister: Malory’s ‘Rejected’ Masculinities,” Arthuriana 6.4 (1996): 73–83.
Elizabeth Edwards, The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 2001), p. 72. Dorsey Armstrong modifies this formulation, giving greater precedence to the Round Table oath, which, she argues, establishes standards for chivalry and gender that are then tested and refined throughout the text. See Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), pp. 29–30.
Karen Cherewatuk, “Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Grete Booke,’” The Social and Literary Contexts of Malory’s Morte Darthur, ed. D. Thomas Hanks, Jr. (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 42–67.
The Book of Fayttes of Armes and Chyualrye, trans. William Caxton, ed. A.T.P. Byles, EETS o.s. 189 (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1932).
The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3rd ed., ed. Eugene Vinaver, rev. P.J.C Field (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990) 486–88; IX.13–14. After the page number, I cite the book and chapter number according to Caxton. Hereafter, Malory will be cited parenthetically in the text.
See, for instance, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991);
Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002);
John Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982);
Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6.
See, for instance, Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathy Lavezzo (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2004);
Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 98–113;
Patricia Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001);
Michelle Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100–1300 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). For a dissent,
see Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), pp. 107–15, although they concede there was a “nascent” nationalism in the fifteenth century that Caxton’s printing of Le Morte Darthur helped foster (pp. 136, 159–71).
L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Pro Patria Mori,” Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathy Lavezzo (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 3–38.
For more background on affinities, see Rosemary Horrox, “Service,” Fifteenth-Century Attitudes, ed. Rosemary Horrox (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 61p–78; and Richard III: A Study of Service (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For an analysis of the role of affinities in Le Morte Darthur, see
Hyonjin Kim, The Knight Without the Sword: A Social Landscape of Malorian Chivalry (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 55–99. For their significance in the life of one of the possible authors of Le Morte Darthur, see
P.J.C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 48p–51 and elsewhere.
Although Edward IV and Henry VII both claimed to be descendants of Arthur, such claims were not central to their royal images: see Sydney Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London: Seaby 1992), pp. 40–60.
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© 2005 Kenneth Hodges
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Hodges, K. (2005). Introduction: Medieval by a Month. In: Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979322_1
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