VI - ‘The Vengeaunce of My Brethirne’: Blood Ties in Malory's Morte Darthur

Summary

Thomas Malory's King Arthur has some complicated blood relationships. Early in the text, he makes ‘grete doole’ when ‘he understood that syre Ector was not his fader’ (15), and in the chilling moment when Arthur and Mordred, father-uncle and son-nephew, meet one another on the battle-field, the extent to which Arthur can rely upon and trust blood ties is questionable – indeed, his blood kinship with the volatile Orkneys ultimately contributes to his downfall. His foundation of the Round Table fellowship is an attempt to establish a loyalty system in which chivalric brotherhood can overcome the potentially unstable clan relationships that precede its inception. But Arthur's artificial brotherhood is inherently vulnerable, not least because so many of his Round Table knights are engaged in blood-feuds with one another. Of course, such feuds are not original to Malory; Gawayne's vendetta against Launcelot, for example, is well attested in the two main sources for that section of the Morte, the French Mort Artu and the Middle English Stanzaic Le Morte Arthur. However, there are ‘numerous passages in Malory which occur in neither’. It is my contention that Malory is preoccupied with blood and that he augments and expands his sources in order to emphasize the potentially dangerous outcomes of vulnerability to the demands of blood kinship.

There are a number of incidents in the Morte that illustrate this tendency; since it is not possible to cover them all in detail in this essay, the focus is on a group of episodes that involve Arthur's troublesome Orkney relatives.