A novel by an English writer of the 15th century. Sir Thomas Malory, bearing, according to later tradition, the name "The Death of Arthur", is a literary monument of twofold value. On the one hand, this is the world's best collection of chivalric novels of the so-called Breton cycle - a collection of heroic and fairy tale plots, which, in turn, go back to the myth and epic of the Celtic peoples and to the history of the western extremity of Europe in the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e. These stories contain echoes of real historical events - for example, the struggle of the British Celts against the Angles and Saxons | and traces of the mythical ideas of the ancient inhabitants of the European northwest - a whole world of deep, dark European antiquity. It is characteristic that the motives of the search for divine grace, typical of the Middle Ages, serve here as an occasion for new knightly adventures, and the Grail turns into a kind of cornucopia. The creation of the 15th century, Malory's book is, first of all, a certain result of the previous four centuries of the development of European knightly literature, its completion.