Chapter 2

From this point in its history that sturdy ancient English oak, the
original story of Arthur and his knights, an account mainly of warlike
adventures, sent forth four new branches that have now become part and
parcel of the parent legend. These four branches are the story of
Merlin, the story of Lancelot, the story of the Holy Grail, and the
story of Tristram and Iseult. Some of the writers who came after
Chrétien took one of these stories, some another, each enlarging his
theme according to his own taste, until each story was the center of a
large number of new and romantic offshoots. Practically all of them,
however, were bound together by the thread that led from the court of
the great King Arthur at Camelot.

The story of Merlin, that man of magic, is the least important of the
four branches, though Merlin is still an intensely interesting figure in
the story of Arthur that we read to-day. The story of Lancelot was to
prove very important; starting as a romance that had very little
connection with Arthur, it became with Malory and Tennyson the real
center of interest of the plot. The story of the Holy Grail proved
almost equally important. In the earliest accounts of this Perceval was
the knight chosen above all others to reach the Grail Castle, but
Perceval was too rough and worldly a knight to suit the taste of the
monks who wrote out the legends and so they created Galahad to take his
place as their own ideal of perfection. And into these adventures are
woven some of the tales of Sir Gawain, among them the delightful story
of Gawain and the Little Maid with the Narrow Sleeves. To the legend of
Perceval, Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Bavarian, added the story of the son
of Perceval, or Parzival, as he calls him, the story of Lohengrin, the
famous Swan-knight. Tristram and Iseult, the fourth of the branches,
though less connected with Arthur than either Lancelot or the Holy
Grail, became immensely popular with poets and remancers because of its
great love story, and is to be found told again and again in widely
varying forms all through the Middle Ages.

So we have seen that a British chieftain, winning a great battle in the
year 500, became in time celebrated throughout Europe as the greatest
king of romance. So far it was mainly the French who had made him
famous. Layamon, an English priest, had written a poem in English
concerning Arthur shortly after 1200, and told of the founding of the
Round Table, but it was to be a considerable time yet before any English
writer was to attempt what the French had already done. Chaucer told
none of the Arthurian stories, though he placed the scene of his _Wife
of Bath’s Tale_ at King Arthur’s court. An unknown English poet wrote
_Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight_ somewhere between 1350 and 1375. It
is not until we come to the _Morte Darthur_ of Sir Thomas Malory,
finished in 1469 or 1470, that we reach the next great step in the
history of the legends since the time of Chrétien de Troies. But in
Malory’s story Arthur steps forth resplendent, the kingly figure that we
have to-day.

Little is known concerning Sir Thomas Malory. He seems to have been a
knight and country gentleman of Warwickshire, a member of Parliament in
the reign of Henry VI, and later a soldier on the side of Lancaster in
the Wars of the Roses. As a result of the victory of the party of York
he had to retire from public life when Edward IV came to the throne, and
lived quietly at his Warwickshire estate. He was familiar with life at
court and with men-at-arms and he knew how popular the stories of King
Arthur were becoming in England. So, being a man of education, he set to
work to make a collection of the legends, using as his chief sources the
French romances.

Malory showed considerable originality in carrying out his plan. He made
Arthur the central figure, taking the story of Merlin as an introduction
to the birth of Arthur, instead of as a separate legend, and ending his
account soon after the death of the king. He omitted a number of the
older legends that had little to do with Arthur, many of them good
stories, such as that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He made the
England of his Arthur something like the England he knew, and his people
became real and living instead of fanciful figures out of a far-distant
past. His descriptions are vivid and lively and his style so engaging
that his work of the fifteenth century is much read to-day. Three
characters stand out from all the rest, Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere,
and these three became in all stories and poems subsequent to Malory’s
time the main figures of the legends.

Matthew Arnold attributed to Homer three great epic traits, swiftness,
simplicity, and nobility. It is these three characteristics that have
made the _Morte Darthur_ so deservedly famous.

With the printing of Malory’s book by the first English printer, William
Caxton, in 1485, we come to the end of the Middle Ages in literature.
Manuscripts written out laboriously by monks and clerks were now to
give way to the printed page. The age of Elizabeth was less than a
century away, one of the golden ages of the poets. Yet few of the
Elizabethans touched on the story of Arthur. The main exception was
Edmund Spenser, who made Prince Arthur the hero of his great poem _The
Faerie Queene_, but Spenser’s Arthur and his knights and ladies have
little in common with the figures in the old romances.