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So, I am still way behind on this blogging thing!
Many moons ago a friend lent me a copy of King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales so I could exercise my brain a bit after reading too much new teen fiction; this particular set of Arthur tales is exerpts directly from Sir Thomas Malory with the spellings barely modernized. The archaic language was a joy to read and I felt all intellectual an' shit reading it on the subway. For some reason the footnotes came in repeated cycles of being labeled 1 through 12, which I found amusing. (I am easily amused.)
This collection starts off with a nice long introduction that is almost as fascinating as the tales themselves, which tells us a bit about the structure and content of the French legend cycle that Malory's Morte d'Arthur is adapted from. It also tells us a bit about courtly love and Malory's life and all that other fun stuff.
The book is rather short, running at only about 230 pages, so the excerpts really are just snippets--the book doesn't hold much of a narrative arc, although the Death of Arthur is, quite suitably, at the end. The Holy Grail stuff is very minimal, which is occasionally confusing. The storyline with the most page time seems to be Lancelot's, which actually adheres quite closely to the version presented in "The Once and Future King" (or, more accurately, TOaFK adheres closely to the Morte d'Arthur).
While this is undoubtedly a work of Great Literature, it is also an illustration of how bugfuck crazy everyone was in the early middle ages; a lot of the storylines involve knights trying to kill each other randomly, and then equally as randomly deciding that (a) it's all ok, just a little misunderstanding, lol, no big or (b) it is totally unacceptable to have fought my relatives just because they were trying to kill you, now we will have a blood feud between our families where we just all keep killing each other's sons and brothers and cousins for no reason for ever and evarrrr. Apparently, this is just how knights roll.
All in all, this is a good book to read if you are not yet ready to tackle the entire Morte d'Arthur, which many of us probably never will be. I hope to read the whole thing one day, but probably not anytime soon.
Many moons ago a friend lent me a copy of King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales so I could exercise my brain a bit after reading too much new teen fiction; this particular set of Arthur tales is exerpts directly from Sir Thomas Malory with the spellings barely modernized. The archaic language was a joy to read and I felt all intellectual an' shit reading it on the subway. For some reason the footnotes came in repeated cycles of being labeled 1 through 12, which I found amusing. (I am easily amused.)
This collection starts off with a nice long introduction that is almost as fascinating as the tales themselves, which tells us a bit about the structure and content of the French legend cycle that Malory's Morte d'Arthur is adapted from. It also tells us a bit about courtly love and Malory's life and all that other fun stuff.
The book is rather short, running at only about 230 pages, so the excerpts really are just snippets--the book doesn't hold much of a narrative arc, although the Death of Arthur is, quite suitably, at the end. The Holy Grail stuff is very minimal, which is occasionally confusing. The storyline with the most page time seems to be Lancelot's, which actually adheres quite closely to the version presented in "The Once and Future King" (or, more accurately, TOaFK adheres closely to the Morte d'Arthur).
While this is undoubtedly a work of Great Literature, it is also an illustration of how bugfuck crazy everyone was in the early middle ages; a lot of the storylines involve knights trying to kill each other randomly, and then equally as randomly deciding that (a) it's all ok, just a little misunderstanding, lol, no big or (b) it is totally unacceptable to have fought my relatives just because they were trying to kill you, now we will have a blood feud between our families where we just all keep killing each other's sons and brothers and cousins for no reason for ever and evarrrr. Apparently, this is just how knights roll.
All in all, this is a good book to read if you are not yet ready to tackle the entire Morte d'Arthur, which many of us probably never will be. I hope to read the whole thing one day, but probably not anytime soon.
