Excerpt from Le Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory Its Sources Mediaeval mystics have a word for us, mediaeval music sounds around our altars, mediaeval art claims an ever-larger measure of devotion, and mediaeval literature waits to be studied as one of the great imaginative expressions of the race. In this literature, romance holds a leading place. True, the Latinists of the Middle Ages have a power and a value hardly yet appreciated; it has been rightly pointed out that Carlyle, Ruskin, Bergson, would have written in Latin had they lived in the thirteenth century, and the mediaeval philosophers and theologians are as great men as their modern successors. But the writings in the vernacular are warmer with the touch of life. Among these, the romance-cycles are of prime importance, among those cycles, none is so central as the Arthurian, and in the long development of Arthurian romance, Malory's Morte, for English readers at least, marks the glorious consummation. That is the reason for this book. In the revival of mediaeval studies, three phases may be distinguished: there is a sentimental approach, there is a scholastic approach, and there is an interpretive approach made possible by the other two. The first approach, eagerly sympathetic but uncritical, marked the early years of the modern romantic movement; but its superficialities were checked before long, and a serious scholarship arose for which one can hardly feel too grateful. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."