Product Description
This single-volume edition of the complete works of Sir Thomas Malory retains his 15th-century English while providing an introduction, glossary, and fifty pages of explanatory notes on each romance. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Works of Malory by Eugene Vinaver
I am undertaking a course in the Arthurian Legend and one of the course books we are studying is Malory's Morte D'Arthur. It is a complex series of short stories translated from Medieval French. Eugene Vinaver's Book, Works of Malory, throws a lot more light on a difficult subject in his parallel commentary.

Especially, it was exciting and motivating to be able to locate a good copy of this valuable out of print book at an affordable price. Thank you Amazon

Mike Hodgetts
SYDNEY AUSTRALIA

Surprisingly Good but is it worth it?
Long, repetitive, and formulaic to the point of being grossly unsophisticated, The Morte D'Arthur in its original late Middle English is surprisingly and remarkably engaging and readable. It really does attest to the sheer power of story-telling that eschews unnecessary details and keeps the story moving at all costs.

In this work, Sir Thomas Malory presents a condensed compilation of the Arthurian legend taken from various French and English sources. And he takes great pains to extract, rearrange, and splice together coherent and engaging stories from scattered and sometimes contradictory fragments. Although there were slow and maddeningly long parts (esp. 'The Book of Sir Tristram De Lyones,' which clocks in at 300 pages, almost 40% of the entire book), never did I feel sleepy or bored as constant actions kept me engaged at all times. The language - late Middle English - is not bad at all, at least much, much understandable than Chaucer's Middle English. The book provides the reader with necessary notes and glossary where you can look up unfamiliar words, making it - as a review on its back cover says - "eminently readable."

As for the individual divisions or 'books' in the work, I found the last three - "The Tale of the Sankgreal" (the quest of the holy grail), "The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere," and the title story, "The Death of Arthur" - to be the most fascinating as Malory in these last three books masters the splicing technique and the stories are just a blast to read even by modern standards.

"The Book of Sir Tristram" and "The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney" both suffer from head-bangingly monotonous and eye-rollingly naive plot. The book of Tristram is just too long with too many episodes and too many names. It also doesn't tell us how the affair between Tristram and Isolde ends (told 160 pages later in the book of Lancelot and Guinevere), or how Lamerok, one of the three greatest knights of all time along with Lancelot and Tristram (excluding Galahad since he is like a God-incarnate and belongs more or less to the celestial order than to the mere human species) gets murdered by Gawain and his brothers. Though there are characters and events that the book foreshadows, it may best be skipped or read in parts for the interest of time.

The book of Gareth, on the other hand reads like a medieval version of a corny Power Rangers episode except the Power Rangers are the evil ones being butchered (NB: there are knights who are called the Black, Blue, White, Green, and finally Red Knights, and of course the Red Knight is the leader of them all. I'm not kidding.)

All of the divisions in their own way (even the mega-long book of Tristram and giga-facetious book of Gareth) are good stories once you get into them. Finally, although late Middle English is readable, the Middle-English-phobic reader may benefit from reading Signet Classic's modern translation, which would save both time and money ($7.95 with 500+ pages vs.$37 with 700+ pages).

All in all, a good book with good stories.

If I only had one book . . .
If I had only one book to read for the rest of my life and couldn't read anything else, it would be this one.

Ian Myles Slater on: Worthwhile Malorys, Not For All
This is mainly a review of two related editions of the work commonly known as "Le Morte D'Arthur" (Anglo-Norman French for "The Death of [King] Arthur). One is Eugene Vinaver's "Malory: Complete Works," the title of which will be explained shortly. The other is the Norton Critical Edition, as "Le Morte D'Arthur"-- an admirable book, but not for all readers; as also explained below, the text has some striking visual differences from the usual modern book, which some may find too difficult. Both are original-spelling editions of the fifteenth-century text, in what can be called either very late Middle English, or very early Modern English; other, easier-to-read, editions will also be mentioned below.

Until a mis-catalogued fifteenth-century manuscript in a safe at Winchester College was finally recognized in 1934 as Sir Thomas Malory's account of King Arthur and his knights, the only authoritative text of this now-famous work was that found in the two surviving copies of William Caxton's 1485 printing. Unhappily, its first and last pages are missing, so Caxton remains the source for those passages. (The standard exact, or "diplomatic," text of Caxton's Malory was edited by H. Oskar Sommers, 1889-1891. There is a recent critical text, edited by James Spisak, 1983, and a facsimile edition, edited by Paul Needham, 1976.) There are thousands of minor differences, and a few very large ones.

Caxton had divided the text into twenty-one books, with numbered and (usually) titled chapters, and called the whole "Le Morte D'Arthur" -- "Notwithstanding that it treateth of the birth, life, and acts of the said King Arthur, of his noble knights of the Round Table, their marvelous enquests and adventures, the achieving of the Sangrail, and in the end the dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all" (Caxton's Colophon). He had also dramatically abridged one long section (his Book Five), and seems to have made some changes of his own in wording, sometimes softening Malory's aristocratic bluntness. When Eugene Vinaver edited the Winchester Manuscript for the Oxford English Texts series, he gave the three-volume set (with critical notes, glossary, etc.) the title of "The Works of Sir Thomas Malory" (1947; revised edition, 1967; third edition, re-edited by P.J.C. Field, 1990).

In Vinaver's eyes, the manuscript revealed that Malory had produced only a very loosely connected set of narratives, distinct "WORKS" to which he, as editor, gave his own titles (which are now in current use, despite the lack of any other authority for some). The idea of a single, continuous, narrative was, in this view, Caxton's; hence the many inconsistencies, such as dead villains showing up alive and still wicked after a few "books." This decision has given rise to a long critical controversy; Malory was, in Caxton's term, "reducing" some disparate French texts into English, and may have just missed some discrepancies, as he tried to produce a reasonably unified "whole book". It has also created a certain amount of bibliographic confusion.

Keith Baines' "Rendition in Modern English" of Vinaver's edition (1962; a rewriting, covering every incident, but mostly sacrificing the language) is carefully called "Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table," as if to emphasize that Caxton's "interference" is being removed, without sacrificing reader recognition (and sales). Vinaver's later Oxford Standard Authors one-volume original-spelling text edition (1971), however, is"Malory: Complete Works." Vinaver also edited for Oxford University Press a modernized-spelling "King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales by Sir Thomas Malory" (1956, 1968, 1975), which maintained the same premise. John Steinbeck, a great admirer of Malory, was delighted by Vinaver's edition, and referenced the Winchester Manuscript in the subtitle of his unfinished "Acts of King Arthur ...," avoiding the "Morte" designation. (This is in fact an Arthurian novel by Steinbeck, incorporating chunks of source material, *not* a modernization.) Thus far, there is a certain amount of consistency.

However, a more recent Oxford edition, Helen Cooper's modernized spelling edition of the Winchester text for The Oxford World's Classics (1998; abridged, unfortunately; otherwise excellent), is instead titled "Le Morte D'Arthur." So, too, is the medievalist R.M. Lumiansky's much more extensively modernized 1982 complete version of the Winchester text. (Almost a translation, and thus an implied commentary on the text; but not to be confused with Lumiansky's projected, and unpublished, critical edition, almost complete at the time of his death in 1987. But is quite impressive, and I can understand anyone who thinks I am too critical of it.) The title of the facsimile edition for the Early English Text Society (N.R. Ker, 1976) "The Winchester Malory," avoided the issue, but the volume also helped renew the debate over Vinaver's theory by eliminating his editorial hand.

Stephen H. A. Shepherd's Norton Critical Edition is "Le Morte D'Arthur" on the cover, but on the title page has the Caxton-derived subtitle of "The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of The Rounde Table." This title may well go back to Malory, or least to the manuscripts; it would have appeared on the missing final pages. Shepherd, indeed, gives considerably more weight to Caxton's evidence than has been customary. It has become clear, from printer's marks, that the Winchester Manuscript was in fact available to Caxton, and was still on hand when his successor, Wynkyn de Worde, reset the "Morte" in 1498, introducing some of its readings. This suggests that Caxton was comparing at least two manuscripts, and that some of his "innovations" may reflect Malory's intentions as much as any other scribal copy.

The one-volume Oxford"Malory: Complete Works" is a rather bare-bones edition (especially compared to its three-volume prototype), consisting almost entirely of a very lightly "normalized" text (abbreviations are silently expanded, but variant spellings are usually preserved, etc.), with some good textual notes and a glossary (about a hundred pages of "apparatus"). In the Norton Critical Edition, Shepherd offers the reader an extended Introduction, Chronologies, a text with explanatory footnotes, a large section of "Sources" (earlier and / or alternative versions of Arthurian stories, many translated by Shepherd) and "Backgrounds" (contemporary medieval documents and modern histories illustrating Malory's times) and "Criticism" (essays and book excerpts), followed by a thirty-two-page double-column Glossary, a "Selected Guide to Proper Names," and a Selected Bibliography. (There is also a website, accessible through W.W. Norton's main page; it lists printing errors, and reports that the corrections of those identified have now been made in a second printing.)

Shepherd's text itself includes more of Caxton's readings, which seem to reflect another manuscript with different errors; and manuscript is the crucial word. Unlike Vinaver, who attempted to reproduce what he regarded as Malory's intended structure (or non-structure), Shepherd aims to create the impression of reading a medieval manuscript, without the most difficult obstacles. Not only are original spellings preserved, he carefully includes marginal notes and other indicators of scribal practices. The two scribes of the Winchester Manuscript carefully (but not completely consistently) wrote names, and some passages, in red ink ("rubrications"). Shepherd does not ask the printer for two colors, but follows the practice of "Scribe A" in using a more ornate script for the rubrics, substituting a black-letter font, so these words stand out; in some cases, following the scribes' use of larger lettering, they are printed in an extra-bold face.

Shepherd has some sensible solutions -- not identical to Vinaver's -- to such problems as character variation ('u' and 'v' and 'i' and 'j' had yet to settle into their modern restrictions, for example), erratic word divisions, and punctuating sentences whose beginning and / or end is not clearly marked. [A recent review by Jim Allan, posted on the "Le Morte Darthur" side, elegantly summarizes Shepherd's approach to these and other problems.]

This does not make for easy reading; it does reproduce, as nearly as possible in a printed book, and with modern typefaces, the experience of reading a medieval book -- which is the point of the exercise. As someone who once pored over the facsimile of the Winchester Manuscript without being able to make out much from the fifteenth-century handwriting, I love it. And it is not Shepherd's eccentric decision. It is part of a renewed appreciation for the medieval book as a physical artifact, not a sort of nuisance to be made transparent by modern typography.

However, with their 'olde spellynges' and other peculiarities, neither the Oxford Standard Authors version nor the Norton Critical Edition is suitable for all readers. Although Lumiansky's version comes close, there is still a need for a *complete* "normalized" edition based on the Winchester text, only very lightly modernized as to spelling, and faithfully preserving the original words and sentence structures.

The best version of Le Mort D' Arthur ever!!!!
If you want the original Middle English version of Le Mort D' Arthur, this is it.It is the Winchester version.I bought this book while in England and it's the best version I have due to the original spellings.It's a challenge to read, but I enjoy it because it is more authentic.Since you don't have somebody "correcting" the text, you get to see what the original actually looks and reads like.I believe this is the only middle English version available.You won't be disappointed! ... Read more

Product Description
From the incredible wizadry of Merlin to the passion of Sir Lancelot, these tales of Arthur and his knights offer epic adventures with the supernatural as well as timeless battles with out own humanity.

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Customer Reviews (1)

Keith Baines Translation: Signet Classis
In a nutshell, I think the Keith Baines translation is an excellent edition for the lay reader, high school student, or first-time Le Morte D'Arthur reader who wants to enjoy the essence of Malory's work.Baines' translation is fluid and makes Arthurian Legend accessible and enjoyable for the modern reader.

Although the Baines edition does lack the style and diction of Malory's Middle English, within its pages you will find all of the characters and events that make Malory's work so rich and exciting: the story of young Arthur and his mentor, Merlin; the treacherous Morgan le Fay, the adventures of Arthur and his Knights, the Tale of the SanGreal(Quest of the Holy Grail), the Fisher King, the tragic Elaine, Launcelot and Gwynevere, and the final battle between Arthur and Mordred.

I use the Baines translation to teach an overview of Arthurian Legend to college-prep. senior high school students (British Lit.), and I couldn't imagine using another edition of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur at that level.(Of note, excerpts from this Baines translation appear widely in high-school textbooks because it is so accessible).

If you are an advanced student and require a scholarly treatment of Malory's text in Middle English, this is not the edition for you.

... Read more

Product Description

Virtually all modern versions of the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are derived from a single book: Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1469), one of the world's most renowned literary works. Yet the author, a fifteenth-century knight, has remained an enigma for centuries. Existing historical records imply that Malory was a criminal—accused of rape, ambush, rustling, and attacks on abbeys—and was imprisoned for most of his life.

Customer Reviews (1)

plenty here for the historians and the literary historians, too
This is a book that general audiences can have hours of fun reading and historians, literary historians, Arthurians, and other scholars of all shades can have hours of fun arguing about (and I draw from personal experience). Most impressive is Hardyment's full-scale, detailed look at the context of the world in which Malory lived and wrote, exploring its political pressures, its social conventions, its cultural attitudes, and the ways it sought to authenticate itself. She's also adept at managing the physical evidence, reproducing for us (in word pictures and fine visual additions) the materiality of the world: its houses, its armor, its food, its diseases. She admits where her conclusions are romantic speculations (imagining Malory's amorous intrigues and/or military commitments) but places them within the context of existing evidence. The extensive endnotes and bibliography prove she's done her research and documented her sources. Literary critics might be hesitant to read as much of Malory's own personal attitudes from what's written in the 'Morte Darthur' as Hardyment does--even in the fifteenth century, authors were capable of irony, satire, creating fiction, and constructing narrative personae--and after a few hundred pages, the blur of names and titles makes one long for a glossary of proper names at the end, just to keep the dynasties and loyalties organized in one's mind. But none of this proves an impediment to the fine, clear prose, and in the end, Hardyment's imaginative reconstruction of a man of deep loyalties, strong moral fiber, romantic leanings, and nostalgia for a world where chivalry actually means something is persuasive and appealing and, on its own, offers an explanation for why the 'Morte Darthur' has such a lasting literary life. ... Read more

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This is an electronic edition of the complete book complemented by author biography. This book features the table of contents linked to every volume, book and chapter. The book was designed for optimal navigation on the Kindle, PDA, Smartphone, and other electronic readers. It is formatted to display on all electronic devices including the Kindle, Smartphones and other Mobile Devices with a small display.

Customer Reviews (72)

Review of the Winchester Manuscript from Oxford World Classics
This is a review of Le Morte D'Arthur: The Winchester Manuscript (Oxford World's Classics).I haven't read numerous other editions, so I can't compare this, but what I can say is that you'll be a richer person for reading this book.I don't claim that it will be easy, as significant amounts of historical English permeate the text.After a little while, though, your brain will switch over and it will be easier.There are a tremendous number of endnotes to help the reader along and a table of translations that also comes in handy.

Months after reading this I still find myself recalling the characters and stories.If you've never read it, this is as good an edition as any and I truly am happy I read this book.

Idealism Doomed by Human Weakness
Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur " is perhaps the best-known version of the Arthurian legends in English. Despite the title, "the death of Arthur", the work does not deal solely with King Arthur's death but rather with the whole of his life and reign. The error appears to have originated with Malory's first publisher William Caxton who applied the title of Malory's final section to the entire work. The book retells some well-known stories from French and English sources, such as the Sword in the Stone, the Quest for the Holy Grail, the romance of Tristan and Isolde, the adulterous love between Lancelot and Guinevere and the death of King Arthur at the hands of the traitor Mordred. One of the book's eight sections, the Tale of Sir Gareth, appears to be Malory's own invention.

The identity of the author is not precisely known. During the time it was being written, during the 1450s and 1460s, there were at least six men named Thomas Malory living in England, but most (although not all) modern scholars attribute the work to Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire. This individual lived from around 1413 to 1470, so would have lived through the latter part of the Hundred Years War as well as the Wars of the Roses. He appears to have been a colourful character who served as an MP for Warwickshire but also served time in prison for various offences including rape and robbery. There is an irony if such a man was indeed the author of Le Morte D'Arthur, as one of the work's major themes is how one might reconcile two of the great preoccupations of the Middle Ages, love of God and love of violence.

There is some doubt as to whether King Arthur ever existed, and to judge from Caxton's preface there were some people who had doubts about his existence even in the 1400s. Malory, however, presents his work as though it were the true story of a real historical figure who lived about a thousand years before his own time. The work is, however, anachronistic in that the society which Malory describes bears a much greater resemblance to that of the fifteenth century than it does to that of the fifth. Malory even makes reference to cannon, even though firearms were only introduced into Europe about a century before his birth. (Mind you, the only character who actually makes use of guns is Mordred. Perhaps Malory saw them as the coward's weapon.)

Indeed, the whole work is based around an anachronism. Although fifth-century societies had warriors, they had no concept of the institution of knighthood or chivalry, something which grew up in the later Middle Ages. This institution may have developed in an attempt to reconcile warfare with Christian ideals. In "Le Morte d'Arthur" these ideals are represented by the Pentecostal Oath sworn by the Knights of the Round Table. Arthur makes his knights swear that they will only fight in a righteous cause, show mercy to defeated opponents, uphold justice, fight against oppression, protect the poor and weak and respect the chastity of women.

A key concept in the book is "honour"- except that Malory generally does not use this Norman-French loanword, preferring the native English "worship", with all its religious connotations. A knight can gain worship by mighty feats of arms, provided they are performed in a worthy cause. A knight will lose worship if he fights in an evil cause or if he fights unfairly, such as by striking an opponent who is wounded or unhorsed.

Yet despite this note of idealism, Malory's vision is at heart a pessimistic one. The only knight who wholly lives up to these ideals is Galahad, who is rewarded with a vision of the Holy Grail but dies young. Galahad's father Lancelot, in other respects a paragon of knighthood, is deemed unworthy because of his adultery with Queen Guinevere, and most of the other knights fall a lot further short of the ideals expressed in the Pentecostal Oath than does Lancelot. Even Arthur himself, although initially presented as a beacon of hope, is far from being an idealised monarch- he fathers a child, for instance, by his own sister. It is the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere which leads to the civil war which devastates the kingdom, to the downfall of the Round Table and to the death of Arthur. Malory was doubtless inspired to write these passages by the civil war which had devastated England in his own lifetime and his message is clear; idealism is doomed to failure by human weakness.

My comments are based upon the Wordsworth edition which modernises the spelling and punctuation but otherwise leaves the text as it was first published by Caxton. The modern reader's main problem with the work is unlikely to be Malory's language- there are only a handful of unfamiliar vocabulary items, and the Wordsworth edition provides a helpful glossary of these- but his long-winded prose style and tendency to repeat himself. Apart from the Holy Grail sequences, which are more like an extended religious allegory, the narrative tends to fall into a very familiar pattern- Knight A rides out, meets Knight B, fights with him, overcomes him and then moves on to a fight with Knight C, which is described in similar terms. Even Malory's similes become repetitive- two knights fighting are generally likened to two wild boars hurtling together, even though these creatures had been extinct in England for around two hundred years at the time he was writing. Malory's passion for informing us exactly how many knights Lancelot or Gawaine unhorsed at some particular tournament recalls that of the football anorak who can recite by heart all Sheffield Wednesday's results from the 1956-57 season.

Some modern editions abridge the text, and I can understand why. "Le Morte D'Arthur" may be the best-known work of English-language Arthurian literature today, but "well-known" does not always equate to "widely read", and I suspect that most readers today will owe their familiarity with the story to a modern retelling. The original, at least in its unabridged form, will probably be of most interest to those with an academic interest in the development of English literature.

Boring? Stupid?
This is not a review of any particular edition, but of the work in general and I only put this here in response to a number of one-star reviews scattered about various editions available on Amazon.

Often a reviewer will say the book is "boring" and "stupid" then give it a one-star rating. Some reviewers go on to recommend some outrageous alternative (like a video game) so I am not sure if all those reviewers are serious or not, but they do get a couple of things right -- it does get repetitive ("long and boring"?) and some of the characters do some very stupid things (like blindly promising to grant anyone pretty much whatever they ask for before knowing what it will be).

But all that has a purpose. It eases you into accepting and joining that reality -- falling in love with that imaginary time and place. The story starts with light hearted and humorous episodes -- good deeds are done, victories are won, valor is rewarded, romances consummated (or not) -- but as you go through the "boring" parts it slowly gets darker and darker. When it all comes to its (by then) inevitable end it really means something to you. Just where did things go wrong? Where is Merlin when you need him?

"HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE"
("Shame be to him who thinks evil of it")

Modernized Malory
This 1962 translation of Sir Thomas Malory's account of the King Arthur legend has many things to recommend it. Robert Graves, a historical novelist of just renown, writes an introduction telling us about Malory's life, the good, the bad and the ugly. We get the benefit of Graves' scholarship as well as his authorly insight. Malory, born a gentleman, was a Member of Parliament for Warwickshire in 1445, but he turned rogue and robber five years later and was imprisoned in Newgate.There he languished, wrote this collection of tales about King Arthur and there he died.

The text is a pleasure to read.Keith Baines has walked a narrow line with razor sharp accuracy.He gives us the action in clear, crisp language that contains no jarring anachronisms.This is important because the ornamental nature of Malory's fifteenth century prose is a two-edged sword.Despite the beauty of the prose, it's heavy going for a modern reader.

The importance of Sir Thomas Malory's work can hardly be overstated.Writing in the fifteenth century, he still had access to earlier works and oral legends that have been lost to later ages.In Malory's work, the legend of Arthur becomes codified into the romantic love triangle of king-queen-leading knight that still inspires a diverse collection of writers.Every era sees a definitive retelling of this story changing the emphasis and details to make King Arthur forever young.

I love this edition and it grieves me to see that it is out of print and has become a rarity. Some copyright hindrance must be the issue as this book does not lack in excellence.

A great story beautifully told
From beginning to end, this story braces the imagination, and takes one to a place and time where faith, honor, and courage were central.You just may find yourself admiring and beginning to love some of the knights and damsels you're reading about.When I finished the book and put it on the shelf, it was a lot like saying good-bye to a friend.

What makes the book even better for a modern is that Mr. Matthews' edition has rendered it extremely readable, while still keeping the ancient flavor that helps put aside for a moment the outlook of the present century.And Ms. Ferguson's excellent drawings of various scenes, interspersed throughout, are further delights that help the mind paint its own pictures along the way.

It is said that Arthur's story is known throughout the world.That must be in part because the story is great; and this edition tells it very well.

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Product Description
First published in 1485, during England's War of the Roses, "Le Morte d'Arthur" or "The Death of Arthur" combines all of the known legends of King Arthur into one creative text. Beginning with the birth of Arthur and telling the tale of his rise to become the head of the Knights of the Round Table and the husband of Guinevere, we also learn of Lancelot, Arthur's most venerated knight. Many of the other knights' stories are told with varying degrees of respect for the code of chivalry they are to abide by, including the quest for the Holy Grail. The decline of the Round Table is brought about by opposing forces within, of which the adulterous affair of Guinevere and Lancelot plays a destructive role. Treachery reveals this forbidden passion to Arthur, and his revenge leads to his death. This comprehensive telling of Arthurian legend reflects both medieval chivalry and the fractious social unrest characteristic of Malory's time, of which he was literally a prisoner, in a work that is both monumental and enduring. ... Read more

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The text is unabridged, with original spelling and extensive, easy-to-use marginal glosses and footnotes. No other edition accurately represents the actual (and likely authorial) divisions of the text as attested to by its two surviving witnesses—Caxton's 1485 print and, especially, the famous Winchester Manuscript. The Winchester Manuscript is now generally agreed to be the more authentic of the two surviving manuscripts. The Norton Critical Edition is the first edition of Malory to recover important elements of this manuscript: paragraphing, marginal annotations, hierarchies of narrative division as signaled by size and decorative intricacy of initial capitals and font changes. The Norton Critical Edition also represents, in black-letter font, the striking rubrication of proper names in the Winchester Manuscript, reconstructing for readers something of an authentic medieval reading experience, one which gives visual support to Malory's extraordinary representation, in character and setting, of a chivalric ideal. No other student edition of Malory contains such extensive contextual and critical support.

About the series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Le Morte Darthur
Great copy of the book. No marking or folded corners. Arrived in a timely manner.

Le Morte D'Arthur
Very handy and well done edition of the classic Arthurian legends.This book is not for the feint at heart as it is written in old english, but once you get through that roadblock there is a power to the tales that starts to shine through.

A new definitive edition.
The Norton Critical Edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur edited by Stephen H. A. Shepherd partly replaces Eugène Vinaver's The Works of Sir Thomas Malory and is in many ways a better effort.

This edition stands somewhere between a scholarly, critical edition and a popular edition. It is based mainly on the Winchester manucript with emendations and additions from Caxton's 14th century printed version. Abbreviations are expanded, major (but not minor) corrections of the text are noted, the obsolete characters thorn and yogh are replaced by modern letters, use of u and v, i and j follow modern usage. and word division, punctuation, and capitalization also edited to follow modern conventions, including use of quotation marks.

But otherwise spelling is not modernized, large capitals in the manuscript are indicated in the printed text by lombardic capitals of approximately the same relative size, paragraphing is mostly followed exactly (with even the // paragraph break marks being rendered by indentation followed by the symbol ¶) and further paragraphing without ¶ where other punctuation or capitalization anomalies indicate sectioning. Vinaver's edition became, eventually, notorious for ignoring the divisions given within the manuscript itself, an especially unfortunate defect since Vinaver's theories about Malory's composition supposedly depended on paying especially close attention to such matters.

In the mansucript, rubricating (that is, red lettering) was employed in scribing almost all personal names as well as on some other names and in marginal notes and is here represented by a black-letter font. One quickly becomes used to this odd convention which actually eases and clarifies reading to the point that one wonders why something like it should not be universally adopted.

And, most pleasantly for a modern book, the notes appear as true footnotes, not endnotes, which means no constant turning of pages.

The text itself is followed by over 200 pages of related source material and reprinted essays, followed by a glossary, a selected guide to proper names, and a bibliography, but, rather oddly, no index.

For any general reader willing to encounter fifteenth century spelling on its own terms and to delight in it, this is probably the best edition to own and use, one which brings the user closer to the Winchester manuscript than any previous edition.

As to the tale itself, Malory himself sometimes seems bored and unitenested in his material, especially in the massive maze of subsidiary episodes that make up his Tristram material. But at his best there is no writer in English who campares with him. Readers having difficulty with the early sections of any edition of Malory's Le Morte Darthur might try jumping to "The Tale of Sir Launcelot and Quene Gwenyvere" (Book XVIII in Caxton's edition) and start at that point, where a mature Malory in control of this story tells it better than anyone before or after. ... Read more

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The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves. ... Read more

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This book an EXACT reproduction of the original book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Caxton's Malory is the first scholarly edition since the nineteenth century of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Mort D'Arthur as it was printed by William Caxton in 1485. The first volume contains Caxton's text, illustrated with twenty-one beautiful woodcuts from William Copland's edition of 1557. The second volume contains the extensive critical apparatus. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Solid Scholarship
As the long title suggests this is a scholarly edition of Malory's classic story of King Arthur and his knights. As such, it forms a counter-balance to the edition edited by Vinaver and Field which is based on the Winchester manuscript. Even though I tend to prefer the Winchester manuscript's readings over the Caxton edition's, I believe this is an excellent edition of the Caxton. No Arthurian library is really complete without it.

The definative Le Morte Darthur
Obviously if you are looking at this book you have more than just a mere passing interest in King Arthur and Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte Darthur. This edition makes available the origional text with the origionalorthography adding only modern punctuation and paragraphing to facilitatereading. The book contains two volumes the first contains the actual text.The second contains some notes showing variations in the various textualversions of Le Morte Darthur as well as a glossery of middle-englishvocabulary. The book can be used by the novice and the scholar alike. Whilethe versions translated into a more modern english are fantastic there isno substitute for the flavour of the origional. As Robert Frostsaid,"poetry is what is lost in translation." ... Read more

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Malory's stories of King Arthur and the Round Table have been widely read for centuries, but their author's own life has been as variously reported as that of any Arthurian knight. The first serious attempts to identify him were made in the 1890s, but the man who then seemed most likely to have written the book was later found to have been accused of attempted murder, rape, extortion, and sacrilegious robbery and to have spent ten years or more in prison. Could this be reconciled with the authorship of the most famous chivalric romance in English? Other candidates for authorship were proposed but there was little consensus. This book gives the most comprehensive consideration of the competing arguments yet undertaken. It is a fascinating piece of detective work followed by a full account of the life of the man identified as theMalory. Close consideration of individual documents, many of which were entirely unknown in 1966, when the last book on Malory's life appeared, makes possible a fuller and more convincing story than has ever been told before. ... Read more

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This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more

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General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1880Original Publisher: ScribnerNotes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free.Excerpt: CHAPTER VIII.How Sir Launcelot Slew Two Giants, And Made A Castle Free.SO on the third day he rode over a long bridge, and there started upon him suddenly a passing foul churl, and he smote his horse on the nose that he turned about, and asked him why he rode over that bridge without his license."Why should I not ride this way?" said Sir Launcelot. " I may not ride beside.""Thou shalt not choose," said the churl, and lashed at him with a great club shod with iron. Then Sir Launcelot drew a sword, and put the stroke aback, and clave his head unto the breast. At the end of the bridge was a fair village, and all the people men and women cried on Sir Launcelot, and said, " A worse deed didst thou never for thyself, for thou hast slain the chief porter of our castle."Sir Launcelot let them say what they would, and straight he went into the castle; and when he came into the castle he alighted, and tied his horse to a ring on the wall; and there he saw a fair green court, and thither he dressed himself, for there him thought was a fair place to fight in. So he looked about, and saw much people in doors and windows, that said, "Fair knight, thou art unhappy."Anon withal came there upon him two great giantsv well armed all save the heads, with two horrible clubs in their hands. Sir Launcelot put his shield afore him, and put the stroke away of the one giant, and with his sword he clave his head asunder. When his fellow saw that, he ran away as he were wood [crazy], for fear of the horrible strokes, and Sir Launcelot after him with all his might, and smote him on the shou... ... Read more

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Fiction. Folk Tales. Medieval Studies. Dorsey Armstrong provides a new, Modern English translation of the MORTE DARTHUR that portrays the holistic and comprehensive unity of the text as a whole, as suggested by the structure of Caxton's print, but that is based primarily on the Winchester Manuscript, which offers the most complete and accurate version of Malory's narrative. This translation makes one of the most compelling and important texts in the Arthurian tradition easily accessible to everyone--from high school students to Arthurian scholars. In addition to the complete text, Armstrong includes an introduction that discusses Malory's sources and the long-running debate surrounding the manuscript and print versions of the narrative. For ease of use, the text is keyed to both William Caxton's print version and the manuscript version edited by Eugene Vinaver. A detailed index is also included. ... Read more

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This is a revised and fully annotated edition of the most dramatic part of the most famous story of the Arthurian legend, fully edited and in the original spelling to bring it as close as possible to the medieval original. ... Read more