Sir Thomas Malory

Life

Almost everything about the author of Le Morte d'Arthur is contested except his name. At the end of his book he tells us he is Sir Thomas Malory, a knight, that he completed the work "in the ninth year of the reign of King Edward the Fourth" (1469–70), and — in pleas scattered through the text — that he is a "knight prisoner" praying for deliverance. Several fifteenth-century Thomas Malorys have been proposed, including men from Papworth St Agnes in Huntingdonshire and Hutton Conyers in Yorkshire, but the candidate most historians accept is Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire.

If it was he, the author of the great English book of chivalry led a strikingly unchivalrous life. The Newbold Revel Malory, born perhaps around 1415–18 (some scholars argue a decade or more earlier), was knighted by 1441 and sat in Parliament, but from 1451 he was accused of a long list of offenses — among them an attempted ambush of the Duke of Buckingham, cattle raiding, extortion, theft from an abbey, and rape. He was never convicted on most of the charges, which some historians regard as politically motivated in a lawless, factional age. He nonetheless spent much of the 1450s in prisons including London's Marshalsea and Newgate, escaped at least twice, and appears to have been imprisoned again in the late 1460s as the Wars of the Roses turned against his allies. He died on 14 March 1471 and was buried at Greyfriars, near Newgate.

Work

Malory did not invent the Arthurian legend; he compressed it. His sources were chiefly the enormous thirteenth-century French prose romances known as the Vulgate Cycle and the Post-Vulgate, together with the English alliterative and stanzaic poems on the death of Arthur. From that tangled wood he cut a single path: Arthur's begetting and the sword drawn from the stone; the wars that establish his kingdom; the Round Table and its knights — Gawain, Tristram, Gareth, Lancelot; the quest for the Holy Grail, which only Galahad, Percival and Bors achieve; the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, which splits the fellowship; and the final battle with Mordred, the return of Excalibur to the lake, and Arthur carried away to Avalon.

His prose is plain, rhythmic and often devastating in its understatement, and he gives the old romances a new melancholy: an order of knighthood breaking apart under the weight of divided loyalties, written by a man living through a civil war. William Caxton printed the book at Westminster on 31 July 1485, titling it Le Morte Darthur and dividing it into 21 books. For four and a half centuries Caxton's edition was the only text. Then in 1934 Walter Oakeshott found a manuscript in the library of Winchester College; Eugène Vinaver's 1947 edition from it revealed that Malory had written eight distinct tales, which Caxton had edited and re-divided.

Legacy

Malory is the reason Arthurian Fantasy in English looks the way it does. Spenser drew on him for The Faerie Queene; Tennyson's Idylls of the King re-told him for the Victorians; T. H. White built The Once and Future King on him and has his young Arthur meet a page named Tom Malory on the eve of the last battle. John Boorman's Excalibur (1981) adapted him for the screen, with its famous armored, green-lit Camelot.

He is not on Gygax's Appendix N, but his knights rode straight into gaming. TSR's Deities & Demigods (1980) included a section of Arthurian heroes with game statistics for Arthur, Lancelot and Merlin. The fullest translation came from Greg Stafford, whose King Arthur Pendragon (Chaosium, 1985) made Malory's arc the structure of play: characters are knights who marry, age and die, and their heirs carry the campaign forward, a structure later editions and The Great Pendragon Campaign (2006) stretched across the whole reign of Arthur. Pendragon's Traits and Passions — Chaste versus Lustful, Loyalty (Lord), Amor — turned Malory's tragic divided loyalties into rules. Online, Mythic Entertainment's Dark Age of Camelot (2001) gave one of its three warring realms, Albion, to the knights and wizards of Arthur's Britain, setting it against realms drawn from Norse and Irish myth. (The older, wilder Welsh Arthur of The Mabinogion is a different figure; it is Malory's courtly king who dominates games.) Wherever a player draws a sword from a stone, Malory is somewhere behind the scene.