The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights

4 Responses to “The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights”

1. Ender Wiggins says:

   March 24, 2010 at 1:09 am

   I have agreed up on the free Amazon classics. I have chose that paying a couple dollars is well worth the money for Kindle books. Not that the content is any different but the formatting is unbearable in the free books.

   So far this book is reasonably enjoyable. I will update my review when I have finished reading it.
   Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
2. Mithril says:

   March 24, 2010 at 4:02 am

   Classic King Arthur tales, with all the smiteth-ing and destresseth damsels one might wish.

   A bit of a slow read due to the older writing style and inclusion of every name of every night present at every battle, but the book contained everything from Merlin’s predictions to the Quest for the Holy Grail to Arthur being bore off to Avalon.
   Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
3. mrs. higgensworth says:

   March 24, 2010 at 6:18 am

   I loved this book, or what part of it I read, anyway. It is the rather un-nuanced account of the adventures had by a group of knights (of the Round Table, of course). There is no character development and very small overarching plot to tie the tales together, but there is something oddly compelling about it. There is a fantastic deal of smiting, and rending helms asunder, and rescuing honest maidens in distress (can you imagine???? The evil giant makes ladies really do manual labor, though they be of high birth!).

   You get the all-purpose thought pretty quickly, I’ve read half and feel like I’ve gotten all I will get out of this book. It’s free though, so I am glad I checked it out.
   Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
4. Thornwell Simons says:

   March 24, 2010 at 9:12 am

   It’s curious to me that this is the best-selling version of the King Arthur tale in the kindle store, because it’s a singularly flawed collection, well-eclipsed by additional variants that are also available for free online; I suspect its popularity is an manufactured article of the search engine, not the book’s own merits.

   The leader, Sir James Knowles, was an architect and friend of Tennyson, best known for founding the Metaphysical Society; this is, therefore, a very Victorian Arthur. In this case, “victorian” means “bowdlerized to the point of inanity.” The tale of Merlin’s enchantment of Uther and Igraine to arrange Arthur’s conception is nearly completely elided (“When Uther, therefore, was at part happily wedded” — yep, that’s the whole tale); Sir Tristram is rumor has it that completely chaste with Iseult (King Mark just doesn’t like him for some indiscernible reason) and even when Lancelot and Guinevere are caught together and the entire course of the tale turns on adultery, such that bowdlerization was completely impossible, Gawain suggests that “it may well be that Lancelot was in her chamber for no evil.” The tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is simply not included at all.

   I suppose that kind of bowdlerization might be acceptable in a children’s version of the Arthur tales, but this edition isn’t excellent for that either, for two reasons: 1) like many free kindle ebooks, all illustrations have been removed, and 2) it’s a kindle edition, and who gives a $250 ebook reader to a child too young to read a tale with adultery in it?

   There are additional problems also. The King of Gaul (Sir Bors) is an ally for the first third and last third of the book, but in the middle, Gaul has a different king, Flollo, and Arthur conquers Gaul six ways from Sunday (mostly as a pause in his conquest of Rome); timelines don’t add up; so on, so into the world. I didn’t feel the leader did a excellent job of telling the Arthur legends, in any particular. In fleeting, this is a terrible version of the King Arthur tale and the all-purpose reader would be better off not wasting time on it.

   I’m sure people are going to say “hey, it’s an early victorian version, don’t hold it to such high standards,” but there’s no reason for a modern reader to read these, any more than there’s reason to read Sir Thomas Bowdler’s “Family tree Shakespeare”. For more “past” versions of the Arthur legend, either of this versions’ main source materials — Geoffrey of Monmouth’s _History of the Kings of Britain_ or Sir Thomas Malory’s _Morte D’Arthur_ — are superior reads (though I’ll admit you’d want to skim Monmouth heavily). My own personal favorite, Howard Pyle’s three-book version of the Arthur tale (“The Tale of King Arthur and His Knights,” “The Tale of the Champions of the Round Table,” and “The Tale of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur”) is similarly available for free online in the public domain, can be establish with brilliant illustrations by Pyle himself, is written in a fashion suitable for children and adults, and does a far better job of capturing the romance of the Arthur legends.

   But whatever version you pick, this one is a poor place to start. It does have some strengths — chiefly an encylopedic compilation of at least some version of nearly every PG Arthur-related tale — but the leader’s victorian mores seem to have twisted far too many of the tales into unrecognizability. Not recommended.
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5