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Updated: June 23, 2025
As the Arthurian legends are one of the great recurring motives of English literature, Malory's work should be better known. His stories may be and should be told to every child as part of his literary inheritance. Then Malory may be read for his style and his English prose and his expression of the mediæval spirit.
Which of Malory's stories do you like best? Where did these stories originate? Have they any historical foundation? What two great elements did Malory combine in his work? What is the importance of his book to later English literature? Compare Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" and Malory's stories with regard to material, expression, and interest.
After the meeting between Sir Galahad and the queen, the book goes on to say that the king and all the estates went home to Camelot, and that as they sat at Supper, the Holy Grail appeared. Tennyson relates the vision almost in Malory's own words.
"O Balin! two bodies hast thou slain and one heart, and two hearts in one body, and two souls thou hast lost. And therewith she took the sword from her love that lay dead, and as she took it, she fell to the ground in a swoon." Malory's work, rather than Layamon's Brut, has been the storehouse to which later poets have turned. Many nineteenth-century poets are indebted to Malory.
In 1485 Caxton publishes Malory's selections from French and English sources, the whole being Tennyson's main source, Le Mort d'Arthur. Thus the Arthur stories, originally Celtic, originally a mass of semi-pagan legend, myth, and marchen, have been retold and rehandled by Norman, Englishman, and Frenchman, taking on new hues, expressing new ideals religious, chivalrous, and moral.
The first four Idylls of the King, 1859, with those since added, constitute, when taken together, an epic poem on the old story of King Arthur. Tennyson went to Malory's Morte Darthur for his material, but the outline of the first idyl, Enid, was taken from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Welsh Mabinogion. In the idyl of Guinevere Tennyson's genius reached its high-water mark.
In Malory's Morte d'Arthur there is the legend of the Sword of Assay. In the church against the high altar was a great stone, four-square, like unto a marble stone. In the midst of it was an anvil of steel, a foot high, and therein stood a naked sword by the point.
He does not appear to have gone deeply into the French and German "literature of the subject." Malory's compilation from French and English sources, with the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him as materials. The whole poem, enshrined in the memory of all lovers of verse, is richly studded, as the hilt of Excalibur, with classical memories.
Some months ago I found the passage which Tennyson seems to follow, in a cheap reprint of sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur then just out, and could not make sense of it. Yesterday I found here this long little book, evidently the edition from which the other was printed and printed correctly too.
In 1859 Tennyson published Lancelot and Elaine, one of a series of twelve Idylls, the last of which appeared in 1855. Tennyson relied mainly on Malory's Morte d'Arthur for the characters and the stories. These Idylls show the struggle to maintain noble ideals. Arthur relates how he collected He made his knights swear to uphold the ideals of his court
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