On the Genesis of Malory's Gareth

Abstract

In an article published more than forty years ago F. Whitehead showed us how Malory composed the sourceless and puzzling passage that concludes his Tale of King Arthur, the first great division of the Morte Darthur.1 The Tale relates the adventures of Gawain, Ywain, and Marhalt, each of whom goes off for a year with one of three damsels they meet at a fountain. Gawain's main adventure is his well-known encounter with Pelleas and Ettard, while Ywain and Marhalt have briefer and more routine adventures assisting damsels, freeing prisoners, and defending Arthur's name. When the year is up, the three knights return to the fountain and then go to Arthur's court, where Ywain and Marhalt become Round Table knights. In adapting this narrative from the French Suite du Merlin Malory made structural changes characteristic of his efforts to tighten narrative sequence, but in general he followed his source faithfully through most of Gawain's adventure, departing from it only for the adventures of Ywain and Marhalt, which have no known antecedents in Arthurian literature. Whitehead's task was to discover why Malory suddenly abandoned the Suite and whether the final brief adventures were to be attributed to Malory or to another of his sources. Whitehead concluded that Malory himself invented the episodes, and he traced certain events and motifs in them to passages of the Suite du Merlin that Malory did not reproduce in full. The versions of the Suite that Whitehead used were the Huth manuscript2 and the fragment that appears in MS fr. 112 of the Bibliotheque nationale. With the later discoveries of the Winchester manuscript of the Morte Darthur4 and the Cambridge manuscript of the Suite du Merlin,5 Whitehead's findings were corroborated, and Vinaver