16. Sir Thomas Malory: life and creative activity (1405-1471)

Although several Englishmen named Thomas Malory lived during the 1400s, most evidence suggests that the writer Sir Thomas Malory was the same hot-blooded Thomas Malory who had represented Warwikshire in Parliament in 1455. Those were troubled times, and the Member of Parliament had found himself supporting the wrong side – the Lancasters - in the war to determine(определение) which family would rule England, the War of the Roses. Charged with various crimes, he spent much of his later life in jail. He may have been a political prisoner rather than an actual perpetrator, but he nevertheless died in jail. It was in there that the ‘knyght presoner’, as the author called himself, composed the great English prose work that related the heroic adventuries of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Mallory’s account of the legend is a reworking from English, French, and Latin sources. In this narrative Malory translated and gave order to that diverse (разнообразный) body of Arthurian romance that had grown up in England and France since Anglo-Saxon times. William Caxton, the first English printer, published Malory’s work in 1485 as Le Morte d’Arthur, French for ‘The Death of Arthur’

Did King Arthur really exist? When the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain in the fifth century, they pushed the inhabitants of that island northward into present-day Scotland and westward into Ireland and Wales. Those older, displaced inhabitants were the Celts. Arthur was presumably (вероятно) a sixth-century chieftain (вождь) of one of those Celtic tribes, fighting from Wale against the invading Germanic tribes. Hundreeds of years later, that primitive chieftain caught the imagination of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the non-religious literature of the Middle Ages from the twelfth century onward – on the European continent even more than in England itself – was filled with the tales of King Arthur, around whom the medieval ideal of chivalry flourished. Malory, it would seem, wanted to recapture the Arthurian romantic ideals that his age was already losing, for as he wrote, knighthood was coming to an end.

17. Medieval English storytelling: simile, metaphor, epithet