This brilliant Arthurian epic cuts through the mists of pagan, early Christian, and medieval splendors that have gathered about the subject and tells the authentic story of the man who may well have been the real King Arthur, Artos the Bear, the mighty warrior-king who saved the last lights of Western civilization when the barbarian darkness descended in the fifth century. Presenting early Britain as it was after the departure of the Romans, no Round...

When Morgan le Fay (Morgaine) has to sacrifice her virginity during fertility rites, the man who impregnates her is her younger brother Arthur, who she turns against when she thinks he has betrayed the old religion of Avalon.

After the Romans withdraw from Britain, chaos breaks out. The military commander, Caius Merylin Britannicus of Arthurian legend describes the fighting, as well as the political and religious intrigues.

The first book John Steinbeck read as a child was the Caxton Morte d'Arthur, and he considered it one of the most challenging tasks of his career to modernize the stories of King Arthur. "These stories are alive even in those of us who have not read them," he says. "And, in our day, we are perhaps impatient with the words and the stately rhythms of [Thomas] Malory. I wanted to set the stories down in meaning as they were written, leaving out nothing...

Explores the beginnings of the great legends of fifth-century Britain: the famed magician of Camelot and King Arthur's court.