Mark Twain first encountered Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur in 1884, in a Rochester bookstore. It ‘is the quaintest and sweetest of all books’, he wrote his daughter later that year, and he told a friend in 1906 that it was ‘one of the most beautiful things ever written in English’. In 1888 Twain included Malory in a list of his nine favorite authors. At the same time, in his Connecticut Yankee (published 1889), Twain had a lot of fun parodying Malory's ‘limited’ and ‘monotonous’ vocabulary.

Mark Twain is not the only commentator to have fallen into self-contradiction after reading Malory's Morte. In literary analysis, Malory's stock phrases have often been dismissed as stale and repetitive. A. C. Baugh, for example, described them as ‘the innumerable formulas and commonplaces – knights stiff in strife, ladies white as foam, swords that well could bite … [that were] common to every author of a mediaeval romance. They were in every one's ears, known to every one who heard romances read or recited. Chaucer knew them well enough to satirize them’. Having noted that stock phrases common in English romance show up also in the Paston letters, P. J. C. Field concluded that the phrases were part of the vernacular of the day and that Malory used them as the ‘readiest and easiest way’ to tell his story.

At the same time, like Twain, scholars have acknowledged the beauty of Malory's prose. Field has commented, for example, that Malory's style ‘is the result of a complex of elements too heterogeneous and irregular in their combination to be the results of conscious art; but the careless yet subtle amalgam into which its elements have been fused will bear comparison with the greatest and most distinctive styles in English prose’.

How can a book be so great if its language is endlessly repetitive and lacks conscious art? The answer involves a closer look at how Malory deploys his stock phrases – a look that will reveal a system behind this repetitiveness that drives much of the book's impact.