The definitive version

There are some stories you just know.  How?

We were surprised, a few months ago, when one of our students didn’t know who Don Quixote was.  We were even more surprised when an informal survey of his generation revealed that only one had even heard the name, and we suspect she Googled it surreptitiously when we weren’t looking.  No one of our generation would have been ignorant of the character and at least some of the episodes in the novel.  But how?

The novel itself is long; our copy runs to something like 900 pages of small type.  And it’s in Spanish.  Moreover, it’s the Spanish of over four hundred years ago, the time of Shakespeare.  It’s safe to say that none of our High School classmates had read more than a few lines of it.  (Those were an extract given to the highest-level Spanish students, and they struggled with it.)  The novel was available in translation, but still, few had read it even in that form. At the same time, we all knew about the hopelessly idealistic knight, and didn’t need an explanation of the phrase “tilting at windmills.”  Somehow the stories were in the air.  We knew about them without being able to identify quite where that knowledge had come from.

That got us thinking about King Arthur and the Round Table.  This is another cycle of stories, material that we think our present students really should be familiar with.  But where should we point them?  The development of that series through the Middle Ages has provided material for many a graduate thesis, so we’re not even going to outline it here.  Probably the definitive version for the legend as we have it was written by Thomas Malory and printed in 1485, one of the first books in English.  So it’s an English even more archaic than Shakespeare, and not at all a short read.  (Some people enjoy it just for its archaicisms.)  It’s not where most people learn about Arthur, or learned about him when we were young.  The musical Camelot did something to popularize the cycle, but we already knew the story.  It was probably, we think, a mixture of Saturday-morning cartoons and Disney versions, retellings from a number of sources.  And here is one: Bullfinch’s The Age of Chivalry or Legends of King Arthur, from 1858.  It was part of the Victorian discovery of the knight as the ideal of manly virtue.

Next to Bullfinch on the library shelf is The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, by Howard Pyle, dated 1883.  The original of the Robin Hood stories seems to be found in several Border Ballads collected no earlier than the end of the eighteenth century by Thomas Percy.  One of our tutors has inherited a book version from 1880, and we’ve enjoyed the originals.  But–and this is important–none of us even knew these existed in our youth.  And yet we were already familiar with the details: archery contests, the life of the outlaws in the forest, robbing the rich to give to the poor.

There are no doubt many other stories in the air.  But our tutor is now facing the problems that arise when his students have been breathing a different air.  Where can he find the definitive edition?