It just so happens that this year I’ve been rereading Malory, slowly and a bit at a time. The one I’m using is the Norton Critical Edition, which is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s the only affordable edition I know of that retains the Winchester Manuscript’s original spelling, paragraphing, and rubrication—this is why I’m using it. On the other hand, like all the Norton Critical Editions, this one is full of “scholarship”, and Malory scholarship—so far as an amateur like me can judge—seems to be particularly retarded in the already dubious field of literary scholarship (dubious not because I think the endeavor itself is illegitimate—good critics are a joy to read—but because so much of what’s done these days seems like crap). For one thing, more or less exactly nothing is known about the author of Le Morte d’Arthur, except that he was a prisoner during the writing of at least some of it. Scholars think they can identify the individual given a decent amount of circumstantial evidence, but the attribution is by no means certain. The one they pin the work on himself has left behind only a handful of documented details. But this hasn’t stopped more than a century of scholars from speculating wildly about him, and then thoroughly psychoanalysing and deconstructing the figment of their speculations, as though this activity had anything to do with the book. And there’s the matter of how they read the book itself when they finally get to it. The Norton Edition contains articles with names like “Malory and Rape”, “Counter-Romance: Civil Strife and Father-Killing in the Prose Romances”, and “Enchanted Ground: The Feminine Subtext in Malory”. Scholars like to read Malory as a biographical or historical document, a mine of data about perceived 15th-century gender relations, a lesson in intertexuality, a puzzle for modern notions of authorship, an employment opportunity—apparently anything but what it is: a strange, beautiful, exciting, and moving book, the first great work of prose fiction in English. It seems like most of them could profit from a rereading of Tolkien’s essay on Beowulf.

The Roman Emperor having demanded tribute from King Arthur, the offended Britains decide to invade Europe instead, citing Constantine and Brutus, among others, for the claim of the English throne to the Empire. They land near Mont-St-Michel (surely one of the most awesome places in France even today), where there lives, instead of St Michael, a giant who has been terrorising the local populace. King Arthur goes in search of this local “saint” and after a terrible struggle, finally kills him in single combat. Just after the battle Sir Kay and Sir Bedwere find him.

“In fayth,” seyde Sir Bedwere, “this is a foule carle”—and caught the “corseynte” [“holy body”] oute of the Kynges armys; and there he seyde, “I have mykyll wondir, and Mychael be of suche a makyng, that ever God wolde suffir hym to abyde in Hevyn—and if seyntis be suche that servys Jesu, I woll never seke for none, be the fayth of my body!”

This hilarious aside, just after a really horrifying fight with a monster and just before a massive battle against the decrepit and sissified Roman legions, is one of those many moments that sends the book over the line from Important to Great. I only wish Norton would put in some scholarship that would actually help me enjoy the book more.