Synopsis of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur

Many people want to read Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur but either never get started, or make a start but give up not too far in, as it’s more difficult, and less exciting, than they expect. What follows is a synopsis of the whole of Le Morte d’Arthur with the idea of helping you decide if you want to read the whole thing. I will try to go light on spoilers, but some things I will have to reveal in order to just tell the story. So here we go!

Another thing to understand up front is that what you find below is my reading of the story. This is my interpretation, and not everyone will have the same interpretation.

Before Arthur is born

We begin with Arthur’s father, Uther, who lusts after his ally’s wife. Merlin casts a spell to let him look like her husband, and he gets in and they conceive Arthur. Merlin takes the baby Arthur to be raised by the Ectors, an average family. Uther dies, and a sword appears in a stone that can only be drawn by the rightful king.

Arthur grows to fifteen, and when his brother forgets his sword, Arthur runs and grabs the one from the stone. So he is the king! Thing is, none of the noble kings of the day want to hand the rule of the country to a boy, so they go to war on him, but Merlin, through some pretty sweet magic, helps Arthur win the battles and control the country. So yay, Arthur!

Arthur kind of ends up sleeping with his half-sister by accident, you know, and they conceive Mordred. This half-sister is the mother of Sir Gawain, Arthur’s future best friend, and the other half-sister is Morgan, who becomes the fierce sorceress Morgan le Fay. Merlin tells Arthur that his child will be the ruin of his kingdom and all his knights, so Arthur has all the children born that day put on a ship and set adrift. I need hardly tell you that Mordred survives.

Arthur is given the sword Excalibur by the Lady of the Lake. After this opening chapter, Arthur mostly retreats into the background. We are now in the world that he created and our focus mostly shifts to the knights of his court.

The first adventure

The first story is amazing and one of my favorites, the story of the brother knights Balin and Balan. Balin is able to pull a sword no one else can, sort of like the sword in the stone, but he won’t give it back. He is told that if he keeps it, he will kill the one he loves most in the world with it, but he says he doesn’t care.

Then he kills a very important person and Arthur banishes him. Balin sets out to win Arthur’s wars in order to make up for it, but he keeps running into bad luck, and worse luck, and he can’t escape it, and then—he triggers an event that causes God, yes, that One, to take vengeance on the country. This creates The Waste Land, by the way, and can only be repaid by achieving the Holy Grail, about thirty years later in the story. This whole story is very macabre and spooky and it’s showcases the weird and mystical part of the Arthurian legend.

Arthur and Guinevere’s marriage

Then Arthur and Guinevere get married. And it’s not only the grand wedding you’d expect, but this is where the whole thing explodes into a full-on dream world. Balin was spooky, but this is solid dream logic that is completely separate from reality.

At the wedding a huge stag, two dogs, a woman charge in. Then a knight comes in and carries the woman away and the stag runs out. Young Gawain, who is going to become King Arthur’s best friend, has to retrieve one thing, another knight has to retrieve another thing and the same with the third, and their adventures are dark and mysterious and violent, but at the same time make a kind of poetic sense. This is where the Arthurian legend is a kind of bizarre mind trip that doesn’t make sense, but is intriguing and bizarre.

At the end, Arthur receives the Round Table and makes the knights swear to the Pentecostal Oath, which is that they will protect women, the poor and the elderly, and this becomes the official beginning of the Knights of the Round Table.

Then Morgan le Fay has a great adventure where she makes an audacious attempt to overthrow Arthur, and this is one of the rare adventures focused on Arthur, and is the peak of Morgan le Fay’s treachery, and it contains a lot of magic, double-crosses, battle and action.

Then King Arthur goes to war in Rome, and on the way he has an amazing battle with a giant who has taken control of St. Michael’s Mount, off of France. In here Sir Gawain comes into Arthur’s court and so does Sir Lancelot. Now the middle part of the tale shifts to Sir Lancelot.

Focus shifts to Lancelot

Lancelot is the best knight by far. He is so good, so superior in every possible way, that he throws off the balance of the court. Lancelot is ultra-refined and he and Guinevere, the Queen and Arthur’s wife, seem to have a love of the soul. Not really kidding, although that is my interpretation. It seems like at first they are not having sex, although we don’t know. We also don’t know what Arthur thinks about it all, if he doesn’t know, or he is just cool with it.

Lancelot has a bunch of adventures, helps a great many people, and at times fights against the Knights of the Round Table in disguise, because they would never fight him if they knew who it was. A strange knight comes to court and has an amusing adventure with lots of intrigue and magic and the whole bit, and he is finally revealed to be Gawain’s long-lost brother, Gareth. Gawain loves Gareth, but ultimately Gareth avoids his own brother and chooses to hang out with Lancelot. Remember Gareth.

Lancelot is very intense, and I think kind of a disturbed and mentally tortured character. One of the things that happens is that Lancelot is tricked into conceiving a baby—they drug him and make him think he is with Guinevere—and when he finds out what’s going on, the real Guinevere is furious and all of this causes Lancelot to go insane. He spends a few years as an insane man living in the woods and all the knights go looking for him and finally bring him back. The son he had by trickery is Sir Galahad.

Tristram takes over the tale

Around now the story completely shifts to another character, Sir Tristram, which is the same story as Tristan and Isolde, which you may have heard of. The text shifts into this story, which is happening within the Arthurian world with some of the Arthurian characters, but still sort of exists separately from the rest of the Arthurian narrative.

There’s Tristram, who is a super-knight in the manner of Lancelot, there’s King Mark and there’s mark’s fiancée, La Beale Isoud. While Tristram is taking La Beale Isoud to marry Mark, the two of them drink a love potion and fall madly in love, beginning an affair that will continue over the next three long books that contain a multitude of adventures before Mark is thrown in prison and Tristram and La Beale Isoud get to live together happily. Once that is done, the story shifts back to Arthur’s world and we never hear from Tristram again.

Okay, so Galahad is out there. Percival is out there. Gawain is out there. Mordred, Arthur’s long-lost son that he tried to kill, has joined the court. The whole court is getting a little out of control and sordid in a way that’s kind of hard to put your finger on. The peerless Galahad, Lancelot’s son who is essentially perfect, and whose superpower is his incredible virtue, comes to court. Then: The Holy Grail appears.

The Quest for the Holy Grail

The knights get a vision of the cup that held Christ’s blood and decide they must attain oneness with it. One thing most people don’t know about the Arthurian legend is that Arthur begs the knights not to go. It’s not he sends them on this quest, he actually tries to prevent it, because he knows it will be the end of the Knights of the Round Table. The knights go anyway, but the difference is that they are now competing with each other, and for a prize, the award of virtue, but not for virtue itself. Camelot empties out and King Arthur is left alone.

Another thing that might be a surprise is that knight do not do well on the quest for the Holy Grail. The other thing is that the whole world of the story shifts dramatically during this part. We are now in an endless dream world in which spirituality mingles freely with reality, where knights meet actual angels and actual devils, and there are holy men behind every tree.

The thing is, these knights are violent and their morals are, you know, those of knights. They like to eat, drink and be merry. And God is not having that anymore. They have updated their operating agreements. And the Knights of the Round Table will not be needed anymore, but thank you so much for your service. About a hundred out of a hundred and fifty knights die, and the others have a very bad time and stumble back to Camelot in shame. Arthur, who was the choice of God when he began his reign, is now rejected by God. They story never explicitly points this out, but from this point on there is almost no magic in the story, and we are thrown back into a very earthy, grim world.

Meanwhile Galahad, Lancelot’s son through trickery, is holy enough to make it. Lancelot, by the way, had had to face that he is imperfect because of his love of Guinevere, and is wearing a hairshirt, which is kind of self-torture shirt, to suffer for his sins. But his son, as well as Percival and Bors, achieve the Holy Grail! But it’s not quite the bangin’ party you might think it would be, and it does not grant anyone superhuman abilities or invincible power, they just get to be in the room with it and in doing so, attain oneness with God. However, the blight is lifted from the land. And no exaggeration, a giant hand comes down from the sky and removes the Holy Grail from the Earth.

Final adventures

And now we move into our final section. We make a huge shift back to the real world, where as I said there now appears to be very little magic, and everything just kind of sucks. Remember that two-thirds of the Knights of the Round Table died, so we start having a bunch of new knights, and we just get the sense that they don’t really understand the assignment.

Lancelot comes back, having learned that despite all his greatness he is still not morally worthy, and despite his promise to give up his love for Guinevere, as soon as they see each other he rips off his hairshirt and from now on you get the distinct impression that there is hot, sweaty sex going down in Camelot. Lancelot and Guinevere are also being less discreet about their affair, and people start talking about it. We don’t know to what extent Arthur knows about the affair going on with Lancelot and Guinevere. One of the amazing things about the whole thing is how long it is able to float this question of whether Arthur actually knows about the affair and is tolerating it, whether he’s in denial or he just doesn’t know about it at all.

And somewhere in here, Mordred came back, and he’s not exactly thrilled with his dad. We don’t know to what extent Arthur knows Mordred is his long-lost son that he tried to kill, and we don’t know for sure that Mordred knows Arthur is his father. Mordred is accepted as one of Gawain’s brothers, and he starts hanging out with them.

So first we have a very haunting and beautiful Lancelot story where a young woman falls in love with him and he has the opportunity to have a relationship of his own, but instead he turns back toward the love he can never truly have, his affair with Guinevere.

Then follows one of the rare kind of standalone adventures and one of the best, a true adventure story of knights and queens in distress. It involves a young, arrogant knight, truly a wonderful evil character, and his attempts to kidnap Guinevere and force her to marry him. It involves some intense derring-do on the parts of Lancelot and Gawain, and is just an amazing story, and one of my favorites. But by that time, Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair is getting too hot for Camelot, and something is about to blow.

The kingdom collapses

By the way, everyone is older now and they’re just not the hot young things they used to be. Some of Arthur’s knights, led by Mordred, convince Arthur to lay a trap to expose Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair, which they do. Looks like Guinevere is going to have to be burned at the stake, at by that time, Arthur is like, “Well, the law’s the law. Sorry!” Lancelot come to save her, fighting against Arthur’s knights, and as he does, he accidentally kills Gareth, who you remember is Gawain’s brother who rejected Gawain in favor of Lancelot.

By now, this world is devoid of magic, We are in the hard, mundane reality after the quest and people are turning on each other. One of the more conniving of Arthur’s brothers tempts Arthur into exposing Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair. In the aftermath, a very beloved relative to Gawain is accidentally killed by Lancelot (who would never mean to kill him). Gawain cannot forgive. Arthur owes a family loyalty to Gawain, who he has decades of history with. The court splits into relatives of Gawain and relatives of Lancelot, and Lancelot and his armies go to France.

Arthur knows that Lancelot didn’t mean it, but is bent by his loyalty to Gawain. He goes off to war with Lancelot, leaving Mordred in charge. So Mordred decides to kidnap Guinevere and try to force her to marry him, and overthrow Arthur and become king himself, while Arthur is out at war with Lancelot.

SPOILERS!

This section will reveal the end of the tale, so it is up to you if you want to know.

Arthur returns to England and prepares for war with Mordred. Everyone agrees it’s a bad idea, and that they will not have a battle unless someone pulls a blade. But of course there is some random yahoo who pulls his sword to kill a snake, and the battle begins. Most important people die. Arthur sees Mordred and decides to kill him once and for all. He impales Mordred on his lance, but Mordred pulls himself forward and delivers a fatal blow to Arthur before dying.

Guinevere goes into a convent. Lancelot visits her there and asks for one last kiss, but she says no, they cannot do even that.

Arthur asks for the sword Excalibur to be returned to the lake, where a hand comes up and grabs it. Then a barge comes containing four women, one of whom is Morgan le Fay, to take Arthur to the isle of Avalon to be healed. A grave is created for Arthur, which says [in Latin]: “Here lies Arthur, who was king once, and will be king again.”