The task here undertaken is no light one, nor is success in it assured. Malory has an individuality of his own which gives a peculiar charm to his work, and to retain this in a modernized version is the purpose with which we set out and which we hope to accomplish. The world of to-day is full of fiction, endless transcripts of modern life served up in a great variety of palatable forms. Our castle-living forefathers were not so abundantly favored. They had no books,--and could not have read them if they had,--but the wandering minstrel took with them the place of the modern volume, bearing from castle to court, and court to castle, his budget of romances of magic and chivalry, and delighting the hard-hitting knights and barons of that day with stirring ballads and warlike tales to which their souls rose in passionate response.
In the "Morte Darthur" is preserved to us the pith of the best of those old romances, brought into a continuous narrative by one who lived when chivalry yet retained some of its vital hold on the minds of men, and who, being a knight himself, could enter with heartfelt sympathy into the deeds of the knights of an earlier age. Certainly many of the readers of modern fiction will find a pleasure in turning aside awhile from the hot-pressed thought of the nineteenth-century novel to this fresh and breezy outcrop from the fiction of an earlier day; with the double purpose of learning on what food the minds of our ancestors were fed, and of gaining a breath of wild perfume from the far-off field of the romance of chivalry. That the story of Arthur and his Knights can arouse in modern readers the intense interest with which it was received by mediæval auditors is not to be expected. We are too far removed in time and manners from the age of knight-errantry to enter deeply into sympathy with its unfamiliar ways. Yet a milder interest may still be awakened in what gave our predecessors such enthusiastic delight, and some at least may turn with pleasure from the most philosophic of modern novels to wander awhile through this primitive domain of thought.
To such we offer this work, which we have simply sought to make easy reading, with little further liberty with Malory's quaint prose than to put it into a modern dress, and with the hope that no such complete divorce exists between the world of the present and that of the past as to render the exploits of King Arthur and his Round Table Knights dull, wearisome, and profitless reading, void of the human interest which they once possessed in such large and satisfying measure.