The French Book

I was going to make a post about Bernard Cornwell‘s Arthurian series, the Warlord Chronicles – which are indeed worthy of major reccing. I was going to talk about all the Arthurian texts I’ve read, from “Culhwch and Olwen“, up through Geoffrey and Malory to Tennyson and White, and mention how, despite all the classics, Cornwell’s is my favourite Arthur telling.

Which it totally is, and you should totally read it. But I digress.

I started leafing through Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Started remembering it – remembering the sheer, unadulterated crack.

So I think I’m going to recap it here, or at least attempt to. We’ll see how concentrated the crack actually is, and how much is my memory exaggerating. I’ll start at a chapter a week, posting on Sundays, and see how it goes.

My copy of the Morte is based on William Caxton’s printing, rather than the Winchester Manuscript. The spellings are largely modernized – “king” rather than “kynge”, and so on. It doesn’t go so far as to add quotation marks, though. A potentially-different edition can be read at the invaluable Internet Sacred Text Archive.

Let’s see how it goes.