Stories from Le Morte DArthur and the Mabinogion | Page 3

to rank high as a romantic story-teller
who set a fashion destined to last for some three centuries.
So popular was his book that, not only in England, but, in an even
greater degree, on the Continent, writers were soon at work, collecting
and making more stories about the greatest of his kings, Arthur. By
some it is thought that the Normans took such delight in the knightly
deeds of Geoffrey's heroes that they spread the story in France when
they visited their homes in Normandy. Moreover, they were in a good
position to learn other tales of their favourite knights, for Normandy
bordered on Brittany, the home of the Bretons, who, being of the same
race as the Welsh, honoured the same heroes in their legends. So in
return for Geoffrey's tales, Breton stories, perhaps, found their way into
England; at all events, marvellous romances of King Arthur and his
Round Table were soon being told in England, in France, in Germany
and in Italy.
Now, to some it may seem strange that story-tellers should care to
weave their stories so constantly about the same personages; strange,
too, that they should invent stories about men and women who were
believed actually to have existed. But it must be remembered that, in
those early days, very few could read and write, and that, before
printing was invented, books were so scarce that four or five
constituted quite a library. Those who knew how to read, and were so
fortunate as to have books, read them again and again. For the rest,
though kings and great nobles might have poets attached to their courts,
the majority depended for their amusement on the professional
story-teller. In the long winter evening, no one was more welcome than
the wandering minstrel. He might be the knightly troubadour who,
accompanied by a jongleur to play his accompaniments, wandered from
place to place out of sheer love of his art and of adventure; more often,
however, the minstrel made story-telling his trade, and gained his living
from the bounty of his audience--be it in castle, market-place, or inn.
Most commonly, the narratives took the form of long rhyming poems;
not because the people in those days were so poetical--indeed, some of
these poems would be thought, in present times, very dreary
doggerel--but because rhyme is easier to remember than prose.

Story-tellers had generally much the same stock-in-trade--stories of
Arthur, Charlemagne, Sir Guy of Warwick, Sir Bevis of Southampton,
and so on. If a minstrel had skill of his own, he would invent some new
episode, and so, perhaps, turn a compliment to his patron by
introducing the exploit of an ancestor, at the same time that he made his
story last longer. People did not weary of hearing the same tales over
and over again, any more than little children get tired of nursery rhymes,
or their elders turn away from "Punch and Judy," though the same little
play has been performed for centuries. As for inventing stories about
real people, that may well have seemed permissible in an age when
historians recorded mere hearsay as actual fact. Richard III., perhaps,
had one shoulder higher than the other, but within a few years of his
death grave historians had represented him as a hunchbacked
deformity.
The romances connected with King Arthur and his knights went on
steadily growing in number until the fifteenth century; of them, some
have survived to the present day, but undoubtedly many have been lost.
Then, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the most famous of all
the Arthurian stories was given to the world in Sir Thomas Malory's
_Morte D'Arthur_. By good luck, the great printer who made it one of
his first works, has left an account of the circumstances that led to its
production. In the reign of Edward IV., William Caxton set up his
printing-press (the first in England) in the precincts of Westminster
Abbey. There he was visited, as he himself relates, by "many noble and
divers gentlemen" demanding why he had not printed the "noble
history of the Saint Grail and of the most-renowned Christian King ...
Arthur." To please them, and because he himself loved chivalry,
Caxton printed Sir Thomas Malory's story, in which all that is best in
the many Arthurian romances is woven into one grand narrative.
Since then, in our own days, the story of Arthur and his knights has
been told in beautiful verse by Lord Tennyson; but for the originals of
some of his poems it would be useless to look in Malory. The story of
Geraint and Enid, Tennyson derived from a very interesting collection
of translations of ancient Welsh stories made by Lady Charlotte Guest,
and by her called Mabinogion,[1] although not all Welsh scholars
would consider