Arthur’s death and departure by boat mark the end of his rule and the passage of his story into legend. The account links the king’s final fate to the deaths of Mordred and the fellowship of knights, then leaves his departure in the keeping of three queens who receive him in a barge. The loss is measured not only in the king’s disappearance but in the ruined political and chivalric world that his death leaves behind.

Causes and Background

The ending belongs to a catastrophe whose human cost is made explicit by Queen Guenever when Sir Launcelot finds her at Almesbury. She says that her relationship with Launcelot brought about the war and the death of her noble lord, Arthur. She interprets the destruction as the consequence of their love and asks Launcelot to leave her, return to his own realm, and keep it from further war and ruin. Her account makes the king’s death part of a larger collapse: private attachment has become inseparable from public conflict, and the losses extend across the kingdom’s fellowship of knights.

The narrative also frames the catastrophe through the failure of the ideals that once governed the Round Table. Arthur had charged its knights to avoid outrage and murder, flee treason, show mercy, and succour women and gentlewomen; they swore to uphold these obligations at Pentecost each year. His later judgment of Sir Damas likewise shows him using royal authority to restrain the mistreatment of errant knights and free twenty prisoners. Against those stated standards, Guenever’s acknowledgment of the war’s consequences gives the ending the force of a broken covenant, not simply a change of ruler.

The King’s Death and Departure

The surviving narrative index records that Arthur kills Sir Mordred and is then received by three queens in a barge. These brief notices establish the decisive sequence: the king’s final encounter with his enemy ends in Mordred’s death, but Arthur does not return to ordinary rule. The queens’ arrival marks the transition from the battlefield’s political world to an unresolved departure by water.

The evidence does not describe the circumstances of Arthur’s death in detail, nor does it identify the three queens by name in this account. Its restraint leaves the boat as the defining image of the event: Arthur is taken from the world of his court and kingdom, while the narrative records reception and departure rather than a settled account of his final destination.

Consequences and Aftermath

Guenever’s later meeting with Launcelot gives the king’s death an intimate and political aftermath. She refuses renewed companionship, asks him to turn away from her, and urges him to prevent further war in his own realm. Launcelot answers that he will not marry another woman and says he will follow her into a life devoted to religious discipline. Their separation is presented as a response to the ruin associated with their relationship, though it cannot restore the king or the knights already lost.

After Guenever dies, Launcelot explains that his grief is for the king and queen laid together, and for his own pride and failure, which he believes helped bring them low. He describes the pair as unmatched among living Christians and says that remembering their kindness alongside his own unkindness overwhelms him. The scene does not retell Arthur’s departure, but it clarifies its enduring consequence: the king’s death remains bound to the collapse of the court, the loss of its foremost knights, and the penitential lives of those who survive.

Narrative Significance

The account holds two endings in tension. Mordred’s death is recorded as a definite result of the final conflict, while Arthur’s reception by the queens in a barge leaves the king’s own passage unresolved. That contrast makes the episode both a political ending and an open legend: Arthur’s reign has ended in catastrophe, yet his departure is represented as a crossing rather than an ordinary conclusion.

The later printed history of Le Morte Darthur also cautions against treating every version of the ending as identical. Caxton’s first edition was printed at Westminster in 1485, while later editions introduced changes; the 1634 edition, for example, remodelled the preface, divided the work into three parts, modernised its language, and made extensive additions and variations. Southey’s 1817 edition claimed exact reproduction of Caxton but supplied seventeen missing pages from later material without identifying them as substitutions, and those passages were long mistaken for Caxton’s text. Dr. H. Oskar Sommer’s 1889–1891 edition set out the Althorp copy alongside collations, helping distinguish the original text from later editorial interventions. The king’s final fate thus reaches readers through a textual history in which the ending’s wording and framing require attention to the edition being read.