Le Morte Darthur

First page from William Caxton's edition of Malory's Le Morte Darthur (London 1485).

Le Morte Darthur (more rarely Le Morte d'Arthur , from Old French " La Mort Le Roi Artu ", German "King Arthur's death") is a compilation of various stories from the Old French and Middle English Arthurian epic , including his own material, by Sir Thomas Malory .

content

1. The Birth and Youth of Arthur
2. King Arthur's campaign in France and Rome
3. Lancelot
4. Gareth , brother of Gawain
5. Tristan and Isolde
6. The search for the Holy Grail
7. The love story between Launcelot and Guinevere
8. The end of the round table and the death of Arthur

Most of the events in the book take place in Britain and France in the second half of the 5th century. In some parts it ventures out to Rome and Sarras near Babylon and is reminiscent of biblical stories from the Middle East.

Text history

Malory's own handwriting has not survived; Today two non-congruent texts are known: the first printed edition, overseen and significantly revised by publisher and printer William Caxton - only survived in a single copy, and the Winchester manuscript, rediscovered in 1934, which Eugène Vinaver first published in a critical edition in 1947 under the Title The Works of Sir Thomas Malory submitted. Vinaver’s title indicates an essential difference between the two sources: Caxton’s edition is determined by attempts to give an overview of the text, to divide it into 21 books and to divide them into a total of 507 individual chapters and to cover the course of action in an almost 30-page book a detailed table of contents chapter by chapter overview.

Both versions of the text are close to each other at another point: In the Winchester manuscript, traces of the printer's ink used by Caxton could be detected, an indication that Caxton had the output for a comparison in the company. As far as can be seen, he did not use the edition - text indications allow the conclusion that a lost handwriting was Caxton's model.

expenditure

Editions based on Winchester manuscript

• Facsimile:
  • Malory, Sir Thomas. The Winchester Malory: A Facsimile, introduced by N. R. Ker (London, 1976). ISBN 0-19-722404-0 .
• In original spelling:
  • Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte Darthur. (A Norton Critical Edition), ed. by Stephen H. A. Shepherd (2004). New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-97464-2 . (Website with text corrections and further commentary: Stephen H. A. Shepherd: Le Morte Darthur: On-line companion .)
  • _________. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. by Eugène Vinaver, 3rd ed. ed. by P. J. C. Field (1990). 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-812344-2 , ISBN 0-19-812345-0 , ISBN 0-19-812346-9 .
  • _________. Malory: Complete Works, ed. by Eugène Vinaver (1977). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-281217-3 . (A revised version from Malory: Works 1971).
  • _________. Malory: Works, ed. by Eugène Vinaver (1971). 2 ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-254163-3 .
  • _________. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, hrsp by Eugène Vinaver (1967). 2 ed. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-811838-4 .
  • _________. Malory: Works, ed. by Eugène Vinaver (1954). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-254163-3 . (Malory's text after Vinaver's The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947) in a single volume, shortened in the text apparatus.)
  • _________. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. by Eugène Vinaver (1947). 3 vol. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• In modernized spelling:
  • Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript, ed. by Helen Cooper (1998). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-282420-1 . (a linguistically revised text.)
• Paraphrase in modern English:
  • Malory, Sir Thomas. Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur : King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table . trans. and edited by Keith Baines (1983). New York: Bramhall House. ISBN 0-517-02060-2 . New edition: Signet (2001). ISBN 0-451-52816-6 .
  • _________. Le Morte D'Arthur. (London Medieval & Renaissance Ser.) Trans. by Robert M. Lumiansky (1982). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-17673-4 .
  • Steinbeck, John , and Thomas Malory. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights: From the Winchester Manuscripts of Thomas Malory and Other Sources. (1976) New York: Noonday Press. New edition 1993. ISBN 0-374-52378-9 .

Editions based on the Caxton print

• Facsimile:
  • Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d'Arthur, printed by William Caxton, 1485, ed. by Paul Needham (1976). London.
• In original spelling:
  • Malory, Sir Thomas. Caxton's Malory, ed. from James. W. Spisak (1983). 2 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-03825-8 .
  • _________. Le Morte Darthur by Syr Thomas Malory, ed. by H. Oskar Sommer (* 1861) (1889–91). 3 vols. London: David Nutt.
    • Le Morte Darthur by Syr Thomas Malory. The original Edition of William Caxton now reprinted and edited with an Introduction and Glossary by H. Oskar Sommer. With an Essay on Malory's Prose Style by Andrew Lang. Vol. I. – Text , 1889 ( Google Books US , Internet Archive )
    • Le Morte Darthur by Syr Thomas Malory. The original Edition of William Caxton now reprinted and edited by H. Oskar Sommer. Vol. II. – Introduction , 1890 ( Google Books US )
    • Le Morte Darthur by Syr Thomas Malory. The original Edition of William Caxton now reprinted and edited by H. Oskar Sommer. Vol. III. Studies on the Sources. With an ontroductory essay by Andrew Lang. 1891 ( Google Books US , Internet Archive )
    • The text version is available in html without Sommer's comments: University of Michigan: Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse: Le Morte Darthur .
  • Caxton's text at Marteau, a new html edition compared to the original with word explanations
• In modernized spelling:
  • Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d'Arthur . Ed. Matthews, John (2000) illustrated by Anna-Marie Ferguson, London: Cassell. ISBN 0-304-35367-1 . (The introduction by John Matthews pays tribute to the Winchester text, but then notes that the edition is based on Pollard's version of the Caxton text and has been expanded into eight individual passages from Winchester's manuscript.)
  • _________. Le Morte Darthur , introduced by Helen Moore (1996). Herefordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd. ISBN 1-85326-463-6 . (Based, as far as can be seen, on Pollard's Caxton edition text.)
  • _________. Le morte d'Arthur , introduced by Elizabeth J. Bryan (1994). New York: Modern Library. ISBN 0-679-60099-X . (Pollard's text version)
  • _________. Le Morte d'Arthur , ed. by Janet Cowen (1970), introduced by John Lawlor, 2 vols. London: Penguin. ISBN 0-679-60099-X , ISBN 0-14-043044-X .
  • _________. Le Morte d'Arthur . Ed. Rhys, John (1906). (Everyman's Library 45 & 46.) London: Dent; London: JM Dent; New York: EP Dutton. Reissued as paperback 1976: ISBN 0-460-01045-X , ISBN 0-460-01046-8 . (In the text a new edition of the old edition published by Dent in 1897.)
  • _________. Le Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, ed. by A. W. Pollard (1903). 2 vols. New York: Macmillan (revised after the edition published by Macmillan in 1868).
    Available on the Internet at:
    • Project Gutenberg : Le Morte Darthur: Volume 1 (books 1-9) and Le Morte Darthur: Volume 2 (books 10-21) . (Plain text.)
    • Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library: Le Morte Darthur: Volume 1 (books 1-9) and Le Morte Darthur: Volume 2 (books 10-21) (HTML.)
    • Celtic Twilight: Legends of Camelot: Le Morte d'Arthur (HTML edition with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley from the Dent edition of 1893-94.)
  • _________. Le Morte Darthur, ed. by F. J. Simmon (1893-94), illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, 2 vols. London: Dent.
• Limerick version: Le Morte d'Arthur, an Epic Limerick, 2006, by Jacob Wenzel, ISBN 978-1-4116-8987-9

Editions in German translation

• Sir Thomas Malory: The Tales of King Arthur and the Knights of His Round Table . Transferred by Helmut Findeisen on the basis of Lachmann's translation. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1974 (paperback edition: Insel-Taschenbuch 3209. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-458-34909-X ).
• Sir Thomas Malory: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table . Translated by Hedwig Lachmann (1913). Anaconda, Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-86647-370-6 .

References and comments

1. ↑ transcription .
2. ↑ Only in an edition of 500 copies; See Notable Editions of Caxton's Malory