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.