The Arthurian Legends Room :: Essays Papers

The Arthurian Legends RoomSir Thomas Malory was born around the year 1416 and was the tidings of a country gentleman. He was an MP and a justice of the peace for a period of time. However, in the 1440s he was found guilty of a serial publication of violent crimes, and he spent most of the 1450s in prison. By 1462, he was out of jail. Then, in 1468, he was charged with being involved in a plot against Edward IV, and he was sent to jail once again. It was during this later imprisonment that he finished Le Morte Darthur. Within a few months of finishing Le Morte Darthur, Malory was released from prison. He died soon after in 1471. Fourteen years later, in 1485, William Caxton printed an edited schoolbook and gave the work its name. Centuries later, in 1935, a hologram version of the text was found in the Winchester College library. Le Morte Darthur is an eight-book story about the legendary King Arthurs life. Malory borrowed from a number of earlier works including the French Vulgate cycle (Arthurian prose romances) from the thirteenth deoxycytidine monophosphate and Tristan, also French. Within the text itself, Malory often mentions the English books and French books from which he drew his story. Arthurian Romances tell the tale of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. These knights live by a code of chivalry with a duty to serve God and their king they strive to live a life of honesty and purity. In the modern font world, Camelot is often used to symbolize this ideal of honesty and purity. (from St. Martins Anthology of English Literature Volume I - The Middle Ages and The Norton Anthology of English Literature) Sir Gawain and the Green KnightThere is unfeignedly very little known about the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There is speculation that he wrote the three other poems that are part of the same manuscript as Gawain. They are Pearl, Patience, and Purity. The story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a combination of a number of separate plots that occur in folklore. These plots are the beheading crippled and the temptation.