Mabie, H. W.: Norse Stories from the Eddas.
Marshall, H. E.: The Story of William Tell; The Story of Roland.
Matthews, Agnes R.: Seven Champions of Christendom (St. George and the Dragon).
Morris, William: Sigurd the Volsung.
Nepos, C.: Tales of Great Generals.
Niebuhr, B. G.: Greek Heroes.
Pyle, Howard: Some Merry Adventures of Robin Hood; Stories of King Arthur and His Knights.
Ragozin, Z. A.: Siegfried and Beowulf.
Tappan, Eva M.: In the Days of Alfred the Great; In the Days of William the Conqueror.
Warren, Maude Radford: Robin Hood and His Merry Men.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Story Interests of Childhood (Continued)
D. ROMANTIC PERIOD
At about the age of twelve or thirteen the child’s rougher instincts begin to soften. Romance and sentiment develop. He becomes particular about his appearance. It is less of a task than formerly to get the boy to wash his face and hands, and he has not the antipathy toward civilized attire that he had in the days when Robinson Crusoe was the hero. Instead, he manifests a liking for being dressed according to prevailing modes, sometimes changing so suddenly from a dirty cave dweller into a dandy that it is like the metamorphosis from grub to butterfly. He craves socks and ties of bright colors and clothes that attract attention. If fashion prescribes peg-topped or straight, spare trousers, he wants them extremely wide or extremely narrow, and is willing to have his chin sawed unmercifully if high collars are the vogue, not because of a fit of hysteria, but because he has entered the period when sex awakens. He is becoming interested in the girls and wishes to be dressed in a manner that will cause them to be interested in him; and very often his taste for literature changes as completely as his personal habits. He desires stories of a higher type of heroism than those he craved in an earlier period, stories of romance and chivalry, and now is the time to give him the epic in its entirety, because of the deep racial emotions therein expressed.
He has had many of the adventure tales from the epics during the earlier period. Now he is ready for those tinged with romance, those pervaded by a spirit of fiery idealism in which knights risk limb and life in loyalty to principle, for fealty to king, or in defense of some fair lady. Percival seeking the Grail is a finer hero to him than Percival battling with the Red Knight, and the vow of the men of the Round Table means something because he can understand it. In a vague, indefinite way romance is touching his own life, and his noblest emotions are awakened by the noble words:
To reverence the king, as if he were
Their conscience, and their conscience as their king,
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honor his own word as if his God’s,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds.
Boys and girls in the heroic period enjoyed only the Arthurian stories that glorify physical bravery, those of jousting and conflict into which women do not enter. But now they delight in such tales as those of Geraint and Enid, of Launcelot and Elaine, and some of the adventures of Tristram.
Here a word of caution is necessary. Like the Old Testament stories, these romantic tales will arouse the noblest emotions and highest ideals if given with wisdom, but if told thoughtlessly may create an almost morbid desire for the vulgar. Therefore the non-professional narrator should use for his work some retold version of the King Arthur tales instead of adapting from Le Morte d’Arthur, because there is much in the original that should be eliminated in presenting it to those in the adolescent period. The Pyle or Radford editions are excellent, likewise The Boy’s King Arthur, by Sidney Lanier, each of which keeps the spirit of the poem, but omits everything objectionable.
The story of King Arthur, embracing as it does the Grail legend, should be followed by the German tale of “Parsifal,”—not the Wagner opera version, but the original medieval legend, “The Knightly Song of Songs” of Wolfram von Eschenbach. This has been retold beautifully by Anna Alice Chapin in The Story of Parsifal, a book with which every child in the romantic period should be familiar. Miss Guerber, in her Legends of the Middle Ages, relates the tale of Titurel and the Holy Grail, which will be helpful to the narrator because of the light it throws on the origin of the legend. But for a telling version there is none equal to that of Miss Chapin, none in which the lofty chivalric spirit of the medieval poem is portrayed so faithfully.
The romantic portion of all the national epics, as well as that of Le Morte d’Arthur, is excellent material for the story-teller in the early adolescent period. The Nibelungenlied, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and parts of Jerusalem Delivered feed boys and girls in the early teens as pure adventure stories fed them a year or two before. And if the narrator would have his young listeners enjoy the epical tales to the uttermost, let him quote freely from the epic itself as he tells them. During this age, when romance and sentiment run high and life is beheld through a rainbow-hued glamour, poetry is a serious and beautiful thing. The frequent interpolation of it into a story heightens the pleasure in that story, and young people listen with the gleaming eyes of intense feeling to words like these of Siegfried:
“Ever,” said he, “your brethren I’ll serve as best I may,
Nor once while I have being, will head on pillow lay,
Till I have done to please them whate’er they bid me do;
And this, my Lady Kriemhild, is all for love of you.”
Moreover, young people should understand that the epics were first given to the race in poetic form, and in leading them to that knowledge we can lead them also to an appreciation of the majestic, sweeping measures of the Iliad or Odyssey or Nibelungenlied, which is in itself worth thought and labor on the part of the story-teller.
The Langobardian myths, Dietrich von Bern, the story of Gudrun, of Charlemagne and Frastrada and Huon of Bordeaux, are intensely interesting in this period. Joan of Arc never fails to charm, while tales of the minnesingers, the troubadours, and the Crusaders open gates into lands of enchantment.
Oh, the romance in the lives of these medieval wanderers! Walther von der Vogelweide, too poor to buy him a coat, yet swaying the thought of the German lands; Bernard of Ventadour, among the flaming roses of Provence, making music at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine; Richard Cœur de Lion, riding with a singing heart toward Palestine; De Coucy, Frederick Barbarossa, and scores of others who lived and achieved in that distant, colorful time! Their lives are gleaming pages in the history of their age, and their stories are glorious ones to give to boys and girls who crave the romantic.
Wonderful, too, is the account of the Children’s Crusade, of Stephen, a happy shepherd on the hills of Cloyes, and that other lad of Cologne, who, fired with desire to restore to the Christian world places the Moslem had defiled, sailed away with their followers to shipwreck and slavery. In connection with this tale the children should hear, if possible, some of the music from Gabriel Pierne’s great cantata, The Children’s Crusade. It will give them a clearer, more vivid idea of the preaching of the boy apostle, of the gathering of the company, of the pilgrimage along the Rhine and Seine, of their rejoicing upon reaching the port of Marseilles, and of the light of noble purpose that glorified their eyes as