Routes
Six ways through
There is a great deal here and no obligation to read it in order. These are routes: each one picks a sequence and says why, and each links into the primary text at every stop.
- The story in twelve scenesThe narrative spine, start to finish. If you want to be able to follow a conversation about Arthur, read these twelve and stop.
- Where the legend came fromHow a name in a battle list became a European emperor with a court, a prophet and a Grail. The invention of Arthur, in the order it happened.
- The fall of the Round TableFrom the moment somebody says the affair out loud to the grave nobody can identify. The best-constructed tragedy in English before the theatre.
- The Welsh ArthurBefore France got hold of him: a war-band chieftain surrounded by men who can drink a sea dry, and the rawest version of the Grail failure.
- If you have five minutesOne chapter of Malory: the Grail enters Camelot and the king starts grieving in the same scene. It is the whole argument of this portal in four paragraphs.
- Read Malory properlyThe whole of Le Morte d'Arthur: 21 books, 502 chapters, about 336,000 words. Roughly a month at a chapter or two a day.
The threads
Three walks are elsewhere because they belong to their subject:Follow the Grail walks Malory's whole quest with commentary, Follow the Fall runs Books XVIII–XXI from the sentence that restarts the affair to a grave nobody can identify, and every principal knight on the roster with a real arc has a Follow itinerary of their own.