Thomas Malory

Sir Thomas Malory, a knight of the fifteenth century, collected and compiled all the legends and songs surrounding the pre-Christian Welsh chieftain Arthur into a fascinating, rambling prose narrative, Le Morte Darthur (The Death of Arthur). Since then, it has inspired numerous authors and artists while becoming the principal source for today's notions of chivalry and the Knights of the Round Table. This book is a must-read for anyone with even a remote interest in Arthurian lore. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

Sir Thomas Malory, a knight of the fifteenth century, collected and compiled all the legends and songs surrounding the pre-Christian Welsh chieftain Arthur into a fascinating, rambling prose narrative, Le Morte Darthur (The Death of Arthur). Since then, it has inspired numerous authors and artists while becoming the principal source for today's notions of chivalry and the Knights of the Round Table. This book is a must-read for anyone with even a remote interest in Arthurian lore. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

Volume two of Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory's powerful and elegaic version of the Arthurian legend, recounts the adventures of Sir Tristram de Liones and the treachery of Sir Mordred, and follows Sir Launcelot's quest for The Holy Grail, his fatally divided loyalties, and his great, forbidden love for the beautiful Queen Guenever. Culminating in an account of Arthur's final battle against the scheming, deceitful Mordred, this is the definitive re-telling of the Arthurian myth, weaving a story of adultery, treachery and ultimately - in its tragic finale - death. Edited and published by William Caxton in 1485, Malory's moving prose romance looks back to an idealised Medieval age of chivalry, drawing on French and English verse sources to create an epic masterpiece of passion, enchantment, war and betrayal.

No other edition accurately represents the actual (and likely authorial) divisions of the text as attested to by its two surviving witnesses—Caxton’s 1485 print and, especially, the famous Winchester Manuscript. The Winchester Manuscript is now generally agreed to be the more authentic of the two earlier texts. The Norton Critical Edition is the first edition of Malory to recover important elements of this manuscript: paragraphing marginal annotations hierarchies of narrative division as signaled by size and decorative intricacy of initial capitals and font changes The Norton Critical Edition also represents, in black-letter font, the striking rubrication of proper names in the Winchester Manuscript, reconstructing for readers something of an authentic medieval reading experience, one which gives visual support to Malory’s extraordinary representation, in character and setting, of a chivalric ideal. No other student edition of Malory contains such extensive contextual and critical support.

The legends of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table have inspired some of the greatest works of literature--from Cervantes's Don Quixote to Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Although many versions exist, Malory's stands as the classic rendition. Malory wrote the book while in Newgate Prison during the last three years of his life; it was published some fourteen years later, in 1485, by William Caxton. The tales, steeped in the magic of Merlin, the powerful cords of the chivalric code, and the age-old dramas of love and death, resound across the centuries.The stories of King Arthur, Lancelot, Queen Guenever, and Tristram and Isolde seem astonishingly moving and modern. Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur endures and inspires because it embodies mankind's deepest yearnings for brotherhood and community, a love worth dying for, and valor, honor, and chivalry. "Le Morte d'Arthur remains an enchanted sea for the reader to swim about in, delighting at the random beauties of fifteenth-century prose."--Robert Graves

This single-volume edition of the complete works of Sirhe Thomas Malory retains his 15th-century English while providing an introduction, glossary, and fifty pages of explanatory notes on each romance.