Malory III: The Day of Destiny

The final movement of Le Morte Darthur — "The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere" and "The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur" — is the summit of fifteenth-century English prose, and among the summits of English prose at all. Malory braids his French and English sources (Mort Artu, Stanzaic Morte) into a sequence of his own temper: the May passage, where the narrator steps forward to defend "vertuouse love" in the old way against the fickleness of the new; the poisoned apple and the maid of Astolat; the taking of the queen and the killing — unarmed, unrecognized in the press — of Gareth, whom Lancelot loved and had knighted; Gawain's grief hardening into the war neither Arthur nor Lancelot wants; Gawain's deathbed letter of forgiveness, written "with myne owne honde... wyth my harte-blood"; Mordred; the dream of the wheel and drowned Gawain's warning; and the adder that flashes at the parley — the accident that fires the battle after every cause has done its work. By nightfall on Salisbury Plain a hundred thousand lie dead, and the king who asks "where ar all my noble knyghtes becom?" has his answer around him.

Then the ending the language has kept ever since: Bedivere twice hiding Excalibur and twice lying ("I saw nothyng but wawis and wyndys"); the arm "clothed in whyght samyte" that catches and brandishes and vanishes; the barge of queens; "comfort thyselff... for in me ys no truste for to truste in"; the hermitage, the nun-queen's last refusal, Lancelot's death "with the swettest savour aboute hym"; and Ector's threnody over his brother — "thou were the curtest knyght that ever bare shelde" — prose built like liturgy. Over the grave Malory sets the epitaph he attributes to "many men": HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS — the once and future king — while carefully refusing, in his own voice, to certify the return: "rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff." Note the date of the whole: finished in prison, 1469–70, as the Round Table of Lancastrian England butchered itself at Towton and Barnet. The book is a war veteran's elegy for fellowship, and it knows exactly what it is mourning.