The weapons Malory refers to vary according to his source; his dominant image of chivalry leads him to refer continuously to some weapons but to ignore others. In glossarial form, this chapter lists alphabetically all the weapons referred to in Le Morte Darthur.

A close examination of Malory's references to personal weapons in Le Morte Darthur has two advantages. First, it can elucidate the actual nature of the weapons referred to, which are not now always common knowledge. Secondly, from a more general literary point of view a glance at the detail makes more vivid Malory's characteristic manner. It shows him reliant on but very independent of sources, caring little for material detail, refusing to clutter up his text with realism. Despite the frequency of armed combat in his story, which is indeed essentially about combat, he is not interested in the technical details of fighting. It is almost always general slashing and bashing. The importance of combat is deeper. But the references to weapons used are also symptomatic of Malory's general approach and perhaps I should emphasize here that I find no advantage in a division between Malory the man, Malory the author, then an anonymous ‘storyteller’, then a ‘narrator’ who is assumed part of the time not to know what he is up to. The aim of such subdivision is to sort out the manifold inconsistencies in the narrative of Le Morte Darthur by attributing them to different expositors and the underlying assumption of such an attempt is that the work possesses an ultimately single perspective of a modern kind.