The Two English Mortes

Two anonymous fourteenth-century poems gave English its Arthurian ending before Malory, and he built his final tales directly on both. The Alliterative Morte Arthure (c. 1400, preserved by the Lincoln scribe Robert Thornton) is heroic epic in the old long line: Arthur as conquering emperor, answering Rome's demand for tribute with invasion, fighting the giant of Mont-Saint-Michel in the poem's most savage set-piece — and then, at the summit, dreaming of Fortune's wheel: the Nine Worthies clinging to it, six fallen kings naming their ruin, and the goddess whirling him under. "Thou has lived in delight and lordships enough," she tells him. The poem's war-realism (its battle-wounds read like a surgeon's notes) and its moral audit of conquest — the philosopher's interpretation of the dream indicts Arthur's own wars — make it the tradition's sternest political text. Malory's Roman-war tale is this poem turned to prose.

The Stanzaic Morte Arthur (c. 1350) works the opposite register: eight-line rhymed stanzas, ballad-swift, compressing the French Mort Artu (Unit 22) to its emotional skeleton — the maid of Ascolot, the queen's condemnation, the rescue, the last battle, and two scenes the English tradition made its own: the adder that flashes at the parley and triggers the battle nobody chose, and the final meeting of Lancelot and the nun-queen, renouncing each other for God in plain, devastating stanzas. Malory's last two tales follow the Stanzaic poem closely — sometimes phrase by phrase — and comparing the three (French prose, English stanzas, Malory) is the best training this path offers in what style is: the same events, three temperatures, three verdicts on the same ruin.