Other editions of book LE MORTE D'ARTHUR, Volume One

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Le Morte D'Arthur is a reworking of traditional tales by Sir Thomas Malory about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table. Malory interprets existing French and English stories about these figures and adds original material (e.g., the Gareth story). Le Morte d'Arthur was first published in 1485 by William Caxton, and is today perhaps one of the best-known work of Arthurian literature in English. Many modern Arthurian writers have used Malory as their principal source, including T. H. White in his popular The Once and Future King and Tennyson in The Idylls of the King.The exact identity of the author of Le Morte D'Arthur has long been the subject of speculation, owing to the fact that a number of minor historical figures bore the name of "Sir Thomas Malory", but scholarship has increasingly supported the notion that the author was the Thomas Malory who was born in the year 1416, to Sir John Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire. Sir Thomas inherited the family estate in 1434 after his father died and is believed to have engaged in a life of crime punctuated with long periods of imprisonment. As early as 1433, he was seemingly indicted for theft and, in 1450, it was alleged that he was involved in an attempted murder of the Duke of Buckingham, robbery, rape, and an extortion scheme stemming from a cattle raid. Although in 1450 he was a member of Parliament. He was imprisoned in Coleshill but escaped and soon after robbed the Cistercian monastery. Malory was once again arrested in 1454, but two years later he was released through a royal pardon.

Excerpt from Le Morte Darthur, Vol. 1: TextThrough Earl Spencer's kind permission I was allowed the use, at the British Museum, of the Althorp copy. To ensure accuracy I copied it myself for the press, and I have read the proofs and revises with the original. Any one who has undertaken editorial work of this kind will appreciate the labour involved and the difficulties surmounted, and will be indulgent if here and there slight errors have been allowed to creep in. I soon found that the time at my disposal would only permit me to pass the text through the press, and I determined to devote myself entirely to this during my stay in England, and to leave the working up of the results of my study of the romance until later. I was strengthened in this determination by thinking that scholars would find it more convenient to have the text in one volume, as Caxton indeed gives it, and the whole of the editorial, index, and glossarial matter in another.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.