A Town Mouse and a Country Mouse

A Town Mouse and a Country Mouse were friends. The Country Mouse one
day invited his friend to come and see him at his home in the fields. The
Town Mouse came and they sat down to a dinner of barleycorns and roots
the latter of which had a distinctly earthy flavor. The flavour was not much
to the taste of the guest and presently he broke out with My poor dear
friend, you live here no better than the ants. Now, you should just see how I
fare! My larder is a regular horn of plenty. You must come and stay with me
and I promise you shall live on the fat of the land." So when he returned to
town he took the Country Mouse with him and showed him into a larder
containing flour and oatmeal and figs and honey and dates. The Country
Mouse had never seen anything like it and sat down to enjoy the luxuries his
friend provided. But before they had well begun, the door of the larder
opened and some one came in. The two Mice scampered off and hid
themselves in a narrow and exceedingly uncomfortable hole. Presently,
when all was quiet, they ventured out again. But some one else came in,
and off they scuttled again. This was too much for the visitor. "Good bye,"
said he, "I'm off. You live in the lap of luxury, I can see, but you are
surrounded by dangers whereas at home I can enjoy my simple dinner of
roots and corn in peace."
Butterfly Wings
Nazir had been sitting in the park since morning. He
was staring at the flowers, they were in full bloom, a
welcome sign of the spell cast by spring. These
brightly coloured flowers with their heady fragrance
were enticing all the tiny creatures who had made
their homes in the shrubs, trees, flowers, and grass.
Among these creatures, there were butterflies, all with
brightly coloured wings, flitting among the flowers,
each trying to outdo the other with their aerial
acrobatics.
He had always been fascinated by the sights and
smells of the park, here he reminisced about the past
where it had seemed that there was peace, love, and
prosperity all around. He was particularly attracted to
the colourful wings of the butterflies, and from time to
time, he actually tried to catch one, but he never
succeeded, they were simply too fast and too agile.
The area he was growing up in was impoverished,
basically a slum, and the constant, unrelenting
poverty not only stunted his body, it suffocated his
soul.
Being the youngest of eight siblings, he was often last
in the queue for any attention or care from his
parents. He would leave his tumble down home every
day, with empty eyes that held no hope. With his
clumsy, hobbling gait, picking his way through the
rubbish strewn street, he always chose the longest
path to reach the school gates.
He had no intrinsic motivation to attend school, the
poor condition of the school building and slanderous
behavior of the teachers meant he often bunked off,
and whenever possible he delayed his arrival for as
long as possible. He was often physically punished by
his teachers, but that held no fear for him, and his
only regret when he was caught was that they would
be watching him for a while. The only thing that made
his life worth living was the park near the school. It
was a well known refuge for many lost souls.
He would be drawn to the park at least once or twice
a week, and he spent many hours there. It was a
refuge from the piles of rubbish, the filth, the polluted
air, the clamor of vehicles, the stench of poor
drainage and the appalling news of bomb blasts and
terrorist attacks. Apart from the peace and quiet it
afforded, he was fascinated by the colourful
butterflies. He longed to hold one in his palm and to
be able to touch its jewel like wings.
He was never interested in going home either. He felt
there was nothing there for him but disappointment,
and deprivation. After leaving the park, he felt cheerful
and energetic, his heart was lifted, but as soon as he
neared his home, it was always the same, his feet
began to feel like lead weights; he knew what awaited
him: The vicious arguments between his parents
about money upset him the most, the constant shifting
of blame and the abusive language, it was mortifying.
With the passing of time, he was slowly becoming
immune to the upset, and able to filter out the raised
voices. He tried to keep busy, but ended up
spending most of his time trying to keep out of
everyone's way; daydreaming, or playing with the
other barefoot urchins. His parents seemed to
have no interest in his studies, they were too tangled
up in the labyrinth of meeting the basic needs of their
family. He had been taken to the welfare school by
his older brother, who had really been projecting his
own desires; as the eldest he had been expected to
contribute to the family finances and as a result had
been unable to attend school himself and was
determined that Nazir would succeed where he had
failed.
Nazirs mother often scolded him for his untidy
appearance, and scruffy uniform, but it was
impossible to keep it clean and tidy. He did not really
mind or feel bad about his mothers behavior towards
him, he accepted it as part of his life. The only things
that he truly feared were the bomb blasts. He had
never experienced one at close hand, but he had
heard a number of stories from his elder brothers and
other street boys. He felt they must be exaggerating,
but they terrified him nonetheless.
One day, on his way back from school after a
particularly arduous day, he suddenly decided to
follow one of the colourful butterflies, to see where it
went and find out where they lived. It was getting
late, so he ran towards the park, hoping the butterflies
would still be there. Entering the park, he whooped
for joy as he saw a few butterflies were lazily flying
over the flowers. He targeted one and instead of
running around trying to catch it, he followed it until
suddenly it seemed to disappear. He found himself
standing under a huge, old Banyan tree, its long,
twisted roots like a kind of mystical writing, as if the
tree were trying to tell him something really important.
Suddenly, he felt mentally and physically exhausted.
All thoughts of catching his butterfly forgotten, he lay
down under the tree and fell asleep.
He awoke all of a sudden, for a moment he forgot
where he was, a loud sound had driven him from his
deep sleep, a sound that had also shaken everything
in the park. He thought there might have been an
earthquake, it seemed as if everything was moving
around, but then as if through a fog, he heard the
sound of sirens, and a cacophony of human voices
yelling, crying, and screaming for help.
He stood up and ran towards the main gate of the
park. There he found a large crowd of people on the
main road watching volunteers and rescue teams
rushing around. He walked in a daze through dust
and smoke, until he found himself in the affected
area: smoke and ashes were billowing around burning
vehicles. Everything he had heard about terrorist
attacks came back to him. He felt as if all the blood
had drained out of his body, and he had a feeling of
being, elsewhere. He had never thought that he
would be a witness to one of his brothers stories.
He only came out of his trance when a pair of hands
suddenly grabbed him, pulling him backwards. He
realised he had been walking towards waves of fire.
He looked around, but couldnt see who had grabbed
him in the chaos all around.
Stumbling, he rushed back to the refuge of the park,
but that too was full of smoke from the blast. With tear
filled eyes, he began to touch each flower, as if he
was trying to comfort them, consoling them before
they wilted in the toxic air. Near the old Banyan tree,
he saw something moving in the grass. It was one of
the blue, shiny butterflies, but it was dying in the thick
smoke, one wing hanging loose.
Tenderly, he picked it up, and held it on his palm,
caressing it with his fingers, but he felt no excitement
at having achieved his goal to hold and touch the
wings of a butterfly. Slowly the wings stopped moving,
and he dug a small hole under the Banyan tree with
his fingers. As the tears rolled down his cheeks, he
placed its small broken body inside, and covered it,
stroking the earth into a small mound.
With a heavy heart he headed back to the main gate
of the park, staring at his fingers where the earth and
butterflys wings had left the mixed colours of death
and grief.
The Open Boat
The small lifeboat bounced from wave to wave when to turn the boat. "Keep her a little more
in the rough seas of the Atlantic. The four south, Billie, he said.
men in the boat could not see the sky. The
"A little more south, sir, the sailor repeated.
waves rose too high. The waves with their
Sitting in the boat was like sitting on a wild
white tops pushed at the open boat with angry
horse. As each wave came, the boat rose
violence. Every man thought each wave
and fell, like a horse starting toward a fence
would be his last. Surely, the boat would sink
too high to jump. The problem was that after
and he would drown. The men thought that
successfully floating over one wave you find
most adults would need a bathtub larger than
that there is another one behind it just as
the boat they were sailing. The waves were
strong and ready to flood your boat. As each
huge, and each created a problem in guiding
wall of water came in, it hid everything else
the direction of the boat. For two days, since
that the men could see. The waves came in
the ship sank, the four men had been
silence; only their white tops made threatening
struggling to reach land. But there was no
noises. In the weak light, the faces of the men
land to be seen. All the men saw were violent
must have looked gray. Their eyes must have
waves which rose and came fiercely down on
shone in strange ways as they looked out at
them. The men sat in the boat, wondering if
the sea. The sun rose slowly into the sky.
there was any hope for them. The ship's cook
The men knew it was the middle of the day
sat in the bottom of the boat. He kept looking
because the color of the sea changed from
at the fifteen centimeters which separated him
slate gray to emerald green, with gold lights.
from the ocean. The boat had only two
And the white foam on the waves looked like
wooden oars. They were so thin it seemed
falling snow. As the lifeboat bounced from the
as if they would break against the waves. The
top of each wave, the wind tore through the
sailor, named Billie, directed the boat's
hair of the men. As the boat dropped down
movement with one of the oars. The
again the water fell just past them. The top of
newspaper reporter pulled the second oar.
each wave was a hill, from which the men
He wondered why he was there in the boat.
could see, for a brief period, a wide area of
The fourth man was the captain of the ship
shining sea. The cook said the men were
that had sunk. He lay in the front of the small
lucky because the wind was blowing toward
boat. His arm and leg were hurt when the
the shore. If it started blowing the other way,
ship sank. The captain's face was sad. He
they would never reach land. The reporter
had lost his ship and many of his sailors. But
and the sailor agreed. But the captain
he looked carefully ahead, and he told Billie
laughed in a way that expressed humor and "See it? said the captain. "No, said the
tragedy all in one. He asked: "Do you think reporter slowly, "I don't see anything". "Look
we've got much of a chance now, boys? again, said the captain. He pointed. "It's
exactly in that direction" This time the reporter
This made the others stop talking. To express
saw a small thing on the edge of the moving
any hope at this time they felt to be childish
horizon. It was exactly like the point of a pin.
and stupid. But they also did not want to
"Think we'll make it, captain? he asked. "If
suggest there was no hope. So they were
this wind holds and the boat doesn't flood, we
silent. "Oh, well, said the captain, "We'll get
can't do much else, said the captain. It would
ashore all right". But there was something in
be difficult to describe the brotherhood of men
his voice that made them think, as the sailor
that was here established on the sea. Each
said: "Yes, if this wind holds!. Seagulls flew
man felt it warmed him. They were a captain,
near and far. Sometimes the birds sat down
a sailor, a cook and a reporter. And they were
on the sea in groups, near brown seaweed
friends. The reporter knew even at the time
that rolled on the waves. The anger of the
that this friendship was the best experience of
sea was no more to them than it was to a
his life. All obeyed the captain. He was a
group of chickens a thousand miles away on
good leader. He always spoke in a low voice
land. Often the seagulls came very close and
and calmly. "I wish we had a sail, he said, "to
stared at the men with black bead-like eyes.
give you two boys a chance to rest" So they
The men shouted angrily at them, telling them
used his coat and one of the oars to make a
to be gone. The sailor and the reporter kept
sail and the boat moved much more quickly.
rowing with the thin wooden oars. Sometimes
The lighthouse had been slowly growing
they sat together, each using an oar.
larger. At last, from the top of each wave the
Sometimes one would pull on both oars while
men in the boat could see land. Slowly, the
the other rested. Brown pieces of seaweed
land seemed to rise from the sea. Soon, the
appeared from time to time. They were like
men could see two lines, one black and one
islands, bits of earth that did not move. They
white. They knew that the black line was
showed the men in the boat that it was slowly
formed by trees, and the white line was the
making progress toward land. Hours passed.
sand. At last, the captain saw a house on the
Then, as the boat was carried to the top of a
shore. And the lighthouse became even
great wave, the captain looked across the
larger. "The keeper of the lighthouse should
water. He said that he saw the lighthouse at
be able to see us now, said the captain. "He'll
Mosquito Inlet. The cook also said he saw it.
notify the life-saving people" Slowly and
The reporter searched the western sky.
beautifully, the land rose from the sea. The
wind came again. Finally, the men
Thomas
Malory
 At the end of Le Morte d'Arthur, Malory wrote,
" . . . I pray you all praye for my soule; for this
book was ended the ix yere of the reygne of
kyng edward the fourth by syr Thomas Maleore
knyght . . . " Details elsewhere in his book reveal
that he was a prisoner at the time of his writing.
On this basis the author of Le Morte d'Arthur is
. traditionally identified as Sir Thomas Malory of
Newbold Revell, who was repeatedly
imprisoned between 1451 and 1460, and
possibly later. This identification has never been
certain and has recently been thrown into
serious doubt: the writer may have been
another Thomas Malory. Nevertheless, the
traditional identification is still widely accepted
and has played so important a part in literary
folklore that it is worth preserving, if only as a
curiosity.

The outlaw Malory was from an old

Warwickshire family uneasily aligned with the
House of York until the mid-1460's, when
Warwick shifted to the Lancastrian camp.
Malory was in his twenties when he succeeded
to the ancestral estate. He served with the Earl
of Warwick at Calais in 1436, was married a few
years later, and in 1449 acquired a second
estate, that of his sister's husband. All this time
he was, as far as we know, a respectable and
perhaps well-off citizen. In 1450 he turned
outlaw and with a vengeance. Between 1450
and 1451 he was charged with several major
crimes robbery, two cattle raids, several
Biography, extortions, a rape, and an attempted murder.
He was jailed, but escaped by swimming a moat
Writings and and immediately after his escape sank to what
was for medieval men the darkest of depravities

Contributions robbing churches. He broke into the Abbey

of the Blessed Mary of Coombe, opened two of
the abbot's chests, and stole various sacred
objects and two bags of money. He came back
the next night with accomplices, broke eighteen
doors, insulted the abbot, and stole more
money. He was again arrested and remained in
prison for three years (1451-1454), except for a
short time outside in 1452. When he was
released he returned to his criminal activities,
was again jailed, again broke out. He was
granted a royal pardon in 1455, probably by the
Duke of York, and managed to serve for his
shire in Parliament for a year; but two years
later he was in debtors' prison (Ludgate); and
he went to Newgate Prison later (1459). He may
have been in prison in 1468, when Edward IV
extended his pardon to the Lancastrians but
excluded "Thomas Malorie, miles." He may
have been released upon the restoration of
Henry VI in October, 1470. He died March 14,
1471, and was buried in the chapel of St. Francis
at the Grey Friars near Newgate in the suburbs
of London.
Although Thomas Malory the highwayman-
knight may not in fact have been the author of
Le Morte d'Arthur, his criminal activities are no
evidence either for or against his claim to
authorship of the work. The author of Le Morte
d'Arthur says at the end of his book that he is
"the seruaunt of Ihesu both day and nyght," and
throughout the hook the stiff code of chivalry is
played against humane and flexible Christian
charity. On the other hand, Malory's myth of
Arthur is essentially secular in its focus. Even
the Grail Quest, as Malory treats it, is more
secular than holy and ironic in spirit: it shows
nobility of soil] and, at the same time, through
its slaughter of many of Arthur's knights, it
dangerously weakens the kingdorn. If the God
of Malory's universe is as much a God of love as
a ruler of destiny, Merlin part man, part
wizard, part devil is his only available
prophet. What the author of Le Morte d'Arthur
knows best is battle, jealousy, sexual lust,
sudden rage, frustrated idealism, and the waste
of human potential.
Malory and the Legend of Arthur
The earliest recorded tradition concerning
Arthur represents him as a leader of the Britons
against the Anglo-Saxon invaders. He is
supposed to have won the battle of Badon Hill
in the sixth century. The battle itself is
historical, and since the name Arthur derives
from the common Roman name Artorius, it
seems likely that the Arthur legend may have
begun in the heroism of it real man, one of the
Romans who shared the plight of the Celts
when the Anglo-Saxons struck. The British
historian Gildas, who finished his De Excidio et
Conquestu Britanniae around 540, tells of the
battle but says nothing of Arthur. The hero
himself first appears in a ninth-century history,
The Historia Brittonunt, allegedly drawn from
earlier histories. The Historia Brittonunt, begun
by a man called Nennius and expanded by later
writers, reports that Arthur, though not a British
king himself, commanded the British forces and
won twelve great victories, one of them the
battle of Badon Hill, where Arthur alone killed
960 men. Later in this history the writers speak
of a stone bearing the footprint of Arthur's dog,
Cabal, and of the tomb of Arthur's son. A still
later history, The Annales Cambriae, is the first
to tell of Arthur's final battle, in 537, against
"Medraut" Mordred.
Though histories give little space to Arthur until
the twelfth century, he was apparently a firmly
established folk hero. He is the central figure in
numerous ancient Welsh and Irish legends
(impossible to date), and by the early twelfth
century, some scholars think, he may have been
known in northern Italy and France, where
names possibly derived from Arthurian folklore
occur.
But it was in 1137, with the release of Geoffrey
of Monmonth's Historia Regum Britanniae, that
the legend solidified. According to Geoffrey, the
Historia translates an ancient book in the British
language. Except for his earliest readers, no one
has believed him. Imaginary sources were a
standard ploy of medieval writers.
Nevertheless, it is not impossible that the basis
of Geoffrey's work was folk history, perhaps
even folk history written down. At all events,
the spirit of Geoffrey's work is frankly patriotic.
It gives the English and Anglo-Norman
aristocracy a British hero as noble as the
Norman hero Charlemagne. It traces England's
genesis to the fall of Troy and the dispersion of
the Trojan heroes that misty antiquity when,
for instance, Romulus fled from Troy to Rome,
Tuscan to Tuscany, and Brutus to Britain and
by establishing British power as coeval with
Roman and French power, it raises Britain out
of its subservient position with respect to
European kingdoms. This pseudo-history was
accepted as fact well into the Renaissance.
Arthur, the greatest of Geoffrey's mythical
kings, became not only a vital symbol of British
national spirit, but the practical model of real
medieval and Renaissance kings. Edward III, like
Arthur, had a Round Table and twelve peers;
Henry VII traced his claim on one side to King
Arthur.
Except insofar as folk tradition continued (such
as in the tales recorded in the much later Welsh
Mabinogion), the further development of the
Arthur legend in England was almost wholly
political in impetus. Only Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, a few courtly tales such as
Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, and a half dozen
Scottish Arthurian pieces stand outside the
general trend. Wace's Roman de Brut, a poem
in French apparently presented to the wife of
Henry II of England in 1154, closely paraphrases
Geoffrey and maintains the patriotic spirit,
merely embellishing it with verse. Layamon's
Brut, which began as an English paraphrase of
Wace, intensifies the nationalistic spirit of the
poem in three respects-first, by the use of the
English language; second, by substituting native
alliterative meter for Wace's continental poetic
form, octosyllabic couplets; and third, by
introducing new material both new events
and a new intensity of emotion to reach
more than double the length of Wace's poem;
i.e., Layamon expands Wace's 1,500+ lines to
32,000+. Another English alliterative poem, the
Morte Arthure, composed in the mid-
fourteenth century, during the reign of Edward
III, has political implications of a gloomier sort.
Here Arthur's conquests are made to parallel
Edward's, Arthur's battles grimly parody
Edward's battles, and Arthur's tragedy a fall
through pride-warns Edward that a similar fate
may await him. The poem is the direct source of
Malory's "Arthur and King Lucius" sequence and
may, in the opinion of some scholars, have
provided Malory with a model for political
comment through romance. Whereas the
Morte Arthure poet identified Arthur with
Edward, Malory alters details as if to equate
Arthur and Henry V, suppresses the tragic
conclusion of the poem, and thus perhaps sets
the glory of Arthur and of Henry V in ironic
counterpoise with what came afterward in
Malory's England.
Naturally enough, the Arthurian legend
reflected in Geoffrey's Historia Regum
Britanniae was developed along very different
lines in France. It provided not a national myth,
but subject matter for fiction. It provided
material for the relatively short "Breton lays"
popular in France in the mid-twelfth century
and after (not all of the lays are Arthurian), and
it provided themes for the more elaborate
verse "romances." The earliest which have
survived and perhaps the first written are
those of Chretien de Troyes, elegant and
artificial elaborations of older Arthurian stories
of (possibly) Welsh origin. Here the tales
become threads for moral allegory, illustrations
of virtuous behavior, courtesy, and polite
conversation. Verse romances of this sort very
soon became popular outside France in Italy,
Spain, Portugal, and Germany; in England the
French influence resulted in the Arthurian
Christian parable, Sir Gawain arid the Green
Knight.
In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,
French verse romance gave way to prose and to
still more ingenious and elaborate art. It was to
this form, the prose romance, that Malory
turned most often for his material. Whereas
French verse romances were relatively
straightforward with respect to plot, the prose
romances became a gloomy medieval forest of
complexity. A given romance might have dozens
of main plots, hundreds of digressive episodes
(indeed, main plots may be dropped and
forgotten), and too many characters for the
reader to keep in mind. Scholars are still
uncertain about how these prose romances
work, and anything we say must be speculative;
but since they are Malory's point of departure,
some speculation is necessary.
One thing is certain: the greatest of the prose
romances for example, the so-called Vulgate
Cycle-begin by dismissing, if they ever thought
of it, the Aristotelian idea that a work must be
perspicuous. Like the elaborate interlace work
in medieval painting, manuscript illumination,
and church ornamentation, they intentionally
defy intellectual comprehension. They are
freighted with symbols of obscure significance,
with apparently meaningful but widely
separated verbal repetitions, and with subtle
relationships between plots and between
characters. They were written backward, so to
speak, beginning with a "given" of Arthurian
romance for instance the fact that a certain
knight has a certain magical sword and
explaining how the hitherto unexplained detail
came about. If the prose romance form has any
significance in itself, it would seem to be this:
like the universe as the Christian Middle Ages
conceived it, the prose romance is complex
beyond all intelligibility, yet secretly ordered
just as the baffling world around us is subtly
ordered by God's plan. Knights go on quests,
suffer more distractions, diversions, and
reversals than the mind can retain; yet trifling
events produce, hundreds of pages later, their
destinal effects. For some of these events, the
motivation of characters is carefully plotted and
thoroughly explained; and though events within
any given plot may be isolated by the intrusion
of events from other plots, no event is isolated
in the total process of the cycle's flow of reality.
The seemingly shapeless form of the romance,
like the devious paths its knights ride down,
celebrates the optimistic doctrine that nothing
is wasted, nothing lost: God moves in strange
ways.
Nothing remotely resembling this art form
appears in English literature. But in simplifying
the French prose romances, Malory did more
than reduce an incredibly complex art to mere
adventure. Suppressing the carefully worked
out motivations he found in his sources,
dismissing some of the religious mystery,
introducing a seeming realism (either dropping
the magic in his sources or presenting it in flat,
plain statements of what must be taken for
weird fact), Malory changed the premise of
Arthurian legend and gave the legend new
meaning.
Malory's legend involves hundreds of characters
whose names and family relationships, though
significant, are sometimes confused. There are
various reasons for this confusion in the text.
Malory wrote in prison, presumably under less
than ideal conditions; he used sources which
were themselves sometimes obscure or
confused; he consistently changed certain
names for purposes of his own but occasionally
let the name found in the source creep in; he
sometimes misunderstood his French sources;
he left no perfect copy of his work we have
only Caxton's much edited edition and one
scribal manuscript riddled with errors. The
accompanying chart of major character
relationships may be helpful.
Other important characters include Merlin the
magician, a devil's son; the Lady of the Lake,
from whom Arthur gets his sword; Nineve, the
sorceress who becomes Lady of the Lake after
the death of the first one; Balyn and Balan, the
cursed brothers whose relics go to Launcelot
and Galahad; Tar
Malory was most probably confined at
Newgate prison from 1460 until his release.
He likely wrote Le Morte d'Arthur (The
Death of Arthur) based on Arthurian
mythology, the first major work of English
language prose. Richard Whittington, mayor
of London, was responsible for
philanthropic work that allowed prisoners
access to a library in the Greyfriars
monastery adjacent to Newgate.[17] This,
coupled with the probability that Malory
had at least some wealth, allowed a certain
level of comfort and leisure within the
prison. His main sources for his work
included Arthurian French prose romances,
Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the
Kings of Britain, and two anonymous English
works called the Alliterative Morte Arthure
and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur.[18] The
entire work is eight romances that span
twenty-one books with 507 chapters, which
was said to be considerably shorter than
the original French sources, despite its vast
size.[19] Malory was responsible for
organizing these diverse sources and
consolidating them into a cohesive whole.
The work was originally titled The Book of
King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the
Round Table, but printer William Caxton
changed it to Le Morte d'Arthur before he
printed it in 1485, as well as making several
other editorial changes. According to one
theory, the eight romances were originally
intended to be separate, but Caxton altered This has led some scholars in recent years
them to be more unified.[20] to believe that Malory may have been the
author of the poem.

There has been some argument among

critics that Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur was
primarily intended as a political
commentary of Malory's own era. Malory
portrays an initially idyllic past under the
strong leadership of King Arthur and his
knights, but as intrigue and infighting
develop, the utopic kingdom collapses,
which may have been intended as a parallel
and a warning against the infighting taking
place during the Wars of the Roses. The
seemingly contradictory changes in King
Arthur's character throughout the work has
been argued to support the theory that
Arthur represents different eras and reigns
throughout the tales.[21] This argument has
also been used to attempt to reconcile
Malory's doubtful reputation as a person
who continually changed sides with the
unexpected idealism of Le Morte d'Arthur.
It remains a matter of some debate
whether this was a deliberate commentary
or an imaginative fiction influenced by the
political climate.

The sources of the romances that make up

Le Morte d'Arthur, and Malory's treatment
of those sources, correspond to some
degree with those of a poem called The
Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle;
they also both end with a similarly worded
prayer to be released from imprisonment.
Project
In
 English 9
Submitted by :

Therese Juje Songahid

Submitted to:

Ms. Elgrace adarna