Book description
Le Morte D'Arthur is Sir Thomas Malory's richly evocative and
enthralling version of the Arthurian legend. Recounting Arthur's birth,
his ascendancy to the throne after claiming Excalibur, his ill-fated
marriage to Guenever, the treachery of Morgan le Fay and the exploits of
the Knights of the Round Table, it magically weaves together adventure,
battle, love and enchantment. Le Morte D'Arthur looks back to an
idealized Medieval world and is full of wistful, elegiac regret for a
vanished age of chivalry. Edited and published by William Caxton in
1485, Malory's prose romance drew on French and English verse sources to
give an epic unity to the Arthur myth, and remains the most magnificent
re-telling of the story in English.
No one knows for sure who the author of Le Morte D'Arthur was, but
the generally accepted theory is that of American scholar G. L.
Kitteredge, who argued it was Sir Thomas Malory, born in the first
quarter of the fifteenth century, and who spent the greatest part of
his last twenty years in prison. Another possibility is a Thomas
Malory of Studley and Hutton in Yorkshire, or an author living north
of Warwickshire. It is generally accepted that the author was a member
of the gentry and a Lancastrain.
John Lawlor was Professor of English Language and Literature at the
University of Keele. He is the author of The Tragic Sense in
Shakespeare, Piers Plowman: An Essay in Criticism and Chaucer. Janet
Cowen is a senior lecturer in English at King's College, University of London.
