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 OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
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changing needs of readers.
 OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS

SIR THOMAS MALORY

Le Morte Darthur
THE WINCHESTER MANUSCRIPT

Edited and abridged

with an Introduction and Notes by
HELEN COOPER

OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
 OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Published in the United States
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First published as an Oxford World's Classics paperback 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Malory, Thomas, Sir, 15th cent.
Le morte Darthur : the Winchester manuscript/Sir Thomas Malory;
edited and abridged with an introduction and notes by Helen Cooper,
(Oxford world's classics)
Based on the 'Winchester manuscript' of the Morte Darthur held by
the British Library.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Arthurian romances. 2. Knights and knighthood—Romances.
3. Kings and rulers—Romances. I. Cooper, Helen. II. Title.
III. Series
PR2043.C63 1998 823'.2—dc21 97-18955
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-282420-2
ISBN-10: 0-19-282420-1
12
Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
 CONTENTS

Introduction vii
Note on the Text xxiii
Select Bibliography xxvii
Chronology of Arthurian Material to 1500 xxxi
Glossary of Recurrent Words xxxii

LE MORTE DARTHUR
FROM THE MARRIAGE OF KING UTHER UNTO KING ARTHUR 3
How Uther Pendragon begot the Noble Conqueror
King Arthur
The Tale of Balin and Balan 33
The Wedding of King Arthur SO
Of Nenive and Morgan le Fay 58
THE NOBLE TALE BETWIXT KING ARTHUR AND LUCIUS
THE EMPEROR OF ROME 82
A NOBLE TALE OF SIR LANCELOT DU LAKE 95
THE TALE OF SIR GARETH OF ORKNEY 120
THE BOOK OF SIR TRISTRAM DE LYONESSE 169
Of Sir Galahad, Sir Lancelot's son 281
Of Sir Lancelot 293
Of Sir Tristram and of Sir Palomides 304
THE NOBLE TALE OF THE SANGRAIL 310
Of Sir Galahad 321
Of Sir Gawain 327
Of Sir Lancelot 329
Of SirPercivalde Gales 335
Of Sir Lancelot 346
Of Sir Gawain and Sir Ector 351
vi Contents
Of Sir Bars de Gam's 357
Of Sir Galahad 373
Of Sir Lancelot 388
Of Sir Galahad 395
THE TALE OF SIR LANCELOT AND QUEEN GUENIVERE 403
THE DEATH OF ARTHUR 468

APPENDIX Caxton'sPreface 528

Explanatory Notes 531

Index of Characters 567
 INTRODUCTION

The Story of Arthur

At the battle of Camlann, Arthur and Medraut fell.
That cryptic line is not quite the earliest reference to Arthur, but it is
the first that lays claim to historical plausibility. It is also the first to
name Mordred together with Arthur in their last battle—though
whether as opponents or associates is not clear. TheAnnales Cambriae,
which contains the entry, dates the battle to the early sixth century.
Between that date, whether legendary or historical, and the first full
account of Arthur written 600 years later, legends about him were
widespread, as we know from tantalizingly allusive references in Welsh
poetry, from recurrent appearances of Arthur as a Christian name, and
from the record of a fracas in Cornwall early in the twelfth century
between a local man and the servant of a visiting ecclesiastical
dignitary over the issue of whether Arthur was still alive.
It was Geoffrey of Monmouth, however, writing his History of the
Kings of Britain in the 1130s, who first made Arthur into the great
British hero, and who provided him with the biography that remained
current in accounts of the English past down to the time of the six-
teenth-century historian Holinshed. Like the writers of much of the
best fiction, Geoffrey claims to be deriving his work from an ancient
book that he was lent, written in the British language; neither its exist-
ence nor its non-existence can be proved. His Arthur is a conqueror
(both within the British Isles and on the continent of Europe) who is
supported by a group of warriors, notable among them Gawain and
Kay; it is while he is campaigning on the continent that his nephew
Mordred, left as regent in his absence, attempts to usurp the throne,
resulting in their final internecine battle. The Round Table makes its
first appearance in a French verse redaction of Geoffrey made some
fifteen years later, the Roman de Brut of Wace. Shortly after that, prob-
ably starting in the 116os, Chretien de Troyes composed the first
French verse romances devoted to the exploits of individual knights of
the Round Table. It is in these that Lancelot first achieves prominence,
as the lover of Guenivere and as Arthur's best knight, displacing
Gawain.
viii Introduction
The fashion started by Chretien initiated an extraordinary literary
flowering of Arthurian material across Europe. New romances were
composed; French ones were translated and adapted into a multipli-
city of languages, from Norse to Portuguese and Hebrew. Early in the
thirteenth century in France, the stories contained in the verse
romances of Arthur were given a new and extended form in prose. A
connected series of these written by various authors, known as the Vul-
gate Cycle, covered the whole history of the Round Table from the
pre-history of the Grail in the generation after the Crucifixion down to
Arthur's death in battle against Mordred, who by this time had
become his illegitimate son unwittingly begotten on his sister. In this
cycle, divine retribution for sexual sin—Arthur's incest with his sister,
Lancelot's adultery with Guenivere—brings about the fall of the
Round Table, and the Grail knights are accordingly upgraded into
being warriors of God, pure of any sexual contact, and with the new
figure of Galahad replacing the earlier and more worldly Grail hero
Perceval. Tristan and Isolde, whose story had originally been independ-
ent of any Arthurian connections, were also drawn within the great
magnetic field of the Round Table, and Tristan, in a huge prose
romance of his own, became the only knight of medieval romance to
rival Lancelot in both prowess and popularity.
In England, the history of Arthurian romance followed a slightly
different path. The 'historical' story of Arthur, ultimately derived
from Geoffrey of Monmouth, was retold several times in poetic form,
notably in the alliterative Morte Arthurs of the late fourteenth century.
There are a number of English metrical romances of individual
Arthurian knights: a version of the original Tristan story, a translation
of Chretien's Yvain, a Percival of Gales without the Grail. The most
striking feature of the English tradition, however, is that Gawain
remains the most popular Arthurian knight, eleven surviving metrical
romances being devoted to his exploits besides the magnificent allitera-
tive Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Lancelot never received the kind
of attention that he did in France: only a verse adaptation of the last
part of the Vulgate Cycle, the stanzaic Morte Arthur, accords him any
significant space before Malory himself.
The stanzaic Morte Arthur, probably composed around the same
time as the alliterative Morte, is typical in translating French prose into
English verse. Prose romance arrived late in England, well into the
fifteenth century. To us, Malory's decision to write in prose looks
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 Introduction ix
inevitable; at the time he was writing, in the 14605, it was by no means
such an obvious choice. Only one English translation of Vulgate Cycle
material out of the five that precede Malory uses prose; and his English
sources are all in verse, stanzaic or alliterative. His choice of prose may
have been influenced by the fact that the earliest English prose
romances tend to be stories of disaster or tragedy—stories such as
Oedipus or the fall of Troy—rather than of wish-fulfilment and happy
endings. That Malory gives his whole work the title of the Morte
Darthur, the death of Arthur, insists that this too is a story in which
things go irrevocably wrong.
Although Malory was writing over two centuries after the composi-
tion of the French prose romances that form the bulk of his sources, he
was neither old-fashioned nor anachronistic in turning back to them.
They were enjoying a new surge of popularity in the fifteenth century,
with new manuscript copies being made and a cult of chivalry to
encourage their reading. A number are known to have been owned by
readers in England, and Malory would probably not have needed to go
to the continent to find copies of his source works.1 England's first
printer, William Caxton, who printed Malory's work in 1485, was both
cashing in on the fashion for Arthurian material and setting the pace
for its broader dissemination: the first French Arthurian prose
romance to be printed, the Lancelot, appeared in 1488, the Tristan in
1489.
It was Malory's work, however, that survived. After tastes changed
in the course of the sixteenth century the French romances ceased to
be reprinted, and in so far as they have been known at all since then it
is largely as works for study by academics, despite recent translations
of some of them. Malory, by contrast, was reprinted several times
down to 1634; he passed into some obscurity after that, but since the
revival of interest in the Morte that started early in the nineteenth cen-
tury, he has served as the direct or indirect basis for almost every
Arthurian work in any medium: poems, novels, children's books,
science fiction, films, advertisements, cartoons, modern heritage
paraphernalia—everything from epics to T-shirts.

1
See Carol M. Meale, 'Manuscripts, Readers and Patrons in Fifteenth-Century
England: Sir Thomas Malory and Arthurian Romance', Arthurian Literature, 4 (1985),
93-126.
x Introduction

Sir Thomas Malory

Who was Sir Thomas Malory? The strong likelihood is that he was a
man who at first sight appears distinctly unpromising, at least if one
believes that writers' lives should accord with the principles of their
work. The career of Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, in War-
wickshire, reads more like an account of exemplary thuggery than
chivalry.2 His date of birth and early years are obscure; he may possi-
bly have served in France in the later stages of the Hundred Years War.
He first enters the records in 1439, and had been knighted by 1441.
With the exception of an episode of grievous bodily harm, until 1450
he lived the life of a socially responsible member of the gentry, holding
various public offices including that of Member of Parliament. After
this, however, he turned to a career of crime and violence, interspersed
with long periods of imprisonment. He began with a spectacular out-
burst that included attempted assassination, cattle-rustling, extor-
tion, abbey-breaking, and rape. (He was indeed accused of raping the
same woman on two separate occasions; in his favour, it should be
noted that at this date a charge of rape of a married woman could be a
husband's way of going on the offensive over his wife's adultery.)
Unprecedentedly large forces were sent to arrest him; he twice escaped
from imprisonment—once by swimming the moat, once with the help
of swords and long knives—and his jailers were threatened with
record-breaking penalty clauses in the event of a further escape. He
had the unique distinction of being exempted by name from two sepa-
rate general pardons. In his periods of liberty, various of the magnates
who had interests in the Warwickshire area made gestures towards
recruiting him into their affinities (political and, if necessary, military
interest groups), but none showed any enthusiasm about either hold-
ing on to him or offering him support. A number of comments in the
course of his Arthurian work inform us that he wrote it in prison; he
completed it, he tells us, in the year 1469-70. He died in March 1471.
The mismatch between this life and the golden ideal of chivalry that
the Morte Darthur promotes has led to a series of attempts to find other
candidates for its authorship, but none has been convincing. There
2
The following account is indebted to P. J. C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas
Malory (Cambridge, 1993), modified in the light of Christine Carpenter, 'Sir Thomas
Malory and Fifteenth-century Local Polities', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical
Research, 53 (1980), 31-43.
 Introduction xi
were other Malory families in the fifteenth century, but none con-
tained a Thomas known to have been knighted, nor one known to have
been imprisoned for anything like the length of time necessary for pro-
ducing such a huge work. Claims have been made for a Yorkshire
Malory and, less convincingly, for a Cambridgeshire Malory, but sup-
porting evidence is no more than circumstantial.'
The contrast between the ethics promoted in the Morte Darthur and
those evinced by Malory's life is huge, but it is not so greatly different
in kind from the contrast shown by the age in which he lived. The
fifteenth century witnessed a cult of chivalry such as had never been
known before: its practitioners seem to have thought of it as a revival,
but it is hard to find actual precedents. Tournaments and individual
chivalric combats, the latter often based on the model of the prose
romances, reached new heights of elaboration on the continent of
Europe. Noblemen and other gentlemen would sometimes set up a pil-
lar or a shield or a basin at a crossroads or some comparable place, to be
struck by challengers who wished to engage in combat with them—a
process known as the pas d'armes, the passage of arms. A Burgundian
gentleman named Jacques de Lalaing acquired fame for conducting
his life on the model of a knight errant, travelling Europe in a search
for chivalric combatants. Orders of knighthood flourished: one of the
earliest, Edward Ill's Order of the Garter, had been established in
1348, in a conscious imitation of the fellowship of the Round Table,
but the majority of such orders were fifteenth-century foundations.
Malory himself apparently modelled the oath sworn by the fellows of
the Round Table on the charge laid on the neophyte knights in the
ceremony for creating Knights of the Bath.
Chivalric orders, however, were founded in order to set standards of
aspiration in a world that was less than ideal. Local and national disor-
der in England increased in intensity in the course of the fifteenth cen-
tury, more or less in line with Malory's own career of violence. The
weak adult rule of Henry VI culminated in civil war between his
house of Lancaster and the rival dynasty of York; but the battle for the
throne was only the extreme form of a more general feuding and civil

' See William Matthews, The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Enquiry into the Identity
of Sir Thomas Malory (Berkeley, California, 1966); and Richard R. Griffith, 'The
Authorship Question Reconsidered: A Case for Sir Thomas Malory of Papworth
St Agnes, Cambridgeshire', in Aspects of Malory, ed. Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek
Brewer (Cambridge, 1981), 159-77.
xii Introduction
disturbance, which a stronger king could have controlled. It is much
too easy to imagine the Wars of the Roses as a simple struggle between
Yorkists and Lancastrians: in practice it was more like a series of
faction-fights in which participants might on occasion change sides,
not just over the question of which king they supported, but according
to baronial enmities and local disputes that could in turn draw
members of rival magnate affinities into larger feuds.
Malory's work may ostensibly be set in a legendary age in which
chivalric behaviour was lived most fully, but not the least interesting
thing about his own redaction of his Arthurian material is the way it
intersects with the conditions of his own era. In the French Vulgate
Cycle, it is the failure of earthly knighthood, as shown up by the stand-
ards of religious perfection set by the quest for the Holy Grail, that
causes the downfall of Arthur. In Malory's version, the fellowship of
the Round Table is split from within by warring factions. Gawain and
his brothers (always excepting the 'good knight' Sir Gareth) acquire a
hatred of Lancelot grounded on envy; and they murder Sir Lamorak
because of a blood-feud deriving from their father's death in battle at
the hands of Lamorak's father Pellinore. Arthur, bound to Gawain by
close ties of kinship, appears helpless to stop the violence; and after
Lancelot accidentally kills Gareth while he is unarmed and on the
King's service, Gawain demands revenge from the King that Arthur
cannot legally or feudally refuse.
All these episodes are present in his French sources, but Malory's
changes of emphasis amount to an ethical restructuring of the whole
history of Arthur. His version is not a clash between earthly and divine
focused on the issue of sexual sinfulness, but a study of the personal
rivalries that underlie political disintegration. His awareness of the
connections between the story he is recounting and his own times
becomes on occasion explicit: as he notes that in Arthur's days justice
was exercised regardless of the rank of the accused and without mis-
carrying for 'favour, love, nor affinity'—the last being a reference to
the system of magnates' packing of juries in support of their retainers;
or in his outburst attacking 'all ye Englishmen' who are prepared to
exchange one king for another, 'and men say that we of this land have
not yet lost that custom'. Malory's Morte Darthur is not an exercise in
nostalgia for a golden age: it is an account of the destruction of an
ideal.
 Introduction xiii
Malory's Arthurian World
Malory's 'whole book of King Arthur and of his noble knights of the
Round Table' gives a complete history of the Arthurian world. In part
it comprises a life of Arthur himself, from the mysterious circum-
stances of his begetting and birth, through his mighty conquests, to his
downfall and death. Integrated with and inset within that is a series of
individual histories of the most famous members of the fellowship of
the Round Table. Some are given space of their own—Gareth,
Lancelot, Tristram, Galahad; others are told of in the course of other
stories—Gawain, Mordred, Pelleas, Bors, Palomides, Dinadan, Lam-
orak. The important thing, however, is that they do make up a fellow-
ship. They support each other, rescue each other, 'enfellowship' with
each other—the verb is Malory's own coinage. If they engage in com-
bat in anger (as distinct from sport), it is because of mistaken identity,
or because of an explicit failure of fellowship: a failure that becomes
increasingly evident as the whole history progresses, and which finally
destroys the fellowship from within.
The ideal of knighthood that Malory presents is summarized in the
oath sworn by the Round Table knights: to avoid treason and wrongful
quarrels; to show mercy; never to offer violence, especially sexual vio-
lence, to gentlewomen (the aristocratic social basis is a premiss almost
universal in medieval romance, not least in Arthurian material) and to
fight on their behalf. Later he adds that the quarrels in which a knight
fights should come from God or his lady; and he repeats many times
and in many forms that true love should be faithful and unchanging. It
is, in fact, an ideal of secular Christian chivalry, that incorporates
physical prowess, an observance of one's duties to God—his knights
are generally meticulous about attending Mass—and faithful hetero-
sexual love.
None of these, however, is unproblematic. Secular romance gave
primacy to love—most often, to courtship and sexuality that leads to
marriage; less often, though more famously, to love independent of
marriage, such as proved its absoluteness by its inability to be con-
strained by the social taboos against adultery in general, or, in particu-
lar, with the wife of one's overlord. The medieval church, by contrast,
had a tendency to define spiritual perfection in terms of sexual intact-
ness, virginity, in a manner directly at odds with the ethos of secular
romance. Malory seems perfectly happy to give examples of all three
xiv Introduction
attitudes: Gareth's winning of Dame Lyonesse as his wife, the illicit
passion of Lancelot and Guenivere or Tristram and Isode, the eleva-
tion of virginity in the knights of the Grail quest. He is notably free of
the anxieties about sexuality that are often ascribed to medieval cul-
ture; he takes it as natural and unthreatening, for instance, that women
have sexual desires, reserving his disapproval for women such as Mor-
gan le Fay who try to impose their desires by force or blackmail in a
female equivalent of rape. His villains in his presentation of love are
those men or women who are promiscuous, jealous, or violent, or who
betray lovers in order to destroy them. Hermits and other confessors
who try to impose the standards of the Church are accepted without
fuss: they are, after all, only doing what holy men are supposed to do.
The knight's position in regard to God can none the less be rendered
untenable by the demands of a different ethical system. The clash of
the two becomes the engine that drives Malory's version of the Grail
quest. The French prose romance of the Grail may have been written
to offer a religious counterbalance to the attraction of secular romance;
it insists on the positive damage done by sexuality, by the desire for
honour, by all those things that elsewhere in the Arthurian stories con-
stitute the essence of knighthood. Lancelot, accordingly, becomes the
exemplary failure, the knight who is foiled by his own sinfulness, his
inability to change from a worldly ethic to a spiritual one. Malory's
Lancelot, by contrast, comes close to being the hero of the quest, pre-
cisely because he will not give up: because he will not abandon his
desire for the Grail, and cannot ultimately abandon his desire for
Guenivere.
It is only in the course of the Grail quest, when the episodes function
less as narratives of knightly adventure than as allegories of moral
temptation or theological signification, that Lancelot can be overcome.
Elsewhere, his prowess is absolute. His physical superiority and his
faithfulness to the terms of the Round Table oath together make him
the paragon of knightliness; by the time of Malory's great lyric
encomium on love, his devotion to Guenivere is included as a part of
that excellence. Might does not always or necessarily indicate right,
however. Good knights will frequently be defeated and mistreated by
stronger wicked ones, and rely on the most powerful figures, Lancelot
or Tristram, for rescue. King Mark generally relies on the underhand
methods of plotting rather than open combat to further his own inter-
ests and defeat his enemies, but he has the good fortune to defeat in
 Introduction xv
combat an opponent who has justly charged him with murder—God
does not always, as Malory notes, intervene to support the right. And
in the final stages of the work, even Lancelot's prowess becomes
problematic.
Malory designs the last two sections of his work around Lancelot's
three successive rescues of Guenivere from the threat of judicial exe-
cution. In the first, when she is charged with murder, she is innocent.
In the second, given its place here by Malory himself and not by his
sources, the charge is of adultery with one of the wounded knights
lying in her chamber, and she is innocent only on a technicality: it is
Lancelot himself who has slept with her. On the third occasion, when
Lancelot is taken in her chamber and fights his way out, even Malory
acknowledges that her innocence is problematic. He will not commit
himself as to 'whether they were abed or at other manner of discourse',
but he recognizes the inevitability of the position taken by both
Lancelot and his kin, that he must fight in her defence: 'In so much as
ye were taken with her, whether ye did right or wrong, it is now your
part to hold with the Queen.' 'Whether right or wrong' becomes
almost a leitmotiv phrase of the end of the work; and Arthur and
Lancelot both know that if the issue comes to individual combat, then,
whether right or wrong, Lancelot will be the victor.
There is a strong sense, however, in which Lancelot is in the right:
not necessarily over the question of what happened that night in the
Queen's chamber, which Malory avoids specifying, but because he, in
contrast to his accusers, is (paradoxically) faithful to Arthur as his lord.
Malory's Arthurian world operates by the principles of a shame cul-
ture, where worth is measured in terms of reputation, 'worship',
rather than by the principles of a guilt culture, of what one's con-
science may declare to be right or wrong. So long as Arthur's honour
is not spoken against, his kingship is untouched. Agravain and Mor-
dred insist on bringing the affair into the open, regardless of its direct
damage to the King and the consequences to the fellowship and the
realm. Lancelot, by contrast, does his best to restore 'worship' to
Arthur by offering to fight (and therefore to overcome) all those who
are prepared to accuse the Queen, and to restore the fellowship to its
wholeness by his offers of reparation to Gawain. His refusal to fight
with Arthur himself is consistently presented as due to love and loyalty
rather than a guilty conscience. As author, Malory blames Agravain
and Mordred for the downfall of the Round Table; both Gawain and
xvi Introduction
Guenivere blame themselves. Lancelot bitterly laments his misfortune
in accidentally killing Gareth and his failure to arrive in time to assist
Arthur in his final battle, but if Malory targets him for blame, it is only
through his disposition of material, never by direct statement. More-
over, any guilt that might attach to the sin of the lovers in the eyes of
God is strongly countered in two passages, apparently original to Mal-
ory, that occur on either side of the second accusation of Guenivere,
the only occasion in the work when they do explicitly sleep together:
first, when he insists that 'she was a true lover, and therefore she had a
good end'—a phrase implying that her faithfulness to Lancelot wins
her acceptance into Heaven; second, when God allows Lancelot to
perform his own personal miracle, in the healing of Sir Urry.
Good knighthood in Malory is presented in terms of models and
counter-models, led by Lancelot, Gareth, and Tristram. Opposing
them are characters such as the brutal Sir Tarquin; the outright villain
Sir Breunis sans Pile, who is an expert in violence but who flees as soon
as he is offered serious opposition; and Mordred, the traitor within
Arthur's own household. Malory deploys a rigorously limited vocabu-
lary to define the two groups, in a resonating repetition that serves to
associate all good or all bad knights with each other: noble, worshipful,
good, against shameful, false, traitorous, or (most commonly used by his
knights rather than himself as narrator) recreant or recrayed. This does
not mean, however, that all good or all bad knights are interchangeable.
Dinadan, whose worth Malory consistently stresses, is as much Tris-
tram's sidekick as follower, a knight who has no more than the ordinary
measure of physical courage or prowess and knows that he can get
hurt; he is the direct ancestor of Don Quixote's Sancho Panza. Yet he
too is a knight of the Round Table, and his courage is all the more
notable for not being sustained by the casual self-confidence that
marks Tristram or Lancelot; and his unhesitating clarity of moral
vision makes him a touchstone for measuring knightliness in others.
Other knights swing between the opposing poles of fellowship and
treachery, often very consciously. Palomides' hopeless love for La
Belle Isode makes him lurch between jealous hatred of Tristram and
respect for his worthiness. Gawain, too, veers sharply between
extremes, largely according to the source Malory is following at any
given moment: the English hero is inconsistent with the French
Gawain of the prose Tristan and the Grail, which present him as an
antitype of knightliness. By the end, however, Malory can turn these
 Introduction xvii
contradictions into a source of power: the two readings of him become
a psychological conflict within Gawain himself, when his principles of
knightliness are defeated by his desire for revenge after the death of
Gareth, and are only recovered on his deathbed, when the action he
takes to save the kingdom comes too late.
'Psychological conflict' may appear to be the wrong sort of term to
use about Malory's narrative: he presents speeches and actions, not
thoughts or motives, and the inner life of his characters has to be
deduced from those. Only very rarely does he report an unspoken
thought (and most of those are given to Dinadan, the knight least
effective in outward action). Yet the effect of the narrative is extraordin-
arily powerful. The spareness of Malory's style constantly invites the
reader to fill in the gaps, to supply the motives that produce the
recorded reaction of aggression, or tears, or passion, or an answer at
cross-purposes, or on rare occasions a smile. The hinterland of
Malory's characters requires active imaginative participation from the
reader; his paratactic style, the juxtaposition of event and response
with the causal connections omitted, invites such participation in
every sentence, to turn a 'then' into a 'therefore'.
The effect is very different from that of a novel, and all the indica-
tions are that Malory would not have wanted to write one even if the
form had been available to him. His style has been compared to that of
a chronicle, and indeed he repeatedly insists on the fact that the
Arthurian adventures were a matter of record: that first Merlin, then
Arthur, had written accounts made to document the deeds of the
Round Table for posterity. Malory takes up the position of a latter-day
historian to Arthur's court. It shows, not only in his deferral to his
sources (many of such references, it should be noted, being rhetorical
strategies designed to suggest authoritativeness rather than footnotes
of strict accuracy), but also in his pervasive additions of the details of
names and places, and in his insistence on the protocol of giving all his
characters titles. Kings are always designated as such; knights' names
are always prefixed by Sir, even the more villainous (no other medieval
writer, of fiction or chronicle, makes such a consistent habit of this);
women are designated as Queen or Dame or by some more individual
title.
In contrast to the writers of French romances, but in keeping with
his Middle English sources, Malory seems to have assumed a primar-
ily male readership for his work: readers who would share his own
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