Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript (Oxford World's Classics)

by Malory, Thomas

  The first section describing these, The Tale of Sir Lancelot, is based on extracts from a version of the French prose Lancelot. The later Tale of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guenivere incorporates a further episode from this, Meliagaunt’s abduction of Guenivere and his accusation of adultery. The prose Tristan is the largest work used extensively by Malory, and this supplies the huge middle of his Arthuriad. The original verse redactions of the story, with their close concentration on the progress of the love affair of Tristan and Isolde, would have been useless for his purposes, but the prose romance gave him just what he needed: an extensive space in which the nature of Arthurian knighthood can be explored, free from the more serious political demands of war or dynastic struggles. That Tristram himself comes from outside the élite circle of Arthur’s fellowship means that the Round Table itself is seen initially from an outsider’s point of view, as something to be admired and striven for, a secular equivalent of the Grail fellowship—though increasingly, and especially in Malory’s treatment, one that carries within itself the potential for disaster.

  The Grail quest again has a French prose original, the Queste del Saint Graal from the Vulgate Cycle. Malory also had access to the following, and final, book of the Cycle, La Mort le Roi Artu, though in fact his primary source for the Tale of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guenivere and the Death of Arthur would appear to be the stanzaic Morte Arthur, an English verse adaptation of the same French romance. Malory incorporates only a single one of the many episodes in the French that the English had already excluded; all verbal resemblances are to the English, and increase strikingly in density in the Death.

  Less important sources include, in French, the Perlesvaus, another non-Vulgate prose romance; and perhaps, in English, the mid-fifteenth-century chronicle in seven-line stanzas of John Hardyng. Hardyng is the only person apart from Malory to declare that Arthur was actually crowned as emperor in Rome (a risky claim, since it is so signally lacking in support from all continental historical sources); but it is of course possible that if Hardyng could invent such a triumphant climax to the European campaign, so could Malory.

  Two major episodes have no known sources: the Tale of Sir Gareth and the healing of Sir Urry. There may have been romances of these stories that are now lost (Gareth, indeed, has elements in common with some surviving romances, though nothing resembling Malory’s customary process of translation and adaptation); but both must have been invented by somebody at some stage, and there is no strong reason why that person should not have been Malory.

  Even where Malory is working with a source book in front of him, however, he will not merely translate or ‘reduce’, but invent. Those characteristic similes for combat that resonate across the work, for instance, of knights fighting like boars or rams, are Malory’s own; so are many of the aphoristic speeches given to his laconic knights. More surprisingly, some of the passages that express most emotion—Elaine the mother of Galahad’s complaint to Guenivere that Lancelot cannot love her, Elaine of Ascolat’s dying defence of her love—are original to Malory. So is the longest speech of the work, Lancelot’s defence of Guenivere; and so are the passages on the flourishing of love in the month of May, and on the hatred that cuts down the flower of chivalry like ‘winter’s rasure’. Sir Ector’s final threnody over the corpse of Lancelot doubles as Malory’s own elegy for the passing of Arthurian knighthood.

  The ‘whole book’

  For four-and-a-half centuries, the only version of Malory’s work known was that printed by Caxton. It has no title page; the traditional title of Le Morte Darthur is announced at the very end of the work, in Caxton’s own colophon rather than as part of Malory’s text. It is retained in this edition, partly on account of its familiarity, but also because the defensiveness with which Caxton cites it suggests that he found it incorporated in some form in his copy-text, rather than that he made it up himself: ‘Thus endeth this noble and joyous book entitled Le Morte Darthur. Notwithstanding it treateth of the birth, life, and acts of the said King Arthur, of his noble knights of the Round Table, their marvellous quests and adventures, the achieving of the Sangrail, and in the end the dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all.’

  Then, in 1934, a manuscript was discovered in the library of Winchester College. Known on that account as the Winchester Manuscript, it is now housed in the British Library, and forms the basis of this edition. It divides its history of Arthur into several large sections (the number varying between four and eleven depending on the scholar who does the counting), in contrast to Caxton’s division into twenty-one books. This division led Eugene Vinaver, who first produced an edition of the text that incorporated Winchester, to insist that the work was not a ‘whole book’, as Malory claims in his request for prayer at the very end of the work (in a passage taken from Caxton’s print, since the opening and closing leaves of the manuscript are missing), but a series of eight separate Arthurian romances. He accordingly entitled his own edition The Works of Sir Thomas Malory.

  The ensuing debate led to a more detailed examination of the structure of Malory’s work than had hitherto been undertaken, and there are probably few scholars now who would take up as extreme a position as Vinaver did. Although there is some evidence that Malory may have thought of the various parts of the work as autonomous—he signs off the first linked series of four stories, for instance, with an invitation to his readers to seek out other books for themselves if they want to know more about Arthur—there is far more that suggests that he was actively seeking to make connections between sources that were themselves originally independent from each other, in order to make his own version a single history of Arthur and his fellowship. He accordingly inserts cross-references to show how the various stories relate to each other chronologically, or mentions forthcoming episodes in the course of previous ones, or reminds his readers of events of the past.

  It is especially interesting, in this context, that two of the narratives that operate most strongly to forge links between the early and late parts of the whole story may be Malory’s own inventions. One of these is the Tale of Sir Gareth, which gives the early history of one of Lancelot’s most loyal supporters; it is his death at Lancelot’s hands that precipitates the final tragedy—a tragedy that is especially poignant on account of the love between them shown in that first story. The other narrative is the healing of Sir Urry, in the course of which Malory gives a great roll-call of the whole fellowship of the Round Table, recalling moments from their past and completing stories earlier left half-told. As the sense of doom in the last stages of the book becomes more pervasive, so do recollections of the past: in the repeated references to the fact that it was Lancelot who knighted Gareth, or to the murder of Lamorak by Gawain and his brothers; or in Lancelot’s reminders to Gawain and Arthur of how much they owe to him. Adventures that had seemed when they happened to float in a romance world free of time and space, are suddenly revisioned as milestones on the one-way road to the ‘day of destiny’ on Salisbury Plain.

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  This edition takes for its base text the Winchester Manuscript, housed in the British Library, shelfmark Additional MS 59678. The only full editions of Malory to use this manuscript are those by Eugene Vinaver, in the form of a three-volume scholarly version (recently revised by P. J. C. Field) and a one-volume student version. These are not, however, editions of Winchester: Vinaver’s aim was to get as close as possible to what he believed Malory wrote, or should have written, and he therefore emended the Winchester text, not only from Caxton’s print (a procedure that is sometimes unavoidable), but also by reference to the French originals. He also occasionally misrepresented both the sentence division and the larger text divisions and layout of the manuscript. My own aim is to re-create for modern readers something of the experience of the original readers of the Winchester manuscript—an aim that includes making the text more user-friendly than a full scholarly edition could be, through modernized spelling and punctuation. I have accordingly
followed the manuscript as closely as is consistent with presenting a slightly abbreviated text, and with making sense of what it contains.

  Although Winchester appears to preserve a text generally closer to what Malory wrote than the Caxton print, it is impossible to edit it without some reference to Caxton. The print is the only evidence we have for the opening and closing sections, where the outer leaves of the manuscript have been lost, and for the occasional missing or torn leaves in the middle. Just occasionally there are muddles or miscopyings by the scribes (there were two working on the manuscript), where the obviously correct reading, such as supplying a missing negative or changing a name, is confirmed by Caxton. Winchester also contains a number of short omissions of the sort known as eyeskip errors—that is, where the scribe has looked at his copy-text as far as one usage of a particular word, and then picked up his copying again at the next usage, leaving out the words in between: as if, for instance, all the words between those two occurrences of ‘usage’ had been omitted—‘as far as one usage, leaving out the words in between’. I have supplied from Caxton all instances of such missing words and of any other omissions where they are essential for the sense.

  These examples of eyeskip errors are especially interesting for proving that Caxton had his printed version set from a manuscript other than Winchester—one that contained the missing phrases. This is somewhat surprising, since it seems that Caxton had Winchester itself in his workshop at some stage: Lotte Hellinga has identified certain smudges on the manuscript as coming from Caxton’s types,1 and the claim has been generally accepted. The precise nature of the relationship between the two versions of the text, however, continues to be a matter of debate. Vinaver believed that there were at least two intermediate copyings of the work between Malory’s own original and each of Caxton and Winchester; but few of the explicable variants between the texts require so complicated a model, while others are hard to explain in terms of textual descent.

  The preparations for setting a text in type included making small marks on the manuscript to indicate how much text would fill a printed page, so that several typesetters could work on different parts of the text at the same time—a process known as ‘casting off. There are none of these marks on Winchester. Toshiyuki Takamiya has noticed, however, that the numerous small variants in wording between the Winchester and the Caxton versions increase in frequency towards the end of each page of Caxton.2 This suggests that his copy-text was not so different in detail from Winchester as might at first appear: that the typesetters, following normal printing practice, would expand or shrink phrases to whatever small degree was necessary to get the required amount of text on to each printed page.

  The biggest difference between the texts—apart from Caxton’s division into books and chapters, which he tells us he supplied himself—lies in the very different versions of the story of Arthur’s war against the Emperor Lucius, which comprises Caxton’s Book V. For a long time it was assumed that Caxton himself, who often played an active part in producing the texts of the works he published, had written an abbreviated version of this whole episode. Now some scholars are arguing that perhaps it was Malory himself who did the reworking.3 The account of the war in both versions is very different in style, vocabulary, and tone from the rest of the work: it is based on the alliterative Morte Arthure, and preserves many northern language-forms as well as a specialized alliterative vocabulary and the structure of many of the original lines. The derivation of the poem from the historical rather than the romance tradition of Arthur also shows in its priorities of interest, in massed battles rather than personal combat. In keeping with the rest of this edition, I have followed Winchester, though with considerable abbreviation of the detail of Arthur’s campaigns and of the more digressive episodes.

  Caxton describes Malory as ‘reducing’ his huge French sources, so producing a text that fitted into a single large volume. I have in turn ‘reduced’ Malory, for exactly the same purpose. Few readers now are likely to share Malory’s passionate interest in the details of battle tactics and tournaments, and I have cut these generously; this in turn enables a focus on the battles and tournaments that are of particular importance for the whole story. The crucial importance of the final sections of the work has required some slimming of the opening sections and the cutting of a number of self-contained episodes that occur as digressions within larger individual stories. All omissions are signalled in the notes.

  Winchester presents its text in long blocks of continuous prose, broken up by occasional large capitals, by formal incipits and explicits—that is, announcements of a new start or of the completion of a story—and sometimes by leaving half a page or more blank. I have followed these indications of narrative division by announcing new stories with separate titles where Malory provides them, by leaving a line of white space where the scribe gives a large capital (except where it seems to represent a scribal quirk rather than something real about the structure of the narrative in hand), and, in the longer stories such as Sir Tristram, by supplying occasional page-breaks where the manuscript itself indicates some kind of breathing-space in the narrative. Caxton’s subdivision into books and chapters was his solution to the problem presented by the massive blocks of prose; his numbering system for these still provides the most convenient means of referring to points in the text across different editions, and is retained here.

  Punctuation within the manuscript takes two forms: small capital letters, and two short oblique lines (//). I have generally provided semicolons or full stops at the capital letters, full stops or paragraph breaks for the double lines. Commas are supplied in accordance with modern usage. Malory’s prose is a wonderfully flexible medium, that moves with none of our required rigidity of division between speech and the action it initiates, or between reported and direct speech; in moments of intensive action, such as combat, he will dispense with punctuation altogether for several lines at a time. Close imitation would make a reading of the text so difficult as to falsify the effect of the original, but I have tried, so far as is compatible with ease of comprehension, to preserve both Malory’s rhythms and his fluidity of sentence movement.

  Modernizing spelling may appear to be an easier matter, but this too involves hard choices. Malory’s language, to his original readers, was familiar and lucid. My aim has been to get as close to this familiarity as is possible without either misrepresenting what he wrote or losing any of his rhythms. This has required replacing some archaic forms of words, verbs in particular, with their modern spellings: ‘helped’ and ‘bore’ for ‘holpen’ and ‘bare’, for instance. I have retained all forms that carry a charge of meaning even if their connotations now are more with poetic diction than with Malory’s everyday speech: to eliminate ‘thou’ and ‘thee’, for instance, would be to lose the crucial distinctions that Middle English, like modern French and German, can make between the insulting, familiar or intimate form of the second person and the formal and courtly ‘you’. On a tiny number of occasions I have altered a preposition to make an idiom comprehensible, or modernized word order—object-verb-subject to subject-verb-object, for instance, in the very rare instances where Malory’s form is seriously misleading. I provide a Glossary of recurrent words before the main text, and would urge readers to take note of it, particularly of false friends such as ‘and’ in the sense of ‘if’, and ‘or’ in the sense of ‘before’. First occurrences of all these are signalled by ° in the foot-of-page glossing of unfamiliar words; these glosses are not repeated unless a phrase is particularly obscure.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Arthurian Literature

  The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy (updated edition, New York and London, 1996), contains an abundance of information on all matters Arthurian.

  Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (corrected edition, Oxford, 1979), gives a general survey of the numerous medieval Arthurian texts and their relationships.

  The Romance of
Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation, ed. James J. Wilhelm (extended edition, New York and London, 1994), includes extracts from the early chronicles, the Arthurian section of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and a number of other Arthurian romances in whole or in part. The full text of Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain is translated by Lewis Thorpe for Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth, 1966).

  Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, general editor Norris J. Lacy (5 vols., New York, 1992–6), is a full translation of the Old French Vulgate Cycle.

  Periodicals devoted to Arthurian studies include the annual Arthurian Literature and the quarterly Arthuriana. An annual bibliography is published by the International Arthurian Society.

  The Text of Le Morte Darthur: Editions and Studies

  The text of the Winchester manuscript used for the preparation of this edition is the facsimile published by the Early English Text Society, The Winchester Malory, introduction by Neil Ker, EETS ss 4 (1976).

  Supplementary material from Caxton comes from the Scolar Press facsimile, Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte D’ Arthur printed by William Caxton 1485, introduction by Paul Needham (London, 1976).

  Modern editions of Malory include:

  The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 3 vols., 3rd edn. revised by P. J. C. Field (Oxford, 1990). This is the major scholarly edition, primarily based on the Winchester manuscript. There is a one-volume student version, Malory: Works (2nd edn. first published London and Oxford, 1971).