10 books like Le Morte D'Arthur

Arthur Rex tells the same story as Le Morte D’Arthur, but in a radically different way. Where Mallory idolizes the knights and nobles of Arthur’s court, Thomas Berger paints them in the most unflattering light possible. Everyone is a cretin, a sex maniac, or both, and their backwards morals are used as clever mirrors of our own modern moral failings. Arthur Rex is probably the funniest version of the Arthurian Legend that I’ve read. It’s got its tongue firmly lodged in its cheek. Even so, the ending managed to make me cry, so props to Berger for capturing the full range of emotions with this one.

I read The Mists of Avalon while on a backpacking trip in Hawaii. Thus the mists described so vividly in the novel are forever intertwined with the morning mists on the north shore of Kauai. 

Atmospheric and compelling are the first two words that come to mind in describing this novel. Stereotypes about women, such as Morgan le Fay (usually portrayed as a one-dimensional villainess) are completely dismantled.

Instead all of Bradley’s characters, both male and female, are as real as flesh and blood people, caught in a tumultuous time period.

Like Dances with Wolves, The Mists of Avalon spoke to me deeply about the sadness of a dominant culture completely suppressing a richer, older one that was much more in harmony with nature.

Sir Gawaine is one of the most interesting knights of the Round Table because of how imperfect he is. He’s not the strongest knight in the world -- that’s Lancelot -- and he’s definitely not the most virtuous -- that’s Galahad, who sucks -- he’s a working-class joe who routinely gets in over his head because he loves to swing swords more than he likes thinking about consequences. Sir Gawaine and the Green knight is a story of one of the knight’s most famous capers, and it does not disappoint. The original story was written in Old English, which is barely even English to be honest, so you’re going to need a translation to read it, and who better to translate such a story than J.R.R. Tolkien himself. Yes, that Tolkien. When he wasn’t making elves and humans kiss each other, he was a prolific philologist and translator, and The… show more.

Also a twist on a classic tale, The Once and Future King delves into Arthurian legends and forms the basis of many more recent interpretations in film and television.

Often speaking affectionately to the reader, White decidedly takes the role of a wizened elder recounting important stories of ages gone by to the younger generation.

This is a vivid, dramatic and well-paced version of the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It is set in a legendary time full of castles such as Tintagel, or as here: "Meanwhile Sir Lancelot had lain six days and six nights prisoned in the vault below Sir Meliagraunce’s castle, and every day there came a maiden who opened the trap and let food and drink down to him on the end of a silken cord. And every day she whispered to him, sweet and tempting…" I love the resonance of Sutcliff’s writing; rereading it just now, I couldn’t resist reading it out loud just for the beauty of the sound of the language—something I’m very conscious of because I write poetry.

Who doesn’t love a new take on the Arthurian Legend of King Arthur? This fairly light-hearted story tells of King Arthur and his friends reincarnated in modern times. Age-old legends, it seems, never die… and now present-day teenagers Will and Elaine must fight the same battles for good to triumph over evil. It’s a modern twist on a classic love story, and a lot of fun.

Silverian Stables isn’t technically a ranch, as it is in a fantasy story and the stable is more a place where the horses of the knights, travelers, and other high-born’s horses are kept, but in only a few pages I was sold and ready to start the long trek up Mount Saddle. The stables become a focal point in book two where the Stable Master is one of the main characters. We get a loving peek into her life and the lives of those caring for the horses. The horses that fill the stables feel like ones I have known all my life and am dying to ride. Even though it is fantasy romance, it reads like any great small-town story, just with an added hint of magic.

Oliver Padel is a linguist specializing in early Welsh and Cornish and as such the ideal guide to Arthur’s presence in early Celtic literature. While acknowledging that the earliest datable instances come in the Historia Brittonum in 829-30, his view is that Arthur began as a figure of Celtic mythology and was only later converted into a pseudo-historical figure fixed in the past. In that sense, the early Arthur is the individual in the Historia Brittonum in the section called Mirabilia (Wonders), where he is used as a way of explaining landscape features and the names given to them, who has then been adapted to be a British general fighting 12 battles in chapter 56. This has strongly influenced ways of looking at the evidence in recent years and it deserves our attention.

Personally, I don’t agree with it for two reasons. First of all is the whole issue of… show more.

Green’s book is a great read, very scholarly, and inclusive of a great deal of comparatively early source material on Arthur. If you want a good discussion of how you could go from a figure of Celtic myth to one of history, again and again in multiple stories, this is the best guide to that journey and deserves a hearing, whether ultimately you agree with it or not. You’ll probably not be surprised to hear that I am not persuaded, despite my considerable respect for the arguments made herein, largely for the same reasons as I noted in looking at Padel’s work above. It is extraordinarily difficult to determine whether Arthur passed from ‘history’ to folk-lore or folk-lore to ‘history’, better in my view to not distinguish these as two separate genres with this much clarity.

As usual, it all comes down to the Historia Brittonum, which is called… show more.

This is a volume of papers by lots of different scholars each speaking to their own specialism. This provides a brilliant introduction to numerous parts of Arthur’s story as it began and was then carried through inside the Celtic World both before and after its eventual transmission to England and France, where it took off so spectacularly. Reading through this provides insight into the development of Arthur in what must be assumed to have been his original setting. The book is getting a bit old now and there is a replacement in the offing but it is still a great place to start and opens all sorts of exciting doors through which to pass and explore.