For centuries, chroniclers, poets, storytellers, scribes and printers, court-writers and lay-writers have been praising the noble acts of King Arthur. Recently, however, literary critics have been sceptical of these praises and have gone so far as to suggest that the tradition of praise associated with King Arthur is deeply ironic. Using Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur as a point of departure, this short study places classical, mediaeval, and contemporary theories on memory in conversation with recent scholarship on the History of Emotions to suggest that the tragic form of Malory’s narrative helps to reinforce the earlier tradition of celebrating Arthur’s favourable kingship.
After becoming king and establishing his power at home and abroad in the first part of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, the final tale (of eight), the ‘Morte Arthure’ proper or the ‘Tale of the Death of Arthur,’ charts the collapse of King Arthur’s achievements and concludes with Arthur’s death, Guenevere’s death, and the deaths of the few remaining Round Table knights. Although Wilfred L. Guerin argues that it is
the fall of an ideal society, […] a series of deaths and frustrations, caused on the one hand by a conflict of often ironic, yet always supremely human, circumstances, and on the other by an inscrutable fortune or chance which man alone can never dominate (Guerin 1979, 233),
recent critics have argued that Arthur’s fall is a result of his selfish ambitions and that this makes Arthur both a tyrannical and unjust king (for example, Peck, Matthews, and Lexton). By examining the temporal and spatial settings of the final tale alongside its unusual and augmented linguistic register, this paper aims to show how Malory produces a tale that is at once familiar to and distanced from his contemporary audience. Although Malory’s clear references to the Battle of Towton—a battle that his contemporary audience would be very familiar with—heighten the realism and violent depth of his scenes, Malory employs a language that temporally distances the audience from the narrative. Consequently, amongst the realism presented in the final tale, Malory clearly gives the text a tone of pastness, which establishes that Arthur’s world is not the present world. Not unlike Old English poetry, this tone coalesces into an elegiac tone, or a longing for the things that are past, which emphasises the transience and uncertainty of the world. This juxtaposition of past memories with present realities is emotionally compelling to its audience and stirs up a sense of loss for the ideal kingdom with its ideal king. Hence, Malory’s linguistic style in the final tale works to establish that Arthur is a good king despite his choices during the wars of his tragic fall.
Although scholarship on cultural memory—the socially constructed and collective understanding of the past that is passed from one generation to the next—is relatively new, the philosophical study of memory extends back into the Classical period where Plato provides allegorical models to explore the workings of memory (Plato 1994). One such example is the metaphor of the soul as a slab of wax upon which memories are imprinted as if by a seal, with forgetting represented as the full or partial erasure of the image left by the imprint. In the Mediaeval period, thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Augustine of Hippo adapt Plato’s philosophical model to consider memory in terms of spatial and architectural terms: for example, Augustine describes the ‘spacious palace,’ ‘storehouse,’ and ‘immeasurable sanctuary of memory’ in terms of Christian interiority and the search for God (Ricoeur 2006, 98).
Most recently, modern scholars like Renate Lachmann have incorporated the study of memory into the literary world by claiming that ‘literature is culture’s memory [… and that] writing is both an act of memory and a new interpretation, by which every new text is etched into memory space’ (Lachmann 2008, 301). These old and new concepts of memory as ‘spaces’ from which images of past memories can be summoned to the present place, lie at the heart of memoria— ‘the mediaeval imaginative craft of recollection and memory’—which, as Jamie McKinstry argues, is a key aspect of Middle English romance (McKinstry 2015, 5). Moving onto an intertextual level, ‘as a sketched-out memory space’ (Lachmann 2008, 301), to borrow Lachmann’s phrase, Malory’s final tale connects its audience to the memory of a distant golden era through its use of language and its manipulation of emotion, asking us to reconsider the relationship between these foundational narratives and their broader contexts. With this basis, this paper now moves on to explore the spatial and temporal representations of memory in Malory’s final tale.
Living Memories
Sir Thomas Malory’s final tale is at once familiar to and distanced from his contemporary audience. Malory achieves familiarity in the re-telling of Arthur’s final battle by drawing on recent and familiar collective memories of war, yet augments this realism through his linguistic register—a tone of pastness—to separate Arthur’s world from the audience’s present realities. Malory builds the final battlespace by drawing on recent experiences from the Battle of Towton, a battle that was in living memory of Malory’s audience and a battle that is known as ‘probably the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil’ (Field 2000, 74). Although P. J. C. Field convincingly demonstrates that Arthur’s final battle is based on the corresponding episode in the Middle English stanzaic Le Morte Arthur and may draw on the stanzaic poem’s source, the French prose Mort Artu, which would have been known to Malory’s gentry audiences, he claims that ‘despite this clear literary derivation [...] Malory’s story has a surprising amount in common with the Battle of Towton’ (Ibid, 69).
In the final tale of the Morte, we can see parallels between Arthur’s battlefield and the Battle of Towton. For example, in the following passage, ‘and thus they fought all the longe day, and never stynted tylle the noble knyghtes were layde to the colde erthe’ (Malory 2013, 922.29–30), the ‘colde erthe’ (Ibid, 922.30) mirrors the extremely cold weather at Towton and the ‘longe day’ references Towton, which also lasted a whole day (Field 2000, 73). The realism is further enhanced in the way that Malory depicts this battle scene. For example, Malory inserts very visual elements into the narrative such as when ‘Sir Lucan felle in a sowne, that parte of hys guttis felle oute of hys body’ (Malory 2013, 924.31–32) as well as in the following passage when Arthur and Mordred fatally collide:
‘And whan Sir Mordred saw Kynge Arthur he ran untyll hym with hys swerde drawyn in hys honde; and there Kyng Arthur smote Sir Mordred undir the shylde, with a foyne of hys speare, thorowoute the body more than a fadom. And whan Sir Mordred felte that he had hys dethys wounde he threste hymselff with the myght that he had up to the burre of Kyng Arthure speare, and ryght so he smote hys fadir, Kynge Arthure, with hys swerde holdynge in both hys hondys, uppon the syde of the hede, that the swerde perced the helmet and the tay of the brayne. And therewith Mordred daysshed downe ded to the erthe.’ (Ibid, 923.31–924.5)
Although, as Field notes, information about the Battle of Towton was widely available following the battle, it appears that Malory did not read any of these accounts. Rather, Field suggests that ‘despite the confusing mixture with material from Malory’s sources, [the vivid imagery] appear[s] to provide pictures by a participant’ (Field 2000, 74). This is important because it shows that not only was the Battle of Towton still viscerally present in the memories of his audience, but that the memories of this event continue to live on emotively through the text. That is, through Arthur’s final battle, Malory provides an emotional bridge into the text by giving his audiences an account of what it felt like to take part in the bloodiest battle ever fought on British soil. The historical elements that Malory chooses to include from his own experiences with war also emphasise the greatness of Arthur’s fall and reveal how far Arthur is willing to go in order to save his polity and his kingdom.Therefore, by using elements from a battle that would be very familiar to Malory’s audience, he is able to construct a tangible war space as well as emphasise the brutality of war by using living memories, which works to make Arthur’s fall more colossal and more tragic.
Elegiac Memories
Whilst all of this draws on the audience’s recent collective memory, and therefore is important for making the scenes more visceral to Malory’s audience, amongst all of the realism the scene is characterised by an overall sense of pastness, which suggests that this viscerally tangible world is not the audience’s present world; it is something else. This pastness is achieved through Malory’s style of writing. A cursory glance over the Morte reveals that Malory, on the whole, employs a language that is unusual and archaic when compared to his contemporaries and his sources. This is because he chooses words that are Old English in origin as opposed to Latinate or French in origin. Malory’s decision to use a strong Old English vocabulary to establish his scenes means that his words are broadly associated with fifteenth-century everyday speech and this enables Malory to connect on a linguistic level with his audience. However, there is a connection, too, between Malory’s use of Old English derived words and the narrative register of the fifteenth-century chronicles that were circulating in the gentry society at this time. That is, Malory’s whole book reflects the discourse of his fifteenth-century gentry context.
Turning back to the final tale, again, Kenneth Tiller convincingly demonstrates that the tale as a whole is written in a more distinctively chronicle discourse than the regular prose of the previous tales, which, he suggests, aids in foreshadowing the collapse of the kingdom and in making that collapse more realistic (Tiller 2019). What is important here is that the heightened chronicle form of the last tale nods to a past, golden era of chivalry. In the mediaeval audience’s minds, Arthur’s ‘court’ symbolised the order and authority that Malory’s contemporary England desired and emulated to varying degrees. As McKinstry notes, Arthur’s mythical court was a ‘distillation of the great courts of Charlemagne, Rome, and even Troy; yet the journey into the darkness of a mythical past was illuminated by historical courts and figures which were more immediate in cultural memory, their reputations disseminated through historical chronicles’ (McKinstry 2015, 16). Therefore, Malory’s use of the chronicle form, especially and most prominently in the final tale, nods to a past, golden era and reminds the audience of something that is no longer there. This has the effect of giving the narrative an elegiac tone whereby the audience, although connected to the narrative through its realism, recognises that King Arthur’s world is not their world.
The chronicle form of the final tale, however, also looks towards the future as it acts as a repository carefully storing past and present events. This is important because as the text encodes the past, it also acts as a cultural object whereby his audience may learn something of their future. We see this engagement between past and present in how Malory frequently moves outside of the text to speak directly to his audience. For example, in this passage when he says, ‘Lo ye all Englysshemen … thus was the olde custom and usayges of thys londe, and men say that we of thys londe have nat yet loste that custom’ (Malory 2013, 916.34–917.5), he both reminds the audience of how things were in former days and at the same time warns them about the dangers of forgetting the past.
Future Memories
Whilst Malory clearly sets Arthur in the distant past through his style of writing, he also looks ahead temporally to shape how Arthur will be remembered in the future. Malory does this by drawing on the legendary Arthurian past of Britain and the ancient civilisations of the Classical world by numbering him with the Nine Worthies. The Nine Worthies are a grouping of chivalric heroes that have been well-established as iconographic and literary motifs since the fourteenth century. They represented an ordered view of the past and were subdivided into three groups: pagans, Jews, and Christians. As J. R. Goodman states, ‘a chivalric history of the world lies behind any reference to the Nine Worthies; under their sway the past becomes a succession of great chivalric movements’ (Goodman 1985, 266). Thus Malory and his source’s decision to place Arthur among the Nine Worthies reflects Arthur’s own heroic stature.
This is important because Malory appears to be presenting Arthur as a good king who is rewarded for fighting against the destruction of his kingdom. Although the Wheel of Fortune will inevitably turn, Arthur’s end is arguably better than it could be. For example, Malory’s Arthur does not die as the wicked Mordred does, amongst the thousands dead in the last battle; he is not attacked by grave robbers, nor is he buried in a mass grave as the rest would most certainly be (Field 2000, 70); his time in misfortune is temporally much shorter than his time spent in good fortune; and he is ultimately given a holy burial next to Guenevere, suggesting that Malory, as well as his knights, believe Arthur to be a good king. Just as Gawain is seen in his final moments memorialising the battle through the written word, Arthur is encoded into a memory space through Malory’s act of writing and through the audience’s present and future engagements with the text. These moments, therefore, show how Malory goes out of his way to shape Arthur as a good king in order to establish how Arthur will be remembered in the future.
To conclude, as McKinstry notes, the concept of memory pathways along which past experiences can be recollected into the present lies ‘at the heart of all mediaeval memoria’ (McKinstry 2015, 30). In romance, this allows the past to be ‘re-entered’ by the audience where it can be imaginatively re-constructed, uncovering new pathways into the future (Ibid, 30). In Arthur’s final moments, Malory invites his audience to re-enter the legendary Arthurian past at a particular moment surrounded by the contradictory contexts of the past, present, and future, which must be imaginatively reconciled. The sense of Arthur’s kingdom being both very realistic and very distant is important because the overall tone reflects ‘[t]he transience and uncertainty of the world, the memory of past good fortune, and of things lost’ (Ker 1908, 215).W. P. Ker specifically compares Beowulf to Malory’s Morte when he writes: ‘Beowulf is invaded by pathos in a way that often brings the old English verse very nearly to the tone of the great lament for Lancelot at the end of the Morte d’Arthur [sic]’ (Ibid). I would go further than this by adding that the pathos Ker observes invading both Beowulf and the Morte’s Lancelot can also be likened to the pathos that the audience experiences for Arthur. The presence of this heightened pathos towards Arthur, the existence of which I have attempted to demonstrate, works to establish that Arthur is indeed a good king despite his choices during the wars of his tragic fall.
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Madeleine Killacky is a doctoral candidate in Medieval Literature at Bangor University, Wales. Her research focuses on Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’ and 15th-century material culture.
Email: mdk19qfd@bangor.ac.uk
Twitter: @KillackyM
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