16 - Le Morte D'Arthur

Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory
Oxford University Press, 1971
811 pages
Date completed: November 15, 2009

So I finished this a long time ago and just forgot to write it down! So technically I should have blogged about it a few weeks ago but oh well. Here we have Malory's Works, which is just a fancy name for Le Morte D'Arthur, which is all he wrote. It is comprised of the following books:

The Tale of King Arthur
The Tale of the Noble King Arthur that was Emperor Himself through Dignity of his Hands
A Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake
The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney that was Called Bewmaynes
The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones and Iseult the Fair
The Tale of the Sankgreal (the Holy Grail)
The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere
The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur

I loved basically every minute of this hulking tale of adventure, knights errant, scandal, and, ultimately, destruction. Although some of the tournament and battle chapters were a little dull because they just describe who fought with who, even those weren't bad!

Having finished this entire work, I find it strange that King Arthur and the Round Table are so glorified everywhere. The first time I read some of the tales of King Arthur (in modern English, of course) was in third grade, because I was absolutely enthralled with the idea of Camelot already, at the age of eight! So somehow the legend of Arthur embeds itself into us at a very young age, and from then on (for me, at least), I romanticized the idea and thought Arthur was this great fictional king who did all sorts of amazing things.

In reality, there's a lot of seediness under the surface in Camelot. Right now I'm writing a paper about how withdrawn Arthur was from Britain throughout the last 650ish pages of the book, and how that caused the destruction of the Round Table. Because yes, my friends, the Round Table/Camelot/Arthur all meet their end in this book. It's prophecized by Merlin within the first 15 pages or so, so I don't think that spoils the book for anyone. But again, this is an idea that doesn't really come into pop culture along with the lauding. I think people need to know. Arthur was a great king at first, but he was never, ever the greatest. He was a great warrior and leader, but he was always overshadowed by his knights on the battlefield. He eventually stops taking part in domesticating the kingdom and exploring, preferring to let his knights do all the dirty work while he sits in Camelot on his ass.

Then there's the scandalous affair of Launcelot and Guinevere, the corruption of Gawain and his brothers, and the fact that basically none of the knights of the Round Table (barring Launcelot and a few others) really follow the code of chivalry that has been set before them.

So rather than this mythical, fantasy-esque book about magic and this amazing king and his amazing knights, the real Morte D'Arthur is even better! There is actual human vulnerability exposed all the time! There are conflicts that run much deeper than a clash of swords or lances. There are subplots full of treachery, love stories, kidnappings, the quest for the frickin Holy Grail (which is achieved by Galahad the Boring as well as Bors and Percival), and a ton of humor! Knights wearing dresses over their armor, Lady Hallews with her "poisoned lip gloss" (as my professor calls it), a song written by Dynaden about how crappy King Mark of Cornwall is (Mark = the king from the Tristram and Iseult story who is Tristram's uncle and Iseult's husband. He's probably the seediest, most disgusting character in the whole book), the time Launcelot is sleeping and a knight comes in thinking Launce is his paramour and starts making out with Launce...oh man. I could go on forever.

What I'm trying to say is that this story has it all. It was really written under the pretense of relaying a religious lesson, and in the last 7 pages or so everyone gives up the world and enters nunneries/monasteries and goes to heaven, but the book itself isn't like that at all. It's about the journey: adventurous, thrilling, funny, interesting, and full of characters who are dimensional, vulnerable, and likeable. It's literally a classic (hehe, from the fourteenth century), and reading it in the original early English was a real treat.

And so "he drewe his swerd Excalibur, but it was so bryght in his enemyes eyen that it gaf light lyke thirty torchys, and therwith he put hem on bak and slewe moche people." The epitome of medieval badass right there.