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III

The effect of considering these cases together is to affirm both the importance
and the dangers of conjectural emendation in editing Malory's text. Kato's article
provides outstanding examples of how this principle can solve textual mysteries,
and even Vinaver, a textual conservative, recognized its usefulness.

Vinaver's intelligence and industry stand as an inspiration to all later Malory
scholars. His grand editions remain monuments of twentieth-century scholar-
ship and will doubtless continue to be the standard by which new editions of
Malory's work will be measured. And as this article shows, his conclusionsabout
the existence and nature of the archetype from which Winchester and the Caxton
independently derive remain solid.

However, in the cases discussed above, Vinaver appears to have been misled.
In the instance from "The Book of Balin," Vinaver's theory of editing prevented
him from considering the implications of the corrected mistake in his copy text:
because the corrected reading was not impossible, he apparently did not give
much thought to the fact that the Caxton contains the same mistake. 53 On the
otherhand, his emendation to wight in "The Book of Tristram" section actually
demonstratesa danger of conjectural emendation that Bédier and Vinaver sought
to avoid with their best text system of editing. Perhaps swayed by the excitement
brought about by examining the then newly-discovered Winchester manuscript
with its promise of solutions to mysteries, Vinaver introduced into the standard
edition of a major author an erroneous reading of his own creation. 54

Of these two pitfalls, however, the narrowness of Vinaver's theory is the more
harmful because it focusesattention away from the analysis of textual variants,
which is indispensable to textual criticism. Vinaver'scaret brackets alert the
reader to the hand of the editor. In all such cases the scholarly reader must judge
the validity of the emendation, which will lead to progress either as confirma-
tion or refutation. Yet the missing word in the story of Balin threated to vanish
from all consideration into the tiny type at the bottom of the page until rescued
by Kato's study, a small loss perhaps, but a distortion of a great author's syntax,
nevertheless. Applying a less narrow theory of editing and possessing a greater
appreciation of the critical importance of both major witnesses, we are in a posi-
tion to continue to recover more of Malory's exact words than ever before. Field's
new edition is a great step forward in this endeavor; it improves on Vinaver's text
in a multitude of closely-reasoned variants. This paper argues for afew more in
the ongoing effort to safeguard Malory's work from, as has been memorably put,
time's wallet of oblivion.