King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table

This edition includes a cycle of the most famous legends about the British King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table as told by two 19th-century writers, James Knowles and Henry Gilbert. The book was first published in 1860 and has been reprinted several times since. The text is translated by Eduard Andreevich Granström. The book is decorated with illustrations by several artists: Walter Crane, Lancelot Speed, Catherine Grave and William Russell Flint.
For the British, King Arthur, the wizard Merlin, the beautiful Guinevere, the Knights of the Round Table and other heroes of the so-called Arthurian cycle of legends are as significant and important as their famous Bylinny bogatyrs are for Russians. Arthur is the central hero of the British epic. He is the legendary leader of the Britons, about the possible real prototype of which historians still argue. Mentions of King Arthur appear in Welsh legends of the V-VI centuries A.D. The first literary records of this folklore date back to the Middle Ages. About the exploits of the valiant knight wrote in the XII century in French such authors of courtesan novels as Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. They are probably the ones who invented most of the characters that surround Arthur. At any rate, these characters are not previously mentioned anywhere. In the second third of the XV century. English writer Thomas Malory gathered together all the legends, tales and written in French novels about Arthur and his knights. Having processed the material he published in 1485 the book "The Death of Arthur", which for subsequent generations became a kind of encyclopedia of the Arthurian myth. Special interest in it arose in the Victorian era. To the plots set forth in "The Death of Arthur" more than once turned to the Pre-Raphaelite artists. Illustrations for this cycle painted Aubrey Beardsley. Malory wrote in late Middle English. In modern English, the stories he collected about King Arthur were set down in 1860 by the literary scholar James Knowles. Following in his father's footsteps, he trained as an architect and even had time to work in the field, designing several mansions. However, the craving for literature prevailed, and Knowles for many years led the literary magazine he created "Nineteenth Century". The next step in popularizing the image of Arthur and related characters made the English writer Henry Gilbert. By age, he was old enough to be Knowles's son. Gilbert wrote mainly for a children's audience. His books about pirates or the conquest of Mexico are still published today. With his literary and stylistic treatment of the Arthurian cycle of legends, the stories of his exploits became available to a wider audience. In this edition, the cycle of the most famous legends about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is embellished with illustrations by three British artists who lived at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Walter Crane was a representative of Art Nouveau, Lancelot Speed was renowned as a fine illustrator of Victorian books, and William Russell Flint was a recognized master of watercolor.