THE IDEALIZED WORLD OF MALORY'S "MORTE DARTHUR": A Study of the Elements of Myth, Allegory, and Symbolism in the Secular and Religious Milieux of Arthurian Romance by MURIEL A. I. WHITAKER A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA April, 1970 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree tha permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of Date 7 T ABSTRACT Towards the end of the Middle Ages, Sir Thomas Malory synthesized the diverse elements of British chronicle history, Celtic myth, French courtoisie, and Catholic theology which over a period of six hundred years or more had gathered about the legendary figure of King Arthur. Furthermore, Malory presented in definitive form the kind of idealized milieu that later writers in English came to regard as romantic. Malory's Morte Darthur presents dramatically the activities of a mythic aristocratic society living in a golden age. It preserves the "history" of a British king who defeats the Emperor of Rome and establishes an empire stretching from Ireland and Scandinavia to the Eastern Mediterranean. It portrays the adventures of heroic knights whose prowess is inspired by idealized ladies and whose achievements are helped or hindered by such super• natural agents as fays, magicians, giants, dwarfs, angels and devils. The actions of the knights conform to a ritualistic pattern of quest and combat determined by stereotyped chivalric conventions and performed in a symbol-studded environment. Colours, numbers, costumes, metals, arms, armour, and horses have symbolic significances which may be hierarchic, emotive or moral. Castles and perilous forests represent the antithetical values of security and danger, peace and combat, civilization and primitivism, love and hate. In this antipodal environment occur encounters which often adumbrate a struggle between forces of good and forces of evil. In the religious milieu of the Grail quest, elements of the secular milieu are adopted for the purpose of expressing truths of ii Catholic faith and morality. The Grail Knight's search for Corbenic is an allegory of the soul's search for God. Arms and armour, dress and colours, animals and plants have symbolic significances drawn from Biblical exegesis and Christian art. The unifying element in the historical, romantic and religious milieux is the quest motif; it is the means by which the ideals of the Malorian world are revealed. The historical quest for the crown of Rome shows Malory's view of sovereignty and the ideal of the good king. The romantic quest for fame and fair ladies shows his view df chivalry and the ideal of the good knight. The spiritual quest for the Holy Grail shows his view of religion and the ideal of the good Christian. It is a measure of Malory's art that the wishfulfilling dream world of romance projects an illusion of reality. I wish to express my thanks to all those who so valiantly assisted on the preparation of this thesis; in particular to Professor ¥. M. Thompson of the Department of English and to Professor Richard Holdaway of the De• partment of French at the University of British Columbia. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Introduction 1 I The Historical Quest: The Road to Rome... 9 II The Romantic Quest: Castles and Perilous Forests 43 III The Romantic Quest: The Journey to the Centre 87 IV The Religious Quest: The Way of Salvation 143 Conclusion 205 Bibliography 217 Appendix A Medieval Views of Time and History 236 Appendix B Medieval Views of Place 257 Abbreviations Commonly Used in Documentation Works — The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver. ALMA — Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R.S. Loomis HRB — Geoffrey of Monmouth,.Historia Regum Britanniae, ed. Acton Griscom.. M.A. — alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Edmund Brock. Sommer — The Vulgate Version of Arthurian Romance, ed. H.O. Sommer. INTRODUCTION Malorian scholarship, which received much of its initial stimulus from the publication of H. Oskar Sommer's Le Morte Darthur (London, l889-9l)? gained fresh impetus from Eugene Vinaver's 19^7 edition of the manuscript discovered thirteen years earlier in the Fellows' Library of Winchester College. Yet, as J. A. W. Bennett, the editor of Essays on Malory (Oxford, 1963) points out, "'a large field is yet left unto sharper discerners.'" The collaborative history edited by R. S. Loomis, Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (.Ox• ford, 1959)» indicates that studies of literary sources and analogues continue to occupy the paramount position in Arthu• rian scholarship. The number of books devoted exclusively to Malory is not large. G. L. Kittredge's Who Was Sir Thomas Malory? (Bos• ton, 1897), E. K. Chambers' Sir Thomas Malory (London, 1922) and Edward Hicks 1 Sir Thomas Malory^His Turbulent Career: A Biography (Cambridge, 1928), have concentrated on biography. More recently, William Matthews' The Ill-Framed Knight (Berke• ley and Los Angeles, 1966) has proposed that the author of the Morte Darthur was a Yorkshire Malory rather than the War• wickshire "felon" who is generally considered to be the "knight—prisoner" of the Winchester manuscript. In the area of interpretation, Vida D. Scudder's Le Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory: A Study of the Book and Its Sources (London and New York, 1921) fleetingly mentions 1 2 archetypal material but its emphasis is on literary sources; the author concludes that although Arthur's knights occasion• ally display "disconcerting fairy habits," yet in the main "they and the life they share reflect with extraordinary ac• curacy the varied aspects, material and psycholQgycaifolofion- temporary Europe (p.8)." Eugene Vinaver, too, in his Malory (Oxford, 1929) suggests that the author is concerned with contemporary reality and that he substitutes for the remote idealism of the French romantic writers "the philosophy of a practical and righteous fifteenth-century gentleman (p.109)-" Vinaver's conclusion that "it is not Malory who can lead us back to the enchanted realm of Arthur and Lancelot" repre• sents a position contrary to that taken in this dissertation. In an effort to disprove Vinaver's contention that Malory wrote eight separate books, a number of scholars have contributed essays to Malory's Originality, editor R. M. Lumi- ansky (Baltimore, 1964). These deal with the theme, struc• ture and characterization of the Morte Darthur in relation to its sources. In addition to considering the problem of unity, Charles Moorman's The Book of King Arthur (Lexington, I965) is concerned with the themes of love, religion, and chivalry. However, Moorman's emphasis on the failures of the Round Table distorts the Malorian vision and contradicts the view that Malory is presenting an ideal world. Another critic, Edmund Reissi describes his Sir Thomas Malory (New York, 1966) as a "full-length, unified critical examination of Malory's work, emphasizing the artistic and thematic relationships"; Reiss purposely excludes any examination of "the backgrounds 3 of Arthurian romance." There is a considerable body of periodical material devoted to Malory, much of it listed in Vinaver's bibliog• raphy (Works I, cxxxii—cxlii). Additional titles may be gleaned from the Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society, edited by Lewis Thorpe. So far as can be ascertained, no one has analysed extensively the elements of myth, allegory, and symbolism in Malory's work or shown how they are related to the projection of an idealized world. Several critical works have provided suggestions for the approach which I have taken. Rosamund Tuve's Allegorical Imagery (Princeton, 1966), a study of some medieval sources of sixteenth-century allegory, elucidates the philosophical and aesthetic bases of allegorical romance. Her chapter on "Romances" is often pertinent to Malory though it is directed primarily toward Spenser's Faerie Queene. Angus Fletcher's Allegory (Ithaca, 1964) shows the relationship between the allegorical mode of expression and ritualistic patterns of structure such as the progress and the battle. The work is eclectic and does not focus on the medieval period in particu• lar. Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (New York, 1966) proposes that myth is the archetypal source of romance and designates the quest as its basic motif. His analysis of apocalyptic, demonic, and analogical imagery is relevant to Arthurian material but he seldom cites examples drawn from medieval works. The bases of the Galfridian myth of Arthur as conti• nental conqueror have been discussed by R. H. Fletcher in The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles, second edition (New York, 1966), R. W. Hanning in The Vision of History in Early Britain (New York and London, 1966) and J. S- P. Tatlock in The Legend• ary History of Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950). None of them sees Arthur's journey as a quest. On the contrary, Hanning finds that the Wheel of Fortune metaphor controls the vision of history in Geoffrey's work while Tatlock cites the legends of Alexander as providing an important precedent for the imperialistic theme. Many scholars have found in Celtic mythology the sources of Arthurian marvels, both secular and religious. Lucy A. Paton's Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance, second edition (New York, i960), H. R. Patch's The Other World According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1950) and R.