Le Morte Darthur: Selections: A Broadview Anthology of British Literature Edition

by Thomas Malory, Maureen Okun (Editor)

Arguably no medieval English literary work has had as far and wide a reach as Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur ; among the many adaptations are Tennyson’s Idylls of the King , T.H. White’s The Once and Future King , and the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot . It might also be argued that the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century tradition of fantasy literature―from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to George Lucas’s Star Wars and beyond―owes much to the Arthurian tradition, rooted in English most strongly in Malory’s Morte Darthur . Yet there has been no edition that draws on the results of the past generation’s scholarship while presenting Malory’s work in a form that is at once true to the original and accessible to the modern reader. This new edition, which expands on the revised and expanded selection of Malory material that will be included in the third edition of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature , is all of those things. The extensive selections include most of the material concerning Launcelot, and all of the Morte ’s two final tales; the language has been partially modernized to make the text accessible to the modern reader, while retaining the flavor of the original; the text has been carefully prepared from the Winchester manuscript; and the annotations are extensive.

Genres: Medieval, Classics

360 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2014

About the author

From French sources, Sir Thomas Malory, English writer in floruit in 1470, adapted Le Morte d'Arthur , a collection of romances, which William Caxton published in 1485.

From original tales such as the Vulgate Cycle , Sir Thomas Malory, an imprisoned knight in the fifteenth century, meanwhile compiled and translated the tales, which we know as the legend of king.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_...

Reviews

[Fran · Rating 2 out of 5]

Genuinely better if you read it as a comedy. Between the free-for-all jousting brawls, the graphic descriptions of Launcelot gushing pints of blood at once, the absurdity of the romance, and Launcelot's obsession over disguising himself just to throw hands, this is a ready-made Monty Python script. If only the language weren't so damned dense.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read all selections excl "from Sir Tristram de Lyones"
3.5: foundational!

[Nicole Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll be honest, I didn't read the text of this too closely. The story of King Arthur and his knights is a classic, but even the selections are so slow and so dry to read. I relied on online summaries to keep up with class discussions, whoops.