Thomas+Mallory

Since it's a timeless story of justice, romance, chivalry, questing, and ultimately betrayal, hundreds of writers have tried to give their spin to the King Arthur legends - Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote //The Idylls of the King,// T.H. White had //The Once and Future King,// and Parke Godwin created //Firelord.// Each of these books gave their own spin to Arthur's stories, as did //Disney's Sword in the Stone,// the hilarious movie //Monty Python and the Holy Grail,// and the Broadway musical //Camelot.// King Arthur has appeared in countless books, poems, comics, games, television shows, cartoons, and movies over the years, but every single version of his story owes a little bit to Thomas Malory.

The problem with giving credit for the Arthur stories to Thomas Malory is that no one knows exactly who Thomas Malory was. All we know for sure is that sometime in the mid-1400s Arthur stories were collected together by a man named Thomas Malory. He didn't write most of the stories, instead he translated existing Arthur tales from many different sources and compiled them into one collection. Some of the stories were French, some Welsh, and some English (although the King Arthur story itself was an English adaptation of the Irish myth of Finn McCool), Malory added a few of his own original stories and published this collection in 1485. He called it //Le Morte d'Arthur// - The Life of Arthur - and it contained a total of eight books telling the story of both Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Like we said, there were so many Thomas Malorys back in the day, that know one knows for sure which one was responsible for //Le Morte d'Arthur//, but most think it's the Thomas Malory who was a knight from Warwickshire. However, that particular Thomas Malory was also a thief, bandit, kidnapper, and rapist, hardly anything like the chivalric knights he wrote about. If you don't like the idea of one of history's greatest literary heroes being popularized by a dirtbag, perhaps you would prefer Thomas Maleore, a Welsh poet - who many people believe is Arthur's actual author. If neither of them work for you, scholars still debate a few other Thomas Malorys from the time period. Regardless of who wrote it, or how dirtbaggy they were, some guy named Thomas Malory compiled stories about King Arthur way back in 1485, and in the 530 years since then, his work has become the quintessential Arthur tale, copied over and over and over again.