III - Weeping, Wounds and Worshyp in Malory’s Morte Darthur

Summary

There are a lot of wounds and a lot of weeping in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. This is hardly surprising given that armed combat ‘is Malory’s favourite topic’. Yet despite the popularity and longevity of the Morte, combat has not always proven to be equally beloved by Malory’s critics. Roger Ascham famously condemned the Morte’s excessive reliance on ‘open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye’, and in doing so he initiated what would become a long-standing critical refrain. Recent scholarship on Malory’s Morte Darthur emphasizes the supposed somatic anxieties of Malory’s text, the ways in which various characters feel pain. Emotions, too, are sometimes said to be fractured in the Morte, especially in relation to violence in the text and even, for some scholars, for Malory himself outside the text. It is my contention that both of these lines of reasoning misrepresent the complexity and unity of Malory’s Morte Darthur.

Wounds and weeping are omnipresent in the Morte, but not as a negative cause-and-effect binary. Malory makes abundantly clear that seeking after worshyp by ‘taking the adventure’ involves some form of bodily hazard, usually fighting, and also that combat can have bloody and painful as well as worshipful consequences. Concomitantly and paradoxically, public recognition of success in combat is the surest means of winning worship, and worship is what all knights – and, as we shall see, at least one lady – strive for in the Morte. Nevertheless, a knight’s acceptance of the interconnection of worship and wounds does not (pace Jill Mann) mean that he surrenders his free will ‘to chance’, nor do wounded bodies evoke Malory’s own authorial insecurities about textual traditions and instability (pace Catherine Batt). It does mean, however, that earthly worship is ultimately the more important factor, the prize for which all knights regularly risk bodily harm. ‘[W]orshyp in armys may never be foyled’ (841.26), as Malory insists in the May Passage. Although the narrative divisions and section breaks of most modern editions of the Morte Darthur obscure the connexion, the physical layout of the Winchester manuscript at this point in the narrative makes it clear that the May Passage and its praise of faithfulness in love and worship is meant to conclude the Great Tournament as much as it introduces the Knight of the Cart episode.