The Alliterative Morte Arthure

The Alliterative Morte Arthure
Author: Valerie Krishna
Publisher: University Press of America
Total Pages: 148
Release: 1983
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780819130365

One of the finest narrative poems of the Middle Ages translated in its entirety by a recognized authority on the poem. This volume represents an important chapter in the evolution of the Arthurian legend. It is marked as an epic poem by its celebration of battle and conquest and its unsentimental depiction of combat and death.

King Arthur's Death

King Arthur's Death
Author: Michael Smith
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2021-02-18
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1783529091

King Arthur’s Death (commonly referred to as the Alliterative Morte Arthure) is a Middle English poem that was written in Lincolnshire at the end of the fourteenth century. A source work for Malory’s later Morte d’Arthur, it is an epic tale which documents the horrors of war, the loneliness of kingship and the terrible price paid for arrogance. This magnificent poem tells of the arrival of emissaries from Imperial Rome demanding that Arthur pays his dues as a subject. It is Arthur’s refusal to accept these demands, and the premise of foreign domination, which leads him on a quest to confront his foes and challenge them for command of his lands. Yet his venture is not without cost. His decision to leave Mordred at home to watch over his realm and guard Guinevere, his queen, proves to be a costly one. Though Arthur defeats the Romans, events in Britain draw him back where he must now face Mordred for control of his kingdom – a conflict ultimately fatal to the pair of them. Combining heroic action, probing insight into human frailty and a great attention to contemporary detail, King Arthur’s Death is not only a lesson in effective kingship, it is also an astonishing mirror on our own times, highlighting the folly of letting stubborn dogma drive political decisions.

The Alliterative Morte Arthure

The Alliterative Morte Arthure
Author: Karl Heinz Göller
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 198
Release: 1981
Genre: Art
ISBN: 085991075X

Essays examining a variety of aspects of important Arthurian poem. The present volume grew from a nucleus of four papers given at the Twelfth International Arthurian Conference at Regensburg in 1971 on the alliterative Morte Arthure, increasingly recognised as one of the great masterpiecesof medieval English literature. These lectures sought to reappraise the poem and its somewhat enigmatic historical and cultural context, and are presented here in a much revised and expanded form. Unlike most volumes of theiskind, the contributions form an integrated whole, the result of lengthy discussions among the collaborating scholars over the past year. The topics range from the poem's place among chronicles and Arthurian romances to the date, audience and attitude to contempary problems, notably that of war. pecific fields such as heraldry and laments for the dead are examined in detail, while the linguistic structure of the poem is the subject of two essays.

Before Malory

Before Malory
Author: Richard James Moll
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780802037220

Although most modern scholars doubt the historicity of King Arthur, parts of the legend were accepted as fact throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval accounts of the historical Arthur, however, present a very different king from the romances that are widely studied today. Richard Moll examines a wide variety of historical texts including Thomas Gray's Scalacronica and John Hardyng's Chronicle to explore the relationship between the Arthurian chronicles and the romances. He demonstrates how competing and conflicting traditions interacted with one another, and how writers and readers of Arthurian texts negotiated a complex textual tradition. Moll asserts that the enormous variety and number of existing chronicles demonstrates the immense popularity of the historical Arthur in medieval England. Since these chronicles were the dominant source of Arthurian information for the late medieval reader, they provide an invaluable, and neglected, interpretive context for modern readers of Malory and other later medieval romances. The first monograph to look at the impact of these historical texts on Arthurian literature, Before Malory is also the first to show how canonical vernacular romances interacted with chronicle texts that have since dropped out of the canon.

King Arthur's Death

King Arthur's Death
Author: Larry Dean Benson
Publisher: Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1986
Genre: Arthurian romances
ISBN:

The Stanzaic Morte Arthur engages with the tragic implications of the chivalric love between Lancelot, Arthur and Guinevere; the Alliterative Morte Arthur with those of the aspirations of militant chivalry espoused by Arthur and his knights. The texts have been edited for readers who havelittle or no training in Middle English.

The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's Morte Darthur

The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory's Morte Darthur
Author: Kevin Sean Whetter
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2017
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1843844532

An examination of the rubricated letters in the Morte makes a convincing case for the design being by Malory himself. The red-ink names that decorate the Winchester manuscript of Malory's Morte Darthur are striking; yet until now, no-one has asked why the rubrication exists. This book explores the uniqueness and thematic significance of the physical layout of the Morte in its manuscript context, arguing that the layout suggests, and the correlations between manuscript design and narrative theme confirm, that the striking arrangement is likely to have been the product of authorial design rather than something unusual dreamed up by patron, scribe, reader, or printer. The introduction offers a thorough account of not only the textual tradition of the Morte, but also the ways in which scholarship to date has not done enough with the manuscript contexts of Malory's Arthuriad. The book then goes on to establish the singularity and likely provenance of Winchester's rubrication of names. In the second half of the study the author elucidates the narrative significance of this rubrication pattern, outlining striking connections between manuscript layout and major narrative events, characters, and themes. He suggests that the manuscript mise-en-page underscores Malory's interest in human character and knighthood, creating a memorializing function similar to the many inscribed tombs that dominate the landscape of the Morte's narrative pages. Inshort, Winchester's design creates a memorializing tomb for Arthurian chivalry. K.S. WHETTER is Professor of English at Acadia University, Canada.