Retellings
Why would you listen to a story you already know?
Last week we mentioned those stories that you just know, that you’ve picked up without really being able to say where they came from. They’re in the air of your culture. For us, there’s Don Quixote, Robin Hood, and King Arthur with his Knights of the Round Table as examples. But our tutor faces a difficulty with these: many of his students come from a different culture. They’ve not breathed the same (metaphorical) air as we did, and tales of Medieval Europe are foreign to them. He thinks they should know something about the stories, but sending his students to the original source is not a practical idea. Don Quijote de la Mancha is in archaic Spanish, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur archaic English, and both are very long works. The Border Ballads that are the extant source of the Robin Hood stories are also in an unfamiliar form of English, and extended narrative verse is not always digestible.
To our rescue come the Victorians. Robin Hood was retold by Howard Pyle; our volume bears the date of 1883. Next to it on the shelf is Bullfinch’s The Age of Chivalry or Legends of King Arthur, from 1858. While both of these use language that was archaic for the time, it was purposely so, and doesn’t get in the way of the story. And going beyond the Middle Ages, we have Murray’s Manual of Mythology, an almost encyclopedic treatment of Greek, Norse and Hindu divine figures. The motivation for these volumes almost certainly included the explosion of literacy of the nineteenth century, creating a great demand for books in English.
Another motivation, unfortunately, is Victorian tidy-mindedness. It’s clear in Murray. The various tales concerning the Greek gods and heroes disagree in details, and are sometimes flatly contradictory; Murray reconciles them (though sometimes he acknowledges variants). The frustratingly allusive and unclear references in the Poetic Edda are reduced to a clear story-line for Norse mythology. Included are speculations on social anthropology as revealed by the stories. No doubt it’s an invaluable reference, but we find ourselves looking for another version to read.
Well, why? We already know the outlines of these, the stories in the air of the ancient Greeks. Why look for another version? You know the answer. You’ll listen to the same story more than once, if it’s a good one. You’ll seek another version if there’s a chance the author has added something, a viewpoint or a flavor, that wasn’t in the ones you’re familiar with. [This is a particular virtue of Shakespeare: while his plays wrestle brilliantly with the great themes, the details are left to the troupe (or your own imagination). Richard III can be a 1930s dictator, instead of a Medieval tyrant.] Already knowing the stories means that we can concentrate on the telling. And each retelling reveals more about the current author and times than, perhaps, he or she might wish.
