from Medieval Academy News

“Medieval” books for young readers
by Jane Beal

In London, on a rainy day in July, I exited the British Library and headed straight for King’s Cross train station. I was done with manuscripts, but wanted a book: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I found it in a bookshop not far from the spot where Harry himself begins so many of his adventures (you may know the platform number). I devoured this third story in J. K. Rowling’s series with at least as much enthusiasm as thousands of children the world over.

Harry appeals to his readers, in part, because he lives in two worlds. He’s a boundary-crosser, moving between the modern city of London and the magical Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a place where the classical and medieval past comes alive in various forms: dragons, unicorns, centaurs, a teacher named Athena, an Order of Merlin, and so on. Do these elements make Harry’s story “medieval”?

If so, his adventures arise from an older tradition. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, both medievalists by training, wrote the classic modern fantasy stories that paved the way for Harry’s success. Lewis’s young Queen Lucy the Valiant, perhaps his most memorable character, is one of many young heroines defeating evil and defending good in medieval books for young readers.

In Robin McKinley’s Beauty, a bookish girl named Honour (nicknamed Beauty) reads Greek, Latin, French, the Faerie Queen, and Le Morte D’Arthur while converting her Beast (who forgets his name) to love. McKinley’s changes to the traditional fairy-tale emphasize the heroine’s “girl power,” her inner resourcefulness in the face of medieval challenges. Karen Cushman develops this same theme in Catherine, Called Birdy. The book takes the form of a journal from the year 1290, told from fourteen-year-old Birdy’s point of view. Daily entries include stories of Jewish visitors, drama pageants, and macaronic swearing (“corpus bones!”). Birdy’s Margery-Kempe-like liveliness has few parallels. Rosemary Sutcliff’s Iseult, from the story of Tristan and Iseult, is an older, wiser heroine, who uses language reminiscent of the medieval romances when she speaks, and much of the story’s plot turns on her words.

Of course, modern renderings of Arthurian tales are almost a distinct genre. The Arthurian Handbook provides good descriptions of most of these. Classic examples include Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and T. H. White’s Once and Future King (which influenced the film Camelot and Disney’s cartoon feature The Sword in the Stone). Mary Stewart tells the Arthur story from Merlin’s point of view until her fourth book, in which she creates the first sympathetic Mordred. Sharan Newman and Persia Woolley write trilogies focused on Guinevere, while Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon relates Arthurian matter from a variety of female perspectives.

Occasionally, authors interweave Arthurian matter or medieval history with fantasy and science fiction. In Domesday Book, Connie Willis creates the character of Kivrin, who travels back in time from the twenty-first century to the fourteenth in search of a cure for the plague. Following Tolkien’s example, other authors prefer to create secondary worlds rather than confine themselves to the historical constraints of our own. Terry Brooks, Stephen R. Donaldson, and David Eddings have all written in this vein. Brooks’s Shannara trilogy, Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, and Eddings’s Belgariad books all bear the stamp of Tolkien’s influence. In Brooks’s Magic Kingdom and Donaldson’s Mordant’s Need series, the authors demonstrate intriguing and entertaining originality while maintaining clear connections to medieval material.

Some Internet sites provide annotated bibliographies that include these and other books. The Multnomah County Library (Portland, Oreg.) has compiled a short annotated bibliography of books, some on medieval themes, for young people who like Harry Potter. Among my favorites here are Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, Peter Beagle’s Last Unicorn, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, Madeline L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time, Patricia McKillip’s Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and Robin McKinley’s Hero and the Crown (http://www.multnomah.lib.or.us/lib/kids/harrypotter.html).

Another site (with rather strong commercial links to amazon.com), Jodie Apeseche’s Middle Ages, features an annotated bibliography geared to providing elementary school teachers and parents with good books on the Middle Ages for young readers (http://users.massed.net/~mdurant/medievalbooks.htm#Books). Many of the books are fictional narratives, but others are factual explorations of subjects like castles, armor, Vikings, feasts, beastiaries, and so on. Gloriana’s Bookstore (http://www.gloriana.nu/kids.html), another site linked to amazon.com, gives a shorter reference list of medieval books for children.

Medieval books marketed to young readers need not be limited to them, however. Tolkien noted in his justification of his craft, “On Fairy-Stories,” that “fairy stories offer also, in a peculiar degree or mode, these things: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation, all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older people” (The Tolkien Reader [New York, 1966], p. 57). There may, in fact, be no essential connection between children and the books written for them. I imagine that we may all learn something of value from Harry’s courage or Lucy’s valor. To be childlike for a moment is a gift.

Editor’s note: Jane Beal is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis, where she is writing her dissertation, “Imitatio Creatoris: John Trevisa and the English Polychronicon.”