Well, Rothkoid, what I said earlier was The Grail Quest or Tristram (or Tristran) and Isolde (or Isaud).
Those would be the two elements that interest me, but I'm open to other suggestions. (The rise of Arthur/Excalibur? Gareth's tale? The invasion of Rome? Lancelot & Guinivere's affair?)
The Grail Quest tends to get a bit repetitive and confusing, since you're following the adventures of several groups of knights told sort of out-of-sequence (lots of "Meanwhile, in Gawain's camp..." captions would be necessary in the comic book version).
It's the most overtly allegorical section of the book, the most concerned with the spiritual elements of knighthood, and what it means to be a man of the cross *and* and man of the sword. There's a lot of mystical imagery, and Galahad is a badass of a sort you don't see so often in fiction anymore.
Tristram & Isolde, on the other hand, is a more straightforward adventure tale, but seems to me to have a holographic relationship to the rest of the book; the action primarily takes place in Cornwall, as sort of a "lesser England," and deals with a disruptive love triangle, just like the affair between Lancelot & Guinevere that eventually undoes King Arthur's court. Tristram is often described as the greatest worldly knight save Lancelot (sort of a lesser reflection). Unlike Arthur, however, King Mark is really a nasty piece of work.
And unlike the Lancelot/Guinevere story, there's a really puzzling relationship between Tristram and his foil, Sir Palomides. Palomides is a Saracen (Muslim) convert to Christianity who can't quite fit in in the Christian world. He loves Isolde and admires Tristram above all other knights, but Isolde doesn't love him, and Tristram keeps beating him in combat. There's something instructional about his story; he's never depicted as a villain plain and simple, but as a sympathetic character struggling with faith and duty and love.
Isolde is a fairly well developed character; the women in the Grail Myth tend to be more archetypal (although there are some tricky exceptions along the way).
There's a lot of helm shattering in both stories, and a lot of mystical imagery - T&I is more familiarly narrative, but still loaded with symbolism, while Galahad & the Grail is more weirdly allegorical, so it takes more effort.
Oh, and if anyone wants a free copy of the book, Project Gutenberg offers it as a two-part download.
It's also all available online here.
Reference aids:
This page is a wealth of information, with links to all sorts of information & critical perspectives, including these teaching notes, explaining, roughly, what goes on in each book of the Morte, and this essay, "The Writable Lesbian and Lesbian Desire in Malory's Morte Darthur" hosted on a site run by my old alma mater, where I first read this stuff. (sniff!) It references Isolde, but my academese is so rusty, I'm not sure how central she is. |
