Malory’s Text of the Suite du Merlin

Summary

Although many scholars have studied Malory and his sources, exploring the way he worked and attempting to determine the extent of his knowledge of Arthurian material, no one has successfully established a link between a particular manuscript and Malory's work. This paper explores the relationship between Le Morte Darthur and Cambridge University Library MS Add. 7071, a Suite du Merlin manuscript. Malory composed Le Morte Darthur from a variety of sources; his main source for the first part of his work – corresponding to Books I–IV in Caxton and the first seventy folios of the Winchester manuscript – is the Suite du Merlin. Like many of his other sources, it is a French prose romance related to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. The Cycle has a complex literary history, and scholarly debate on its formation remains unsettled. The Suite is a late addition to the Cycle, designed to draw elements of the romances together; Annie Combes describes it as ‘a long bridging narrative’ to ‘connect the Merlin of 1210 harmoniously to the Lancelot of approximately 1220’ by adding new material and ‘creating links between narratives and characters that are largely unconnected’.

The Suite forms the middle third of the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal, which was composed between 1225 and 1240; it is preceded by the Estoire du Saint Graal and followed by the Queste and Mort Artu. The coherence among the constituent parts of the Post-Vulgate is due largely to the fact that it ‘was from the outset conceived as a complete work’, in contrast to the Vulgate. The Suite, therefore, plays an important unifying role for the Arthurian romances that provide much of the material for Le Morte Darthur. Throughout the Suite, references to the other parts of the Post- Vulgate abound, testament to the fact that the author of the Post-Vulgate ‘attempted to produce a more homogeneous and closely knit whole [than the Vulgate], of which Arthur and the history of his kingdom, rather than Lancelot, was the central character’. The author of the Suite sets into motion many narratives that are later resolved in other portions of the Post-Vulgate; for example, the conception of Mordred ultimately brings about the death of Arthur in the Mort Artu.