Sir
Morien: The Legend of a Knight of the Round Table. By Holly Black and Kaliis Smith. Illustrated by Ebony
Glenn. Little, Brown. $18.99.
The Arthurian legends are far more extensive and complex than the few
with which most people are familiar – Lancelot, Guinevere, the Lady of the
Lake, and a small number of others. And the tales, although often told in
simplified form, were originally decidedly for adults, being filled not only
with religious concerns (the Grail Quest being the central one) but also with
some very adult behavior on the part of King Arthur’s various knights. The code
of chivalry that is endemic to the stories is not necessarily in line with
various later schools of thought – certainly not in the case of Sir Moriaen,
whose tale dates to the 13th century and was written in Middle
Dutch. The basic story involves one of Arthur’s less-known knights, Aglovale,
who while searching for the missing Lancelot falls in love with a Moorish
princess – getting her pregnant and betrothing her, but postponing marriage
until he can honorably (under the code of chivalry) complete his quest. The
racial element of Moriaen’s conception is key to the story, with his face, body
and armor all described as equally black. Moriaen ends up on a quest for his
father, is joined in the endeavor by Lancelot and Gawain, and eventually
Aglovale is found – after which he returns to the Moorish lands to marry
Moriaen’s mother and restore lands that have been taken from her.
This does not quite work for very young readers and pre-readers, and
anyone hoping to use the tale as the basis of a book for ages 4-8 needs to do
more than simply re-tell it. So Holly Black and Kaliis Smith leave out all the
adult elements that are important in the legend, modernize the knight’s name’s
spelling to Morien, and create a super-simple and very appealing book in which
Morien and his mother are said to have tamed a dragon, gone surfing on the
Nile, and “vanquished every last vegetable on the dinner table.” Morien does go
on a quest to find his absent father, but Black and Smith emphasize that
Morien’s superb fighting abilities are not really the point of anything he
does, even though “all the knights he met seemed to want to fight” and, when
Morien did so, he “won every time.”
In this children’s book, Morien does meet Lancelot and Gawain, there are
not-very-serious fights among them with some not-very-serious bragging about
who is better than whom, and then everyone becomes friends and the three set
off on a decidedly upbeat quest – at the end of which they rescue both Aglovale
and King Arthur, who have conveniently been imprisoned in the same castle
dungeon. And the three, now fast friends and devoted companions, set off at the
end of the book on new quests in which friendship will be as important as
martial prowess.
The book is a lot of fun in fairy-tale mode, with Ebony Glenn’s simple digital illustrations keeping the story firmly in the realm of a modern portrayal, for today’s children, of “olden times” in which people are shown to have been pretty much the same as they are now and to have had pretty much the same concerns, attitudes, likes and dislikes. For pre-readers and the youngest readers, this works quite well, and the inclusion of names that young children may encounter elsewhere – King Arthur, Lancelot, Gawain – provides a touch of familiarity for a story that is not at all well-known. Sir Morien: The Legend of a Knight of the Round Table is a pleasant picture book with a small smattering of action, an underlying message of racial tolerance (which is present in the original story as well), and a nicely done emphasis on the idea that friendship and family, rather than religion and chivalric notions, are foundational to the characters’ interrelationships. The Arthurian legends may be due for a re-exploration – the last well-known one, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, dates to 1958, and the musical Camelot that is drawn from it to 1960. It is probably a stretch to think that books for young children could be in the forefront of a new focus on the material, but who knows? Black and Smith, or other children’s authors, might decide that the tale of Sir Morien barely scratches the surface of some under-appreciated and quite excellent storytelling that should still have appeal in the 21st century. Stranger things have happened.
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