Le Morte Darthur for Children: Malory’s Third Tradition

Abstract

Malory’s Le Morte Darthur is a book for adult readers, but one that most of them will already have encountered in a version for children. This was not always the case. Before the mid-Victorian period, there was a juvenile Arthurian literature in the form of short histories, chapbook romances, ballads, Jack the Giant-Killer, and Tom Thumb, but it did not involve Malory, whom young people had to read straight or not at all. J. T. Knowles’s Story of King Arthur (1862) is usually seen as beginning adaptations of the Morte for young readers, a category which has since grown very large. Malory’s book remains today, as it was for Tennyson,¹ a notable link between youth and age, still perhaps one of the few narratives that people might encounter in some form throughout their whole reading lives. But since the mid-nineteenth century there has been a troubled double apprehension of the Morte: that it is somehow particularly suitable for children yet can only be made so by strenuous adaptation. It has been a text both loved and feared, deeply entrusted and distrusted with cultural labor. Through our double compulsion to give the story to children yet to change it radically for that purpose, Malory sets a revealing test for each generation, each writer, who adapts and retells him.