Le Morte d'Arthur

Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1405--1471; his name is also spelled "Mallory" and a handful of other variants) was an English writer whose version of the King Arthur mythos, Le Morte d'Arthur, is often treated as the definitive version. This is partially due to the fact that the book was one of the first to be printed in Britain (by William Caxton in 1485, 14 years after Malory's death), and subsequently reached a high circulation.

Le Morte d'Arthur means "The Death of Arthur": it was originally only the title of the eighth and last "book" of Malory's narrative, which he named The Whole Book of King Arthur & of His Noble Knights of the Round Table. It was Caxton that changed the title to the one that was afterwards almost universally used, presumably because it was shorter.

Oddly enough, in popular scholarly opinion Malory was himself an evil knight, who wrote the tale during his various stints in prison for robbery, murder, and rape&mdash;it was the belief of C. S. Lewis that much of that was from his enemies&mdash;but if he was not as evil as some paint him, then he was probably a feuding and rustling savage (or in other words, a typical knight).

Malory also has a bit part in T. H. White's The Once and Future King (and subsequently in Camelot, The Musical based on it) as the squire that King Arthur sent off to tell the story of the Round Table.


 * Adaptation Distillation
 * Courtly Love
 * Dark Age Europe
 * Doorstopper
 * Excalibur
 * Fan Nickname: His definitive rendition of Arthurian legend originally didn't have a name. It was later called Le Morte d'Arthur because it was the most well-known part of the rendition.
 * Good Old Ways: Courtly Love is not what it was in King Arthur's day! (Newer Than They Think is Older Than They Think.)
 * Grail Quest: As to be expected in an Arthurian Romance. In Le Morte d'Arthur it spans hundreds of pages as the narrative follows the knights of the Round Table in their search for the Grail -- and their many and varied failures. The Grail demanded an almost unmeetable moral standard from the knights seeking it, and threw all manner of temptations in their way -- including the inevitable lures of the flesh, but also some where the knight was tempted to abandon the quest to take up another lesser, though noble, duty than finding the Grail.  Ultimately, the Grail required a state of pre-eminent spiritual purity and focus that most of Arthur's knights could not achieve or maintain; ultimately only three qualified (Galahad, Percival and Lancelot -- and strictly speaking Lancelot was an "almost but not quite").  Furthermore, one could argue that the quest was so stressful that it effectively shattered the fellowship of the Round Table.
 * Incorruptible Pure Pureness
 * In Which a Trope Is Described
 * King Arthur: Duh
 * Load-Bearing Boss
 * Only the Chosen May Wield: The Sword in the Stone.
 * Tsundere: Queen Guinevere