Introduction: The Tournament at Mapplemalleoré: Malory at 550

Summary

At the end of the penultimate book in T. H. White's Once and Future King series (initially published in separate volumes from 1938 to 1940 and 1958), The Candle in the Wind, a weary King Arthur summons a page on the night before the final battle with Mordred. He explains the core idea of his reign, ‘that force ought to be used, if it were used at all, on behalf of justice,’ and tells the boy he is to be sent away from battle, as he wants ‘someone to be left, who would remember their famous idea.’ That boy is named ‘Tom of Newbold Revell near Warwick.’ In other words, Thomas Malory, future author of Le Morte Darthur, still the most famous and widely read of the major medieval Arthurian texts. The collapse in White's narrative of the chronological gap between the ‘historical’ Arthur and his most famous chronicler, not to mention the even wider gap between romance and history, points creatively to the crucial importance of Malory to the Arthurian tradition as a whole. While Malory's real biography might make us pause at the thought, White's account makes his centrality literal, the keeper of an idealistic flame.

Malory is perhaps unique as a single author who acts as a narrow, controlled channel through which a tradition survives the pre-modern and is subsequently reborn. Beginning in the late nineteenth century with Tennyson and Swinburne, the modern Arthurian tradition has largely been a response to Malory's Morte. Whether a Malorian framework is evoked quite closely (Steinbeck's Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights; posthumously published in 1977) or is otherwise augmented with other materials to fill perceived gaps (Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex [1978]), Malory remains the index. Even when a text wants to jettison medieval “accretion” and return to something authentically Celtic, the stamp of Malory continues: Lancelot may disappear, but the adultery remains – an “original” character, someone like Bedwyr, is simply swapped in; texts like Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon rework the role of gender and violence in the Morte.