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 standards 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 miscarrying 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.
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 circumstances 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, Lamorak. The important thing, however, is that they do make up a fellowship. They support each other, rescue each other, ‘enfellowship’ with each other—the verb is Malory’s own coinage. If they engage in combat 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 violence, 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 heterosexual 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 constrained by the social taboos against adultery in general, or, in particular, with the wife of one’s overlord. The medieval church, by contrast, had a tendency to define spiritual perfection in terms of sexual intactness, virginity, in a manner directly at odds with the ethos of secular romance. Malory seems perfectly happy to give examples of all three attitudes: Gareth’s winning of Dame Lyonesse as his wife, the illicit passion of Lancelot and Guenivere or Tristram and Isode, the elevation of virginity in the knights of the Grail quest. He is notably free of the anxieties about sexuality that are often ascribed to medieval culture; he takes it as natural and unthreatening, for instance, that women have sexual desires, reserving his disapproval for women such as Morgan 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 constitute 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, precisely 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 interests and defeat his enemies, but he has the good fortune to defeat in 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 execution. 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 culture, where worth is measured in terms of reputation, ‘worship’, rather than by the principles of a guilt culture, of what one’s conscience may declare to be right or wrong. So long as Arthur’s honour is not spoken against, his kingship is untouched. Agravain and Mordred 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 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. Moreover, 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 Malory, 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 Pité, 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 vocabulary 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 Tristram’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 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 extraordinarily 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 indications 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 primarily male readership for his work: readers who would share his own fascination with battle-strategy and chivalric league tables. He tends to cut out the elements conventionally associated with women readers, such as the analysis of emotion. Women do, however, play a crucial role in his work. Without Igraine, Dame Lyonesse, Guenivere, Isode, or Elaine the mother of Galahad, almost none of the events of the Morte Darthur would happen. Most of them, moreover, arc active agents, not mere passive damosels: Isode falls in love with Tristram before he does with her, and later travels in his company almost as a fellow-knight; Elaine has to scheme to get her man; Guenivere controls Lancelot’s passion for her for better and for worse. There are no women warriors in Malory, as there are in the prose Merlin or many of the Renaissance romantic epics, the Orlando Furioso or the Gerusalemme Liberata or the Faerie Queene; his women have to make their mark in other ways. Their separation from the military world makes them, for instance, much more fully social beings than the male characters. Knights in armour are recognized, or pass unrecognized, because of the shields they carry; with the exception of Dinadan, one of the few knights who has to any notable degree what recruitment agencies would call interpersonal skills, they are remarkably bad at recognizing each other face to face. The women are much better: their space is primarily indoors, in the hall or chamber where the knights are unarmed, not the forest of adventure or the battlefield, and they can identify members of the fellowship with much more assurance than its members themselves can.
The women who are presented most closely and sympathetically are the ones who love, whether that love is reciprocated or not: the two Elaines are a leading example. In themselves, they have nothing except beauty and their own faithfulness by way of resources. Guenivere can add rank and power, but those are presented as a liability, in making her a target for scandal or in enabling her to put her anger against Lancelot into practice, and are of no help when it comes to her love for him. Around them are a group of other, more shadowy women, led by Morgan le Fay, who employ enchantments or other supernatural devices: the Lady of the Lake; Isode’s mother, with her access to poison and the love-potion; the enchantress Hallewes, who tries to entrap Lancelot; Dame Brusen, who succeeds in doing so on behalf of her mistress; or the fiendish temptresses who try to seduce the kn
ights of the Grail. Morgan, Hallewes, and the fiends apart, such women are not necessarily presented as evil; many exploit learning or esoteric knowledge, of herbs or potions, in a manner parallel to the knights’ exertion of physical strength. Not all of Malory’s women, however, have access to such knowledge, and the contrast makes all the more poignant the plight of those who have nothing but love to offer in a world where love is unlikely to be enough.
Malory’s Sources
Malory worked with four principal French sources, supplemented by at least two others, and two major English sources.4 For the four connected stories that comprise the opening section of his work, he used the French Suite du Merlin: as its name indicates, this was intended as a sequel to the Vulgate Cycle Merlin, though it is much more condensed in its treatment of its material than the expansive Vulgate romances. The next section, the war against the Emperor Lucius, is taken from the English alliterative Morte Arthure: this poem, following the historical tradition deriving from Geoffrey of Monmouth, has Arthur leave Mordred in charge of the kingdom while he pursues his military ambitions on the continent, and Mordred’s seizure of the crown takes place while Arthur is overseas for that purpose. Malory accordingly changes the details of the poem and cuts it off short, with Arthur returning to rule his kingdom while his knights undertake their various adventures.
Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript (Oxford World's Classics) Page 2