Le Morte d’Arthur HELP!!!!?

Question

In Le Morte d’Arthur I chose the overall theme of honor, romance, and revenge.

And i got stuck, what are some examples from the storys that ties in those themes. I know there in there i just have writers block.

please help me with examples!!!

Thanks

Answer 1

     I should have thought that honour and loyalty would be closer to the mark.  And of course Sir Bedevere's dread of Arthur's eventual death.  He feels that when he actually throws Excalibur back into the lake, everything's finished.  It's where Arthur speaks that magnificent line

                     "Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."

     In other words, his reign has been so good and just, that people have tended to become complacent and soft. It shows that a good custom can be just as damaging as a bad custom.  Tennyson's wisdom shone through splendidly there, I thought.

     Hope this is of some help,

Good Luck,

Mike B.

Answer 2

Arthur doesn't refer to “one good custom' in any Arthurian story before Tennyson’s “Idyls of the King”.

That’s one problem with Arthurian tales: people read one version and assume that what they find it it is in almost all Arthurian tales. Arthurian tales were written by different people with different views on life, and don’t have a consistent theme. And tales written with one viewpoint are then retold by someone with a different viewpoint, but not fully revised to take account of the different viewpoint.

The authors who first told of the love affair between Lancelot and Guenevere probably had quite different ideas than whoever was responsible for the story of Lancelot's repentance during the Grail Quest. Chrétien de Troyes, one of the first authors of Arthurian romances whose work has survived delighted in stories of marital difficulties between knights and their wives, which was not much followed up on by later authors, except when adultery or murder was the issue.

I rather doubt that Malory would have known that he was supposed to have an overall theme. He was retelling Arthurian tales because they sometimes moved him, and may never have thought to ask why.

Vengeance is sometimes a theme, especially when Gawain is involved. But the whole story of the feud between the sons of Lot and the sons of Pellinor leads nowhere, almost in realistic fashion. Gaheris even beheads his own mother, and nothing comes of it.  (In Malory's sources it is the brother who corresponds to Gareth who beheads his own mother.) Malory makes a murderer of Lancelot in Book X, chapter 6, but most readers have probably forgotten by then that the knight who spoke so rudely of Arthur’s court had slain some who defended its honor. Probably Malory had forgotten also, or he would not have identified this mysterious knight with Lancelot here. In Malory’s source, the “Prose Tristan”, the knight is never explained.

Of course, we can ignore such things as an obviously unintended flaw.

But an oddity is that the later prose romances, from which most of Malory’s material comes, seems rather anti-chivalric, whether it is because those who wrote the tales had seen some of what real knighthood could become, or because they simply hadn’t much moral interest.

What Malory often adds, as against his sources, is an increased emphasis on fellowship and a strong belief in the worth of what Malory calls “the order of knighthood'' far more often than his sources. Lavaine speaks of his own “'love” for Lancelot as a person, something that the sources never get into. And there is not the slightest suggestion in the sources that Arthur had a “deeming” about the affair between Lancelot and Guenevere. Indeed, when he finds out, he goes mad with rage, as Arthur once did before when he believed (wrongly) that the Guenevere he had married was not his true betrothed, but her evil half-sister who looked almost exactly like her. In each case he was determined to kill Guenevere, over any protests by the court, not by any “custom” as Malory would have it, but because he wanted to.

Whereas his sources simply seem to be telling a story that they know, Malory seems to be telling a story about people he respects, even if he doesn't always like them. That’s one of the things that has made Malory’s version work, not the themes, whatever they may be, that are also in his sources.