King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table

Roger Lancelyn Green (1918-87) became interested in myths and legends at an early age. His boyhood schooling was interrupted by bouts of illness, which kept him at home in Poulton Hall, Cheshire, where he browsed continually in the magnificent Queen Anne Library. Andrew Lang's fairytales, H. Rider Haggard's adventure stories, traditional legends from around the world - these were his early influences. Perhaps most significant is the influence of Andrew Lang, the Victorian compiler and presenter of fairy stories, myths and legends. When Green was at Oxford he made a special study of Lang; later he became particularly well known for pursuing the same literary course as Lang, that of presenter of traditional stories. Writing was not, however, his first or only job. He had been a stage actor (especially as Noodle the pirate in Peter Pan) and schoolmaster as well as Deputy Librarian of his old college at Oxford. But from 1946 onwards, a large number of books appeared - biographies of his favourite authors, original children's fiction, and some fifteen volumes of his own retellings of traditional stories. Several of these retellings - the present volume included - are acknowledged to have attained the status of classics. Myths and legends from all around the world fascinated him, nevertheless he was also British to the core. He was, in fact, the hereditary lord of the manors of Poulton-Lancelyn and Lower Bebington. And nothing stirs the British soul so much as native stories, like those of King Arthur - the once and future king of Britain - and of Robin Hood. Green brings to the stories in this volume not just his gifts as a story-teller, but also his particular ability to bring sense and clarity to a formerly confusing mass of legend.Green, Roger Lancelyn is the author of 'King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table', published 1995 under ISBN 9780140366709 and ISBN 0140366709.