"The image of Arthur has haunted the poets and writers of western Europe for nearly nine centuries, and there is no sign of an end to the reign of the 'once and future king'. Sir Thomas Malory, creating his masterpiece Le Morte Darthur half a millennium ago, welded together the widely varied stories he knew to make a continuous narrative. This anthology of the legends of Arthur does the opposite: it aims to show the diversity of those legends, and to illustrate the ways in which poets and writers created new stories around the great heroes, or told the same story in different ways."--Jacket.