Customer Reviews

Caxton's Mallory: A New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur - Based on the Pierpont Morgan Copy of William Caxton's Edition of 1485

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Obviously if you are looking at this book you have more than just a mere passing interest in King Arthur and Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte Darthur. This edition makes available the origional text with the origional orthography adding only modern punctuation and paragraphing to facilitate reading. The book contains two volumes the first contains the actual text. The second contains some notes showing variations in the various textual versions of Le Morte Darthur as well as a glossery of middle-english vocabulary. The book can be used by the novice and the scholar alike. While the versions translated into a more modern english are fantastic there is no substitute for the flavour of the origional. As Robert Frost said,"poetry is what is lost in translation."

As the long title suggests this is a scholarly edition of Malory's classic story of King Arthur and his knights. As such, it forms a counter-balance to the edition edited by Vinaver and Field which is based on the Winchester manuscript. Even though I tend to prefer the Winchester manuscript's readings over the Caxton edition's, I believe this is an excellent edition of the Caxton. No Arthurian library is really complete without it.