Michelle R. reviewed on 11/14/2007 + 25 more book reviews

These are all the Arthurian tales that you would have heard or read in childhood. Unfortunately, the tales that modernity recognizes were first condensed in Malory's Le Morte. Malory used the Norman French revisions of the original Brittano-Celtic myths, a process which turned the Arthurian legends into Norman propaganda and devalued the native Britons. If you want to know why by the time that "Idylls of the King" was written, Gawain was the scum of the earth instead of the flower of British knighthood, which he had been (see "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and the Welsh legends to find a very different perspective), look here and in "The Death of King Arthur."

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