Le Morte d'Arthur

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2013

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Thomas Malory's "Le Morte Darthur", the epic tale of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Sir Thomas Malory was a knight from Warwickshire, a respectable country gentleman and MP in the 1440s who later turned to a life of crime and spent various spells in prison. It was during Malory's final incarceration that he wrote "Le Morte Darthur", an epic work which was based primarily on French, but also some English, sources.

Malory died shortly after his release in 1470 and it was to be another fifteen years before "Le Morte Darthur" was published by William Caxton, to immediate popular acclaim. Although the book fell from favour in the seventeenth century, it was revived again in Victorian times and became an inspiration for the Pre-Raphaelite movement who were entranced by the chivalric and romantic world that Malory portrayed.

The Arthurian legend is one of the most enduring and popular in western literature and its characters - Sir Lancelot, Guinevere, Merlin and King Arthur himself, are as well-known today as they were then; and the book's themes - chivalry, betrayal, love and honour - remain as compelling.

With:

Helen Cooper Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge

Helen Fulton Professor of Medieval Literature and Head of Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York

Laura Ashe CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow at Worcester College at the University of Oxford

Producer: Natalia Fernandez.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time for more details about In Our Time
0:04.1	and for our terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk slash radio 4.
0:09.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:11.9	Hello, it was an age of chivalry and romance, a time when nights,
0:15.4	forts, dragons and saved damsels in distress or so it went in the romances of the day.
0:20.5	The legend of King Arthur on his nights of the round table has captured people's
0:24.0	imaginations since at least the 12th century, but it wasn't until the end of the 15th century
0:28.6	that the first prose account of the Arthurian tales appeared in English.
0:32.4	The author was St Thomas Mallory, a night errant, who wrote his version of the story entitled
0:37.2	Le Mord Arthur, in which he meant the death of Arthur in Middle-French, while it was
0:41.4	in prison, for plotting to overthrow the House of York.
0:44.8	But Mallory never lived to see his epic work in print.
0:47.6	It was 15 years after his death at William Caxton published a book to immediate popular
0:52.0	acclaim, a popularity that is scarcely waned with time and has been the inspiration for
0:56.4	writers, poets, artists and filmmakers ever since.
1:00.5	With me to discuss Mallory's more d'Arthur, our Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and
1:05.1	Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, Helen Fulton, Professor of Medieval Literature
1:10.4	and Head of the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York,
1:14.6	and Laura Ash, University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford.
1:19.7	Helen Cooper, can you give us some sense of what kind of place England was in the 15th
1:25.5	century, and Mallory was writing his book?
1:28.2	It was a pretty disturbed place.
	...

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