Arthurian Romance Books - Page 3

Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance (Medieval Texts and Studies, No 10)

Heldris

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A remarkable story of feminsm, heroism, symbolism; a classic 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

I had the luck to read this book in a literature class, and it has become a very personal love of mine. The story is beautiful and the characters are so full of symbolism; it is a feminine version of Homer's "The Odyssey", but with a feminist theme. The history behind the book is to intriguing that anyone interested in Classical Literature Studies, French Literature, Feminist Literature, or a good story, would quickly fall in love with its beauty as I have. I am currently attempting to contact publishers in hope that someone may realize its importance as a mythological masterpiece, and hope this review may spark some interest. If De Beauvior were born 500 years earlier this would be her "Second Sex". I believe in the story and its universal importance. (I give it a 9 because it was originally written as an Old French poem, which may be why it is so inaccessible--very few people can read Old French--but the story itself is priceless)

Editorial Review:

A facing-page translation.

This bilingual edition, a parallel text in Old French and English, is based on a reexamination of the Old French manuscript, and makes Silence available to specialists and students in various fields of literature and women's studies.

The Roman de Silence, an Arthurian romance of the thirteenth century, tells of a girl raised as a boy, equally accomplished as a minstrel and knight, whose final task, the capture of Merlin, leads to her unmasking.

Glossary, Bibliography, Proper Name list, Notes. B/W Frontispiece illustration.

King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales

Thomas Malory

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

A Good Introduction to Malory 4 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.

I've used this text to teach upper-division college classes on the Arthurian legend, and I'd say that this is the best text for that purpose.

First, although there are some useful and interesting tales missing (such as the tale of Sir Lancelot, and the tale of Sir Gareth), most the the truly vital ones are there -- and the death of Arthur is presented in its entirety.

Second, Vinaver DOES modernize the spelling. But you can't modernize the spelling of an archaic word and, since he is NOT writing a translation but providing a modern-spelling edition, he simply standardizes the spelling of the archaic words and provides a gloss on each one. This is much more useful than the banal translations by Keith Barnes and Richard Barber (Legends of Arthur, from Boydell and Brewer).

This edition is the best way to get used to Malory's beautiful style without having to figure out Middle English spellings (which isn't really very difficult in Malory's case). It's a well organized book, and makes Malory appealing without compromising on the language -- which is one of Malory's greatest facets.

The only problem I have with this text is Vinaver's insistence on re-ordering the tales according to Malory's French originals. "The Knight of the Cart" should be presented AFTER "The Poisoned Apple," and certainly not before the Quest of the Holy Grail. It makes much better sense where Malory put it, where it shows Lanbcelot's deteriorating morals as his relationship with Guenever intensifies. Also, I'd like to see either more from the Quest for the Holy Grail, or nothing at all. The tiny fragment of the story presented here is almost incomprehensible to first-time readers.

Editorial Review:

Now in new covers!

The Return Of Merlin

Deepak Chopra

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Super tale with great wisdom 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This is at great way to explain life and death, love and hate. Everybody should read this in school.

Perceptive Perception 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

If you want to be Merlin, and you want Camelot to live again, read this book. If you are intrigued by quantum reality, read this book. If you are trying to deal with the truth about the dark side of yourself, read this book. Perception is everything. I give this book four Stars because I reserve five stars for the video "What the Bleep Do We Know?"

Merlin stay home 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I dislike giving negative reviews, but this book was flat out boring for me.

Too many story lines, with too many characters, and too many superfluous details. The character development was weak, not nearly enough to generate intrest for me. On top of that add the scattered time travel and alternate realities and the plot became too convoluted.

The spirituality in the book is good stuff, but what is there is pretty basic, and there is not all that much of it.

Readers looking for good spiritual fiction would be better off picking something else from my review list.

Entertainment: 2 stars
Enlightenment: 2 stars

Editorial Review:

The author of the million-copy best-seller Ageless Body, Timeless Mind emerges as a powerful new force in fiction with a luminously written novel about the final act of the Arthurian legend playing out in modern England. The Return of Merlin is a brilliantly realized narrative that begins in Arthurian times and jumps boldly to our own 20th-century dark age of war, pollution, predation, and hatred--with a message of hope.

The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend (Oxford Paperback Reference)

Alan Lupack

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Editorial Review:

The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend is both a critical history of the Arthurian tradition and a reference guide to Arthurian works, names, characters, symbols, and places. Seven essays offer a comprehensive survey of the legends in all of their manifestations, from their origins in medieval literature to their adaptation in modern literature, arts, film, and popular culture. It also demonstrates the tremendous continuity of the legends by examining the ways that they have been reinterpreted over the years. The indispensable reference on the subject, it also contains encyclopedic entries, bibliographies, and a comprehensive index. The extensive chapter-by-chapter bibliographies, which are subdivided by topic, augment the general bibliography of Arthurian resources.
Comprehensive in its analysis and hypertextual in its approach, the Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend is an essential reference book for Arthurian scholars, medievalists, and for those interested in cultural studies of myth and legend.

Bulfinch's Mythology: Age of Chivalry and Legends of Charlemagne (Bulfinch's Mythology)

Thomas Bulfinch

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Mythology in its storybook version 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This a great book for all who have a intrest in hearing the myths and legends of gods and heroes, just in their story form, without it being analytical or narrated as a deconstructed text. This is mythology in its purest form, before it's been tampered with by english professors or translated by the historyian.
A great read of the ancient myths.

Good infornation to put in your background 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I'm a foreign student studying in the US. I listened to this audiobook while I was preparing for GRE. I learned many new vocabulary from the audiobook.
Later when I took western philosophy class, I understood what my professor was talking about because I had learned about Greek mythology from this audiobook.
I also notice people often use idioms derived from Greek Mythology in their writing or conversation. So it's handy to have such information in your background. Listening to this audiobook is an easy way to obtain such knowledge.

Editorial Review:

The classic collection of myths and legendary lore. All major periods of mythology are covered, from Greek and Roman ages to King Arthur.

Mark Twain : Historical Romances : The Prince and the Pauper / A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court / Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (Library of America)

Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A fabulous collection of perhaps Twain's very best works! 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.

This collection contains my 2 childhood and all-time Twain favorites - Prince & Pauper, and Connecticut Yankee - and added the magical ingredient of a historical romance I never knew Twain had written - Joan of Arc. Now that I have read this as well, I see that it may be even better than the other two!

The wry sense of humor characteristic of Twain definitely is most in evidence in CT Yankee. All 3 of these works deliver Twain's wide understanding of human nature in different times and sociological conditions, and his admiration of human nobility and greatness of heart in adversity. Joan of Arc unquestionably is the most inspiring of these tales, being the story of the greatest hero (or heroine). The Prince and the Pauper, however, remains a jewel of an adventure story, which any child can identify with, and learn from.

It is a collection to keep forever, and re-read frequently.

Editorial Review:

An anthology encompassing The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee, and Joan of Arc features Twain's imaginative studies of the Middle Ages, in a children's classic, a unique comic-violent fantasy, and a respectful fictional biography.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Oxford World's Classics)

Mark Twain

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Editorial Review:

When A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court was published in 1889, Mark Twain was undergoing a series of personal and professional crises. In his Introduction, M. Thomas Inge shows how what began as a literary burlesque of British chivalry and culture developed to tragedy and into a novel that remains a major literary and cultural text for generations of new readers. This edition reproduces a number of the original drawings by Dan Beard, of whom Twain said "He not only illustrates the text but he illustrates my thoughts."

Idylls of the King and a New Selection of Poems (Signet Classics)

Alfred Tennyson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Wonderful Evocation of Arthurian Legends 5 out of 5 stars.
24 of 30 people found this review helpful.

After many, many years of good intentions I finally read Tennyson's Idylls of the King. What a pleasure and delight. The poetry is impressive, and the depiction of the Round Table is epochal. I have also compared it to some of Mallory. While Mallory established the standard for the Arthurian legend (in English, at any rate), Tennyson's poetry is far more impressive. The stories themselves seem more impressive in Tennyson's sure hands. Unfortunately, I also made the mistake of watching "Camelot" on video recently; what a travesty. Guenevere is referred to as Ginny, Sir Lancelot is called Lance, and the over-all Hollywood approach is debasing and embarrassing. One could be turned off from Camelot forever as a result of this atrocious film. Let us give praise for Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King. It is magnificent!

Editorial Review:

His poems evoke the past and present, the exotic and the familiar, the rich and the poor, making this selection accessible-and applicable-to just about everyone.

Malory: Complete Works

Thomas Malory

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Ian Myles Slater on: Worthwhile Malorys, Not For All 5 out of 5 stars.
37 of 38 people found this review helpful.

This is mainly a review of two related editions of the work commonly known as "Le Morte D'Arthur" (Anglo-Norman French for "The Death of [King] Arthur). One is Eugene Vinaver's "Malory: Complete Works," the title of which will be explained shortly. The other is the Norton Critical Edition, as "Le Morte D'Arthur" -- an admirable book, but not for all readers; as also explained below, the text has some striking visual differences from the usual modern book, which some may find too difficult. Both are original-spelling editions of the fifteenth-century text, in what can be called either very late Middle English, or very early Modern English; other, easier-to-read, editions will also be mentioned below.

Until a mis-catalogued fifteenth-century manuscript in a safe at Winchester College was finally recognized in 1934 as Sir Thomas Malory's account of King Arthur and his knights, the only authoritative text of this now-famous work was that found in the two surviving copies of William Caxton's 1485 printing. Unhappily, its first and last pages are missing, so Caxton remains the source for those passages. (The standard exact, or "diplomatic," text of Caxton's Malory was edited by H. Oskar Sommers, 1889-1891. There is a recent critical text, edited by James Spisak, 1983, and a facsimile edition, edited by Paul Needham, 1976.) There are thousands of minor differences, and a few very large ones.

Caxton had divided the text into twenty-one books, with numbered and (usually) titled chapters, and called the whole "Le Morte D'Arthur" -- "Notwithstanding that it treateth of the birth, life, and acts of the said King Arthur, of his noble knights of the Round Table, their marvelous enquests and adventures, the achieving of the Sangrail, and in the end the dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all" (Caxton's Colophon). He had also dramatically abridged one long section (his Book Five), and seems to have made some changes of his own in wording, sometimes softening Malory's aristocratic bluntness. When Eugene Vinaver edited the Winchester Manuscript for the Oxford English Texts series, he gave the three-volume set (with critical notes, glossary, etc.) the title of "The Works of Sir Thomas Malory" (1947; revised edition, 1967; third edition, re-edited by P.J.C. Field, 1990).

In Vinaver's eyes, the manuscript revealed that Malory had produced only a very loosely connected set of narratives, distinct "WORKS" to which he, as editor, gave his own titles (which are now in current use, despite the lack of any other authority for some). The idea of a single, continuous, narrative was, in this view, Caxton's; hence the many inconsistencies, such as dead villains showing up alive and still wicked after a few "books." This decision has given rise to a long critical controversy; Malory was, in Caxton's term, "reducing" some disparate French texts into English, and may have just missed some discrepancies, as he tried to produce a reasonably unified "whole book". It has also created a certain amount of bibliographic confusion.

Keith Baines' "Rendition in Modern English" of Vinaver's edition (1962; a rewriting, covering every incident, but mostly sacrificing the language) is carefully called "Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table," as if to emphasize that Caxton's "interference" is being removed, without sacrificing reader recognition (and sales). Vinaver's later Oxford Standard Authors one-volume original-spelling text edition (1971), however, is "Malory: Complete Works." Vinaver also edited for Oxford University Press a modernized-spelling "King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales by Sir Thomas Malory" (1956, 1968, 1975), which maintained the same premise. John Steinbeck, a great admirer of Malory, was delighted by Vinaver's edition, and referenced the Winchester Manuscript in the subtitle of his unfinished "Acts of King Arthur ...," avoiding the "Morte" designation. (This is in fact an Arthurian novel by Steinbeck, incorporating chunks of source material, *not* a modernization.) Thus far, there is a certain amount of consistency.

However, a more recent Oxford edition, Helen Cooper's modernized spelling edition of the Winchester text for The Oxford World's Classics (1998; abridged, unfortunately; otherwise excellent), is instead titled "Le Morte D'Arthur." So, too, is the medievalist R.M. Lumiansky's much more extensively modernized 1982 complete version of the Winchester text. (Almost a translation, and thus an implied commentary on the text; but not to be confused with Lumiansky's projected, and unpublished, critical edition, almost complete at the time of his death in 1987. But is quite impressive, and I can understand anyone who thinks I am too critical of it.) The title of the facsimile edition for the Early English Text Society (N.R. Ker, 1976) "The Winchester Malory," avoided the issue, but the volume also helped renew the debate over Vinaver's theory by eliminating his editorial hand.

Stephen H. A. Shepherd's Norton Critical Edition is "Le Morte D'Arthur" on the cover, but on the title page has the Caxton-derived subtitle of "The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of The Rounde Table." This title may well go back to Malory, or least to the manuscripts; it would have appeared on the missing final pages. Shepherd, indeed, gives considerably more weight to Caxton's evidence than has been customary. It has become clear, from printer's marks, that the Winchester Manuscript was in fact available to Caxton, and was still on hand when his successor, Wynkyn de Worde, reset the "Morte" in 1498, introducing some of its readings. This suggests that Caxton was comparing at least two manuscripts, and that some of his "innovations" may reflect Malory's intentions as much as any other scribal copy.

The one-volume Oxford "Malory: Complete Works" is a rather bare-bones edition (especially compared to its three-volume prototype), consisting almost entirely of a very lightly "normalized" text (abbreviations are silently expanded, but variant spellings are usually preserved, etc.), with some good textual notes and a glossary (about a hundred pages of "apparatus"). In the Norton Critical Edition, Shepherd offers the reader an extended Introduction, Chronologies, a text with explanatory footnotes, a large section of "Sources" (earlier and / or alternative versions of Arthurian stories, many translated by Shepherd) and "Backgrounds" (contemporary medieval documents and modern histories illustrating Malory's times) and "Criticism" (essays and book excerpts), followed by a thirty-two-page double-column Glossary, a "Selected Guide to Proper Names," and a Selected Bibliography. (There is also a website, accessible through W.W. Norton's main page; it lists printing errors, and reports that the corrections of those identified have now been made in a second printing.)

Shepherd's text itself includes more of Caxton's readings, which seem to reflect another manuscript with different errors; and manuscript is the crucial word. Unlike Vinaver, who attempted to reproduce what he regarded as Malory's intended structure (or non-structure), Shepherd aims to create the impression of reading a medieval manuscript, without the most difficult obstacles. Not only are original spellings preserved, he carefully includes marginal notes and other indicators of scribal practices. The two scribes of the Winchester Manuscript carefully (but not completely consistently) wrote names, and some passages, in red ink ("rubrications"). Shepherd does not ask the printer for two colors, but follows the practice of "Scribe A" in using a more ornate script for the rubrics, substituting a black-letter font, so these words stand out; in some cases, following the scribes' use of larger lettering, they are printed in an extra-bold face.

Shepherd has some sensible solutions -- not identical to Vinaver's -- to such problems as character variation ('u' and 'v' and 'i' and 'j' had yet to settle into their modern restrictions, for example), erratic word divisions, and punctuating sentences whose beginning and / or end is not clearly marked. [A recent review by Jim Allan, posted on the "Le Morte Darthur" side, elegantly summarizes Shepherd's approach to these and other problems.]

This does not make for easy reading; it does reproduce, as nearly as possible in a printed book, and with modern typefaces, the experience of reading a medieval book -- which is the point of the exercise. As someone who once pored over the facsimile of the Winchester Manuscript without being able to make out much from the fifteenth-century handwriting, I love it. And it is not Shepherd's eccentric decision. It is part of a renewed appreciation for the medieval book as a physical artifact, not a sort of nuisance to be made transparent by modern typography.

However, with their 'olde spellynges' and other peculiarities, neither the Oxford Standard Authors version nor the Norton Critical Edition is suitable for all readers. Although Lumiansky's version comes close, there is still a need for a *complete* "normalized" edition based on the Winchester text, only very lightly modernized as to spelling, and faithfully preserving the original words and sentence structures.

Editorial Review:

This single-volume edition of the complete works of Sir Thomas Malory retains his 15th-century English while providing an introduction, glossary, and fifty pages of explanatory notes on each romance.

The Once and Future King (Cliffs Notes)

Daniel Moran

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Whole New Perspective 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

A few weeks ago I recieved my school reading list. I was happy that the Once and Future King was on it because I had already read it. I purchased the Cliff Notes. The refreshed my memory with out taking to much time. I also liked how they list the characters and what they did in the beginning of the book. That way if you forget you can always look it up. The comments that are contained also help widen my perspective on what the book means. I think that everyone who has read the book should purchase these cliff notes.

Editorial Review:

Based on medieval Arthurian legends, The Once and Future King is a twentieth-century version of young Arthur's quest for the sword Excalibur and his claim to the throne of England. Including many well-known and much-loved episodes with Merlyn, the sorcerer; Morgan La Fay, the witch; and knights jousting and hounds engaged in the hunt, White's novel adds to the lore surrounding the person of King Arthur.

CliffsNotes brings you this easy-to-understand study guide that covers all four volumes of The Once and Future King with special emphasis given to the most popular volume, The Sword in the Stone. The other three novellas are treated within critical essays.