13 - The Lancelot-Grail Cycle in England: Malory and his Predecessors

Summary

Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, completed in 1469–70 and printed by William Caxton in 1485, is England's Arthuriad, and as such it is the closest English equivalent to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. Equivalence in scope, however, does not imply mere translation or adaptation. Malory's work is the fullest single representative of the Lancelot-Grail in English, but he was neither the only, nor by any means the most faithful, English adapter of Cycle material. His version is indeed strikingly innovative: he both alters his Cycle material and combines it with different sources in French and English to design (to use Chrétien de Troyes’ famous terms) a conjointure for the resulting work from which he can draw out a sens radically different from that of the Lancelot-Grail.

Malory's distinctiveness is best approached through the history of Arthurian romance in English, for the kind of emphasis he gives his work often accords with this much better than with its French developments. ‘English’ here means Middle English language; insular culture is a much broader term, as the likely Anglo-Norman origins of both the Thomas of the Tristan and Marie de France indicate. If the author of the Lancelot-Grail had indeed been Walter Map, as it claimed, then the Cycle itself would have been English in that broader cultural sense. The lack of distinction between French and Anglo-Norman culture in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries is indeed indicated by the fact that Map could so happily have been regarded as its author: there was clearly nothing felt to be implausible about the attribution. Early English-language Arthurian material, however, looks very different from that in French. The stress fell strongly on the life and death of Arthur, and its sources lay in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain and its numerous chronicle derivatives rather than French romance; this legendary, historical version is the ultimate source of works from Layamon's Brut (c. 1200) to the alliterative Morte Arthure (c. 1400). That difference of content, combined with the change of language, makes the history of Middle English Arthurian romance decisively different from the history of the genre in French, even after the Cycle material comes to dominate English Arthurian writing in the fifteenth century.