The Story of King Arthur and His Knights by Howard Pyle

Footnotes

(*1) On My Claim to Having Discovered Howard Pyle Only Recently: It is true, as I wrote in my review, that I did once check Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood out of the library way back when I was in second grade.  But the name Howard Pyle had not stuck in my memory through the years--I only remembered that there was some old Robin Hood book in our school library that I had once attempted, and I had forgotten the name of the author.  It wasn't until doing some Internet research while reading the book that I confirmed that the Howard Pyle version was the same Robin Hood book I had once checked out all those years ago.

(*2) Complaining about how Howard Pyle's original illustrations are not in the Sterling Children's Books edition: It's particularly unfortunate, because according to Wikipedia, these original illustrations were a big part of the reception of the book:

Pyle's writing of the Arthurian stories "[used] text and illustrations to complement one another ... in the presentation of natural description".[3] Helmut Nickel, in his essay "Arms and Armor in Arthurian Films", called Pyle's illustrations "glorious", and worthy of use for inspiration for any Arthurian film.[4]

Fortunately, though, as with Robin Hood, all of Howard Pyle's original illustrations are in the public domain, and viewable on the Internet.  So at least I can see what I was missing out on.    

Why the original artwork wasn't used in the Sterling edition, I have no idea.  But I'm guessing it must have been too much money to print these elaborate pictures?

It appears, however, that there are editions of this book out there which do feature the original artwork:

Story of King Arthur and His Knights: Leatherbound Edition By Illustrated By Howard Pyle

(*3) On King Arthur's Conception: Although according to Wikipedia, there are numerous different accounts of how King Arthur was conceived.  So by going with a less salacious version, Howard Pyle is not necessarily wrong.  Just less interesting.

(*4) On Mordred's Conception: Of course, Mordred as a major plot piece in the King Arthur story won't occur until the end.  But his conception should be set up early on.  Also, again as with Arthur's conception, there are numerous versions.  (With everything that happens in the King Arthur story, there are numerous versions, so it's seldom possible for me to say Howard Pyle got anything wrong--at least not without doing a lot more research.  But you can say he went with less interesting versions.)

(*5) The Story of Merlin: This describes how Merlin was betrayed by his apprentice Vivien.  The same character was named Nimue in The Once and Future King, but (once again) searching Wikipedia shows that there are a lot of different versions of the story.

(*6) On Castles Being Hidden in the Woods: Lest I get accused of hypocrisy, I should confess that I am currently writing, on one of my other blogs, a fantasy story called The Castle in the Magic Forest, which is about (you guessed it) a castle hidden away in the forest.  So obviously I'm making use of the same fairytale type of logic.  Although in my defense, I've so far only contained myself to just one castle hidden away in the forest.  And also the whole premise behind the story is that it is a very unusual thing to have a castle in the middle of the forest.

(*7) More Thoughts on Jousting: The Knights in this book meet each other for combat at the drop of a hat.   Sometimes they fight because they are true enemies, but just as often they encounter another knight in the woods, and they want to see who is the better knight.

It was a bit unclear to me what the dangers of jousting were.  For much of the book, I was under the impression that the worst that could happen was being thrown from your horse.  But then near the end, Sir Pellias gets dangerously wounded when the iron from the jousting spear pierces his armor.  So they are apparently jousting with real spears and real iron points.  Which makes me question all the wisdom of all the times that they jousted for no real good reason.  But I guess that's just part of the story. No use trying to over-analyze fairy tales.

(*8) On the Misplaced Moralizing Tone Throughout the Book: I had the same complaint about Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang, which tried to use the ancient Greek Myths as moral examples despite the fact that these stories also cannot bear that burden.

Both of these books were published around the same time: The Story of King Arthur and His Knights was 1903, Tales of Troy and Greece was 1907.  I wonder if there was this thing about turn of the century children's authors where they felt like they had to try to make all of their stories about morality.

(*9) Why Even Bother Satirizing This Stuff? Although thinking about the idea of satire, it does strike me that there's no genre in our culture so inherently silly that someone won't think it worthwhile to  satirize.   Fairy tales, Disney Princess movies, Superhero comic books, Tom and Jerry, all have been satirized.