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

Perhaps no other Arthurian text simultaneously invites and frustrates definition and interpretation as does the Alliterative Morte Arthure. (1) The questions of date, genre, and meaning--to name just a few--have produced a wide variety of responses among those who study this fascinating poem, which exists uniquely in the so-called Thornton manuscript. Is it a fourteenth-or fifteenth-century poem? Are its topical allusions to Edward III? Richard II? neither? both? (2) Is it a chronicle, a romance, an epic, a tragedy? (3) A lesson in the vagaries of Fortune, or a cautionary tale of over-ambition? (4) And finally (and most vexingly): is it a poem of praise or condemnation? In this article, I would like to address the last question and suggest that the Alliterative Morte Arthure tells two stories simultaneously; one narrative confers critique on Arthur and his actions, while the other points to potential positive outcomes that are, tragically, never realized. It would seem safe to say that the Alliterative Morte is, on one level, a poem about war of many varieties: just war in response to a threat from without, tyrannical conquest and punishment inflicted upon one's own people, military action in response to treason from within, and single combat against a monstrous foe, to name just four types. Yet, for all its overt emphasis on war, the Alliterative Morte, as many critics have pointed out, is a poem that also depends heavily on the idea of peace to construct its narrative. (5) In this respect, it follows in the chronicle tradition of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and La[??]amon, wherein we see peace and war generally represented as equally important components in a repeating cycle, even if less narrative space is given to the peacetime activities than those of war. Peace is the period before and after war when the court comes together in celebration and affirmation of its values and identity, knights may go out on adventures, and the community grows and flourishes. Too much peace, and knights grow lazy, leisure turns to corruption, and the community's state of prosperity and contentment becomes overripe and threatens to turn to rot. War must come again in order to restore the natural balance. Andrew Lynch has recently argued that 'the Alliterative Morte Arthure ... is demonstrably conscious of the traditional cyclical structure, but employs it in unusual ways', (6) further contending that the poem