Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Vol. 1: A Modernized Version of the "Morte Darthur"
The ballads and romances in which the King Arthur of mediaeval story figures as the hero, would scarcely prove pleasant and profitable reading to us now, however greatly they delighted our ances tors. They are marked by a coarseness and crudity which would be but little to our taste. Nor have we anything of modern growth to replace them. Milton entertained a purpose of making King Arthur the hero of an epic poem, but fortunately yielded it for the nobler task of Paradise Lost. Spenser gives this hero a minor place in his Pairie Queen. Dryden projected a King Arthur epic, but failed to write, it. Recently Bulwer has given us a cumbersome King Arthur, which nobody reads; and Tennyson has handled the subject bril liantly in his Idyls of the King, splendid suc cesses as poems vet too infiltrated with the spirit of modernism to be acceptable as a reproduction of the Arthur of romance. For a true rehabilita tion of this hero of the age of chivalry we must go to the Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory, a writer of the fifteenth century, who lived when men still wore armor, and so near to the actual age of chivalry as to be in full sympathy with the spirit of its fiction, and its pervading love of adven ture and belief in the magical.
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