The Boy's King Arthur

Read the history of King Arthur as it was written in 1470 by Sir Thomas Malory. Arthurian legends predate the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and were recorded in various books by many scribes, but Malory consolidated them all into one source during the Wars of the Roses, and the resulting book La Morte d'Arthur was printed by the first English printer, William Caxton, in 1485.

This edition of the book preserves Lanier's original 1881 work, namely it includes his lengthy introduction explaining the historical provenance of the text, as well as nearly 100 pages of the story that later printings omitted. The text in this book is Malory's tale from 1470 reprinted word for word. Its spelling was updated by Lanier, who also includes explanations of words that have shifted meaning over the centuries along with modern equivalents.

You might ask whether the English of 1881 can still be considered modern and readable today, but all it takes is Lanier's introduction to show us that English from even 1470 and the 1100s is still readily comprehensible. He reproduces several lines of the Arthurian tales in both Old French and Middle English. The provided "translation" is frequently unnecessary, especially when he quotes Malory writing in the fifteenth century.

As Malory was writing shortly before the creation of the King James Bible, the sentence structure and reading level can be considered much the same.

From the 1881 edition:

Two famous books—The History of King Arthur, and the inexhaustible Chronicles of Froissart—have furnished nearly all those stories of chivalry and knightly adventure that are scattered through all literatures, and that have been the favorite reading of boyhood for hundreds of years. Boys of the last few generations, however,—even though the separate stories in some form will never die out,—have lost sight of the two great sources themselves, which were in danger of becoming utterly hidden under cumbrous texts and labored commentary.

Last year Mr. Sidney Lanier opened one of these sources again by the publication of his Boy's Froissart. He has now performed the same office for the noble old English of Sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; and under the title of The Boy's King Arthur, has given the Froissart a companion, which perhaps even surpasses it. However familiar the Arthurian heroes may be to him, as mere names encountered in poetry and scattered legends, not one boy in ten thousand will be prepared for the endless fascination of the great stories in their original shape, and vigor of language. He will have something of the feeling with which, at their first writing, as Mr. Lanier says in his preface "the fascinated world read of Sir Launcelot du Lake, of Queen Guenever, of Sir Tristram, of Queen Isolde, of Merlin, of Sir Gawaine, of the Lady of the Lake, of Sir Galahad, and of the wonderful search for the Holy Cup, called the 'Saint Graal.'"

The Boy's King Arthur, like the Froissart, will have Mr. Alfred Kappes's vigorous and admirable illustrations; and the subject here has given him, if possible, even greater opportunity to embody the spirit of the knightly stories which he has caught so thoroughly.