Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children: Essays on Arthurian Juvenilia, and: Chaucer as Children's Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children: Essays on Arthurian Juvenilia, and: Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras Gary Schmidt (bio) Barbara Tepa Lupack 1 ed. Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children: Essays on Arthurian Juvenilia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Velma Bourgeois Richmond . Chaucer as Children’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2004. It is most certainly the case that stories from the Western Middle Ages—and in fact the period itself—have provided fertile ground for authors of children's literature for well over a century. Charles Keeping's retelling of Beowulf, Rosemary Sutcliff's historically-based Arthurian novels, and recent novelizations of Merlin's story by Jane Yolen and T. A. Barron all point to long and continuing interest in the tales; recent Newbery Award–winners such as Avi's Crispin (2002) and Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice (1995), and older winners such as Marguerite D'Angeli's The Door in the Wall (1949) all point to long and continuing interest in the period. As they were in the hands of their early tellers, the stories of the Middle Ages have proven themselves to be enormously pliable; they have been adapted to different times and to different audiences. King Arthur and Merlin and Roland and Robin Hood have, in just this last century, for example, represented a chivalric call to honor and war in Henry [End Page 276] Newbolt's The Book of the Happy Warrior (1917), propounded aggressive pacifism in T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone (1938), and been portrayed as victims of childhood abuse that became formative for character in Jane Yolen's Passager (1996). What allows for this seemingly infinite pliability and adaptability? Is a story's early cultural context not necessarily determinative, but changeable? Are stories rooted in a particular historical context foreign to a young North American reader violated in some sense when that cultural context is simplified, ignored, or even changed? How are the aesthetic and ethical choices made when a story is adapted? Are a story's meanings themselves infinitely variable? To be specific, is it legitimate to retell, say, Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale," with its strong and almost bizarre anti-Semitism, for a child audience? If the bloody violence is removed, and if the anti-Semitism is removed, and perhaps even if some of the miraculous Christian elements are removed, then what is left of the story? And what is left of the way that Chaucer is using that story to characterize the Prioress? And of course the answer is, Not much. Or at least not much that unites the telling to the original. Thus, any study of the adaptation of medieval works for a child audience of any era—Victorian, Edwardian, or contemporary—has the opportunity to wrestle with the ways in which cultural context, meaning, and audience are balanced in the hands of a reteller. The ways in which a story is adapted will say a great deal about that reteller's and perhaps that culture's sense of the uses of history, the uses of story, and the needs and nature of its child audience. Which leads us to Velma Bourgeois Richmond's Chaucer as Children's Literature—in which there is not a whole lot of wrestling going on, alas. Richmond's goal is to explore the retellings of Chaucer's work—principally the Canterbury Tales—in Victorian and Edwardian retellings, and even a brief reading of her work will demonstrate her able bibliographic skills. No one studying medievalism and children's literature during these periods would be amiss to have this book on his or her shelf, for it so well lists the wealth of retellings and their editorial history. In her preface she acknowledges the aid of antiquarian booksellers in the United States and Britain, and there is a sense throughout the text of a writer who has lovingly and passionately frequented such shops and gathered an impressive array of volumes. All of this is able and useful spadework. But after spadework, the foundation is laid...