Rewriting the Chronicle Tradition: The Alliterative Morte Arthure and Arthur's Sword of Peace

Abstract

The Alliterative Morte Arthure poet has revised his sources to create a poem that tells two stories of King Arthur and his conflict with Rome: the first, dominant, narrative is emphatically martial; the second, latent, narrative suggests peaceful alternatives to Arthur's warlike actions. The presence of this second narrative that functions as a critique of the king's actions becomes clear with the appearance of Arthur's sword Clarent in Mordred's hand, a moment unique in the Arthurian tradition.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.