28 - Old Sir Thomas Malory‘s Enchanting Book’: A Connecticut Yankee Reads Le Morte Darthur

Summary

Twain's archaic language in A Connecticut Yankee conflates features from several centuries, thus reflecting the novel's composite historical setting and its concern with cultural relativity.

In Mark Twain's satirical fantasy of time travel into a fictive Arthurian past, published in 1889, Malory's Morte Darthur figures conspicuously. Malory's style forms the staple of the language Twain invents for the inhabitants of his imaginary sixth century. Substantial passages of Malory's text are also quoted whole at different points of the story, in various narrative guises. The first of these is under Malory's own name, at the opening of the frame narrative. It forms the narrator's bedtime reading as he sits by his hotel fireside after a visit to Warwick Castle, where he had met a mysterious stranger who had confidentially claimed unaccountable personal knowledge of the sixth-century armour on display. The narrator's reading lulls him into a comfortable reverie: ‘All that evening I sat by my fire at the Warwick Arms, steeped in a dream of the olden time, while the rain beat upon the windows, and the wind roared about the eaves and corners. From time to time I dipped into old Sir Thomas Malory's enchanting book, and fed at its rich feast of prodigies and adventures, breathed-in the fragrance of its obsolete names, and dreamed again. Midnight being come at length, I read another tale, for a night-cap’ (p. 34). There follows a citation of Le Morte Darthur, Book VI, Chapter XI, recounting an adventure in which Sir Launcelot delivers a group of captive ladies from two giants, and rescues Sir Kay from an attack by three knights.