In the Library
Le Morte d'Arthur
Thomas Malory, 1485
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 11 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 9
- Length
- Length 154k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Beowulf
Anonymous
Beowulf comes from the older warrior world behind Malory's knights: a hall, a king, a hero tested by monsters and by the weight of his own word.
£1.99
The Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser
Spenser builds a knightly world too, but his quests are allegory: every giant and every wood stands for a virtue or a vice under Elizabeth's eye.
£1.99
About the book
A boy too young to know his lineage draws a sword from a stone outside a London churchyard at Christmas, and the realm of Britain has its king. Sir Thomas Malory, an English knight and convicted felon, compiled this prose romance from French and English sources while imprisoned in Newgate, and William Caxton printed it in 1485 as the first sustained English Arthurian narrative. The book gathers the wars of Arthur, the love of Lancelot for Guinevere, the quest of Galahad for the Grail, the long bitter end at Camlann. Knights ride out and do not return; vows hold and then break. Malory leaves the noblest fellowship in Christendom scattered on the field, and the once and future king carried away across the water.