Here we find the stories of Lancelot and Elaine, Geraint and Enid, Merlin and Vivien, and many more, told in Tennyson’s skilful blank verse.
Eliot as ‘Chaucer retold for children’ (a rather odd statement, since Tennyson was following Malory rather than Chaucer), Tennyson’s epic collection of verse tales about the various characters who feature in Arthurian myth is a Victorian classic, albeit of uneven quality.
The recommended edition below is based on the Winchester Manchester, recovered in the twentieth century.Īlthough dismissed by T. And his book would go on to have a considerable influence on later writers. Precisely who ‘Sir Thomas Malory’ was is unknown for sure, but the most likely candidate is the Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire, who may have been a knight but didn’t exactly live up to the chivalric ideal espoused in his work: he was a career criminal who ended up in prison several times, notably during the Wars of the Roses he’s thought to have written his classic and hugely influential work of Arthurian literature while in Newgate Prison.Īlthough the style is occasionally repetitive and the pacing occasionally leaves something to be desired, Malory’s achievement should be viewed as less a ‘novel’ in the modern sense and more a patchwork anthology of the different Arthurian legends and stories. One of the first books printed in England, by William Caxton in 1485, Le Morte d’Arthur is a vast prose retelling of the story of King Arthur and the Round Table.
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