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Summary
Summary
Acclaimed biographer Peter Ackroyd vibrantly resurrects the legendary epic of Camelot in this modern adaptation.
The names of Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, Galahad, the sword of Excalibur, and the court of Camelot are as recognizable as any from the world of myth. Although many versions exist of the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory endures as the most moving and richly inventive. In this abridged retelling the inimitable Peter Ackroyd transforms Malory's fifteenth-century work into a dramatic modern story, vividly bringing to life a world of courage and chivalry, magic, and majesty. The golden age of Camelot, the perilous search for the Holy Grail, the love of Guinevere and Lancelot, and the treachery of Arthur's son Mordred are all rendered into contemporary prose with Ackroyd's characteristic charm and panache. Just as he did with his fresh new version of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Ackroyd now brings one of the cornerstones of English literature to a whole new audience.
Author Notes
Sir Thomas Malory, 1405 - 1471 Sir Thomas Malory's works (consisting of the legends of Sir Lancelot, Sir Gareth, Sir Tristram, and the Holy Grail, as well as the stories of King Arthur's coming to the throne, his wars with the Emperor Lucius, and his death) are the most influential expression of Arthurian material in English. The author's sources are principally French romances; his own contributions are substantial, however, and the result is a vigorous and resonant prose. "Le Morte d'Arthur," finished between March 1469 and March 1470, was first printed in 1485 by William Caxton, the earliest English printer.
Malory is presumed to have been a knight from an old Warwickshire family, who inherited his father's estates about 1433 and spent 20 years of his later life in jail accused of various crimes. The discovery of a manuscript version of "Le Morte d'Arthur" in 1934 in the library of Winchester College, supported the identification of Malory the author with Malory the traitor, burglar, and rapist. It showed that many of the inconsistencies in the printed text were traceable to the printing house rather than to the author. The most reliable modern version, therefore, is one like Eugene Vinaver's that is based on the Winchester manuscript.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Having successfully reworked Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for modern audiences, British editor, novelist, and critic Ackroyd (Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion) turns his talents to Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, transforming the 15th-century compilation of Arthurian medieval romances into an eminently readable narrative. Rather than precisely translating Malory's Middle English, Ackroyd renders the original's tone and spirit in modern prose. Readers will recognize Arthur and Galahad, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristram and Isolde, Merlin, Mordred, and Morgan LeFay, the Sword in the Stone and the Lady of the Lake-portrayed with all their pride, self-doubt, flaws, and frustrations. We see knights caught in a medieval catch-22, trying to abide by a code of chivalry that was difficult even in that era. Their adventures produce enough dastardly villains, doomed loves, magic spells, and heroic deeds to equal the most imaginative contemporary fiction, while relations between the knights and the ladies they rescue, ravish, revere, revenge, or reject yield a surprising range of emotions and complications. Though scholars might prefer a more exact version of Malory's work, most readers will welcome Ackroyd's straightforward storytelling and this celebration of Britain's literary and cultural traditions. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Well, someone had to do it - modernise Malory, that is. The original Morte d'Arthur isn't actually that hard once you get into the swing of it, and carries within its late medieval prose the unignorable frisson, which even the sternest historian cannot resist, that Arthur and his knights actually existed, and that the archaic manner of its telling takes us back in time to this magical past more effectively than any modern retelling: "And so he handled the swerd by the handels, and lightly and fiersly pulled it out of the stone, and took his hors and rode his way untyll his broder Sir Kay and delyverd him the swerd." That hardly needs much effort to modernise, and in fact even needs some tidying up - "handled" and "handels", and the repetition of "swerd" suggest hurried writing. Ackroyd: "So he went over to the stone and, taking the hilt with both hands, lightly and easily took out the sword." We lose "fiersly", but you can see why. After 500 years, you can't expect us to have exactly the same worldview. The original survives, at various removes, as persistent legend, whose best modern retelling is, in my opinion, John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur, which had the misfortune to come out after Monty Python and the Holy Grail - which itself anticipated Boorman's visual magic, and ridiculous carnage. That whole business with the Black Knight having all his limbs chopped off - "it's only a scratch!" - is not very far at all from what knights got up to in those days. You really couldn't ride for half an hour, it seems from Malory, without being challenged by someone with a grievance, and as trial only existed by combat, the victor having proved his case according to the will of God, it wasn't easy to get out of a joust if your opponent was insistent. There is also the plot-furthering wrinkle, which for all I know is an invention of Malory's, that you could fight someone without knowing his identity, as long as he swapped shields with someone and kept his visor down. (Best prose retelling of the Arthurian legends: TH White's The Once and Future King. I still recall the effect on me as a child of the scene of Morgan la Fay boiling a cat in order to pick out the bone that would make her invisible.) But Malory is, in my treasured sturdy OUP hardback of 1954, 900 pages long, and all this biffing, and the (at first) rudimentary explanations of motive, and the weird geography - the action zips all over the country so quickly it is as if there is a super-efficient pre-Beeching railway network in operation - can get wearying after a bit, and his retelling of the Tristan and Isolde story is generally agreed to be far too long and confused. So Ackroyd has ditched about two-thirds of the original, but with the obvious intention of keeping its flavour. Well, you can see from the quotations above what we have lost, and what we have gained, in the matter of style. Adam Thorpe wrote a very perceptive and informed, but also in my view somewhat harsh review of Ackroyd's Arthur in this paper, and in fact he might have been the better person to do it, and all sorts of episodes have had to go (we miss a large part of the explanation why Gareth's death at Lancelot's hands is so grievous), and at one point Lancelot wakes someone up in Ackroyd by tapping him on the head with the pommel of his sword, not in Malory, and so on; but this a perfectly forgivable intrusion of invented detail. It is, after all, all invented detail, and Malory made very free with his French sources. (It is odd that as Malory's writing gets better, and the further he deviates from his sources - the characters have proper depth by the end, and can truly be called "characters" rather than just suits of armour with names attached to them - he makes more allusions to the French texts he's using, as if he's visibly gaining in confidence.) It is, though, one of the great stories, a beautiful, tragic myth of love and power, and if you are not fighting back a tear by the end of it, thou hast a heart of stone, sir. To order The Death of King Arthur for pounds 7.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - NICHOLAS LEZARD Well, someone had to do it - modernise Malory, that is. The original Morte d'Arthur isn't actually that hard once you get into the swing of it, and carries within its late medieval prose the unignorable frisson, which even the sternest historian cannot resist, that Arthur and his knights actually existed, and that the archaic manner of its telling takes us back in time to this magical past more effectively than any modern retelling: "And so he handled the swerd by the handels, and lightly and fiersly pulled it out of the stone, and took his hors and rode his way untyll his broder Sir Kay and delyverd him the swerd." That hardly needs much effort to modernise, and in fact even needs some tidying up - "handled" and "handels", and the repetition of "swerd" suggest hurried writing. Ackroyd: "So he went over to the stone and, taking the hilt with both hands, lightly and easily took out the sword." We lose "fiersly", but you can see why. After 500 years, you can't expect us to have exactly the same worldview. - NICHOLAS LEZARD.
New York Review of Books Review
PETER ACKROYD'S vigorous retelling of the Arthur legends, based on Thomas Malory's 15th-century classic "Le Morte d'Arthur," begins with a reptilian king, "a dragon in wrath as well as in power," lasciviously whispering in the ear of another man's wife. "This dragon will not bite," he assures her, but she's grossed out anyway - who wouldn't be? - and complains to her husband. Kings tend to get what they wish for, especially if Merlin is available to make the magic happen. The husband is killed off, and three hours later the dragon, assuming the dead man's shape, sleeps with the oblivious woman. Presto, Arthur is conceived, not quite a bastard, as Merlin explains, on a technicality clear only to him. The price for Merlins matchmaking is baby Arthur, whom Merlin entrusts to a rustic knight. Only when Arthur, in search of a sword for his foster brother, Sir Kay, conveniently finds one stuck in a stone, is his special destiny disclosed. Many of us view the exploits of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table through the distortions of the 19th century, whether Tennyson's sentimental idylls or Mark Twain's biting satire. More recently, we've had T. H. White's ingratiatingly verbose "Once and Future King," already halfway to Hogwarts, with Arthur nicknamed "the Wart." White's book was the basis for the musical "Camelot" and eventually, in some not quite traceable trajectory, for our fantasy of life among the Kennedys. Ackroyd has dug down through this cultural detritus to Malory's muscular masterpiece, which was first published by Caxton's famous press in 1485 and was itself a retelling of various "old books" as Malory frequently reminds us, most of them French. It may seem odd to translate an English original into English, but that's essentially what Ackroyd has done, though not so freely as in his version of "The Canterbury Tales." He calls his retooling of Malory "a loose, rather than punctilious, translation." He has also weeded Malory's "rambling and repetitive" original and "quietly amended Malory's inconsistencies," aiming throughout for "a more contemporary idiom." When young Arthur is informed that he is king of the land, Malory has him say, "Wherefore I . . . and for what cause?" Ackroyd better conveys the boy's tongue-tied shock: "Me? Why?" (At the other extreme, we have T.H. White: "Oh, dear, oh, dear, I wish I had never seen that filthy sword at all.") When Merlin tells Arthur he will be victorious in battle, Malory leaves it at that. Ackroyd adds a touch of pure Yoda: "The force of the world is with you." Sometimes, however, Ackroyd's phrasing seems almost to predate Malory, as in this Anglo-Saxon tongue-twister reminiscent of "Beowulf": "But after a bitter battle he got the better of them." (Malory writes simply, "but at the last he slew them.") Most important, Ackroyd preserves, and even accelerates, the headlong pace of these tales, where action is everything. "Now we must ride into the world and seek out strange adventures," Lancelot announces, as though such a compulsion were self-evident. A knight like Arthur or Lancelot is less a complex psychological character like David Copperfield or Isabel Archer than the sum of his exploits. Episodes with similar components (sorceresses, hermits and harts, along with the fairy-tale number seven) follow one another in seemingly random order, as if, in the words of the scholar Erich Auerbach, "from the end of an assembly line." Random, too, is the behavior of these highborn heroes and heroines. A knight can seem the flower of chivalry one moment, rescuing damsels in distress at the drop of a helmet, and a marauding butcher the next. Love is similarly capricious. Sir Tristram loves Isolde, of course - "as the old books tell us, Tristram and Isolde were steadfast in their love" - but he's not averse to bedding an earl's wife for relaxation after battle: "They made love so madly that he paid no heed to his wound." You might think Arthur would be a paragon of deportment. Not at all. Like his creepy father, Uther Pendragon, Arthur sleeps around, fathering a child, the dread Mordred, with his own half-sister before hooking up with fickle Guinevere. That marriage, as everyone knows, goes sour when Lancelot joins the Round Table. Why can't Lancelot just marry the Fair Maid of Astolat, who starves herself to death because he's spurned her? "Love must spring from a loving heart," Lancelot explains. "It cannot come from compulsion." Midway through the book, earthly love yields to heavenly love as the picaresque adventures of the Round Table are eclipsed by the quest for the Holy Grail, the fabled "cup that holds Christ's blood." We are meant to be impressed by the spotless doings of prissy Sir Galahad, whom Victorians like Tennyson considered a bit of a "maiden knight." In the earlier tales of Arthur and his court, the fairy-tale symbolism, reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm, seems mysterious and open-ended. The Grail stories, by contrast, are studded with explanations of "tokens" and "signs" of New Testament motives. "The hart you saw is a token of Our Savior himself," Galahad is informed, "whose white skin is a sign of regeneration." Images from the Grail legend particularly appealed to T.S. Eliot (the subject of an excellent biography by Ackroyd), who incorporated them into "The Waste Land." Most surprising in these tales is the frequent linkage of love and trickery. Sir Tristram thinks it's awfully clever to travel incognito as Sir Tramtrist. Lancelot wears a woman's red scarf as a disguise just "for the sport of it," enraging jealous Guinevere. Armor in these stories is always a potential disguise. Brothers kill brothers unknowingly, and fathers fight sons. Merlin, master trickster, teaches his girlfriend "how to talk to the animals of the forest, and how to still a tempest, . . . but she had grown tired of him." What do women want? Malory himself was apparently more than a bit of a rogue, accused, according to court records, of "rape, ambush, intent to kill, theft, extortion and gang violence." He seems to have written at least part of his book in prison, making it, according to Ackroyd, "a towering example of prison literature." Malory's vivid scenes of imprisonment may owe something to his own experience behind bars. There may be other reasons for the recurrent melancholy of these stories, evident in the fates of lovelorn Lancelot and Tristram. Malory may have discovered, like Don Quixote or Twain's Connecticut Yankee, that gallantry can be difficult to maintain in a changing world. "Some of the sadness of Malory's account," Ackroyd notes, "may spring from the fact that he is celebrating a code of chivalry and courtly love at the very time they were being diminished." Diminished then, but what about now? Merlin might appreciate the wizardry of mechanized warfare and unmanned drones, but what would Sir Lancelot say? In these tales, a knight can seem the flower of chivalry at one moment, a marauding butcher the next. Christopher Benfey is Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His new book, a family memoir, will be published in March.
Library Journal Review
Most of us know Sir Thomas Malory's 15th-century Le Morte d'Arthur from T.H. White's The Once and Future King or the musical Camelot. This new version by Ackroyd (The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling) isn't intended to improve on White. It's a modern retelling of the central Arthurian story lines. Arthur becomes king by pulling a sword out of a stone, and he sets up a round table of 150 knights to keep order in the kingdom but is betrayed by his bastard son, Mordred. Sir Lancelot, meanwhile, acts the perfect knight, but his illicit love for Queen Guinevere prevents him from ever attaining the Holy Grail: that privilege is reserved for Galahad, who's still a virgin. Malory's basic story (with obscure language and additional details removed by Ackroyd) should seem old now, but it doesn't. Ackroyd's retelling retains the Christian and chivalric sensibilities of the original but updates the language and cuts out repetition. The result is sheer enjoyment, with notable characters and a narrative that pulls in the reader. And what tales these are-knights fighting for honor, magical potions and poisoned lances, unrequited love, and vile deceit! No one could have done it better than Ackroyd. VERDICT Not a scholarly retelling but a popular one, this story should attract an unexpectedly wide audience.-David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
