A Certain Slant of Light

Bopping along in Le Morte d’Arthur! In book 3, we have Arthur and Guenever’s wedding… which is instantly interrupted when a hart is chased through the hall by a brachet, who is chased by a lady, who is kidnapped by a knight!

So Arthur pauses his wedding feast to send out three knights to follow three quests: the quest of the hart, the quest of the brachet, and the quest of the lady who has been kidnapped by a knight. The rest of the book is more or less about these quests, because Malory is basically not interested in women and couldn’t care less a) how Guenever feels about marrying Arthur, b) how Sir Tor’s mother the milkmaid feels about being raped by King Pellinore all those years ago (“half by force he had my maidenhead,” she notes, and everyone’s just like mmm yes that explains why your oldest son is so knightly…blood always tells), or c) why a lady might scream when kidnapped by some random knight. “When she was gone the king was glad, for she made such a noise,” Malory notes.

(By the way, the lady turns out to be Nimue, the new Lady of the Lake, as Balin beheaded the original Lady of the Lake in book 2. By the end of book 3, Nimue has imprisoned Merlin in a tree, because he just will not stop pestering her to have sex with him.)

I can see why this book spawned so many feminist retellings. There is simply a LOT to be picked over here.

The other continuing theme is Malory’s hateboner for Gawain, who kicks off the book yearning to murder King Pellinore in a blood feud, never mind the fact that it will ruin King Arthur’s wedding feast. (His brother Gaheris restrains him by pouting that if Gawain kills Pellinore now, before Gaheris is knighted, Gaheris won’t get to help!) On the quest of the hart, he cruelly refuses to grant a knight mercy after a knight yields to him, then accidentally cuts off a lady’s head when she dives in front of her lord to protect him with her body. Then he takes the beheaded lady back to Camelot and everyone scolds him for being the worst knight ever and Guenever tasks him to be the knight assigned to look after ladies forever more.

Aided and abetted by Malory Club (skygiants, genarti, and rymenhild; if anyone else wishes to join the Discord that could probably be arranged), I have begun to read Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur! As the vast tome is conveniently chopped into many books, I thought I would post about it as we finish each book.

(If you want to be au courant with these posts but don’t wish to join a discord, we are reading roughly two chapters a night.)

The pacing is breathtaking. In the first four chapters, we speedrun Uther’s war against the Duke of Tintagel to steal his wife the beauteous Ygraine (who already has three grown-up daughters who get married off in an aside at the end of a chapter), the birth of Uther and Ygraine’s son Arthur who is spirited away by Merlin, and the death of Uther.

Then we skip Arthur’s childhood directly to the incident where he pulls the sword from the stone, thus becoming king of Britain, not without a good deal of grumbling from the other kings of Britain, who make him draw the sword over and over again, until the common people declare “ENOUGH!”... and then many of the kings band together to fight Arthur, and most of the rest of book one is taken up with those battles, with occasional side quests like “And then Pellinore stole Arthur’s horse to chase the Questing Beast.”

At this point I’m familiar with most of these stories from retellings, which makes it extra fascinating to trace the threads that they drew on and how they changed those stories: Mary Stewart and T. H. White both vastly expanded Arthur’s childhood, while summarizing or even skipping over the later battles. (In a sense the battle scenes are the place where White comes closest to Malory, actually: there’s the same litany of “this happened and then this happened and then this happened,” except in Malory the things that happen are individual knights smiting and in White it’s the movement of battle formations.)

It’s also interesting to see which parts have not been drawn on. For instance! Sir Lucas the Butler! Never heard of him before.

I amused myself by envisioning Carson the Butler from Downton Abbey rushing onto the battlefield with a saucepan, but in fact medieval butlers were clearly persons of noble heritage and high social standing: Lucas the Butler is a full-blown knight who fights in battle alongside Sir Kay, both of them smiting people left and right.

I am glad that I’m reading this book alongside other people, because I would struggle with it if I were trying to tackle it on my own. It’s not so much the language (I’m reading the version of Gutenberg with modernized spellings) as the fact that is simply an entirely different reading experience than a modern novel. Lots of telling, very little showing, and not much interest in the characters’ interiority, which of course is what makes Malory such catnip for modern retellings: he drew the outlines and left all the modern novelists’ favorite parts out, to be colored in however the modern novelist desires.