The Alliterative Morte Arthure - the title given to a four-thousand line poem written sometime around 1400 - was part of a medieval Arthurian revival which produced such masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory's prose Morte D'Arthur. The Death of King Arthur deals in the cut-and-thrust of warfare and politics: the ever-topical matter of Britain's relationship with continental Europe, and of its military interests overseas.
Simon Armitage is already the master of this alliterative music, as his earlier version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2006) so resourcefully and exuberantly showed. His new translation restores a neglected masterpiece of story-telling, by bringing vividly to life its entirely medieval mix of ruthlessness and restraint.
- ISBN10 0571249477
- ISBN13 9780571249473
- Publish Date 5 January 2012 (first published 12 December 2011)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 11 March 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Faber & Faber
- Edition Main
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 192
- Language English