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.

This anthology, therefore, presents two versions of each hero's exploits: Arthur appears both as emperor and warlord, and as the triumphant and tragic king of the romances, betrayed by Lancelot and Guinevere; Gawain is a traveller in a world of wonders in the Dutch version of his story, but a courtly and subtle hero in the English masterpiece Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Tristan is the single-minded lover of Iseult in his original story, and then a knight of the Round Table whose devotion to chivalry is almost as great as to his beloved.

The differing versions of these and other heroes' lives, gathered together here, show the shimmering shape-changing of the Arthurian romances and illuminate their endless capacity for spellbinding their audience, from the middle ages to the twentieth century.