The Fall of Arthur - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

William Cloud Hicklin · 06-27-2015, 01:36 PM

Quote:

I am aware of no article that has ever denied that Malory’s Book II was not taken directly from the Allierative Morte Arthure, whether before or after the finding of the Winchester Manuscript of Malory. Are you uniquely denying this? If not, then what is the point of your comment?

Nobody denied it before or after the WM, because nobody had even pointed it out before Vinaver and the WM, and since it's so obviously correct, nobody afterwards AFAIK has seriously disagreed with it.

You wrote

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chritopher Tolkien

Vinaver... showed that this tale was actually the first that Malory wrote, and he argued that ‘contrary to the generally accepted view, he first became familiar with the Arthurian legend not through “French books” but through an English poem, the alliterative Morte Arthure’ (Vinaver, I, xli).

In fact Vinaver absolutely failed to prove his case and I know no Arthurian scholar today who would accept it.

One would take that to mean that all modern scholars, exemplum Kennedy, reject both parts of the thesis as you cited it from CRT: (a) that Book II was written first, and (b) that it was derived from the AMA. If you only intended to refute (a), you could have been more clear about it.