The Ballad of Sir Dinadan (22 page)

"But when I came to man's estate,
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
Love's foolishness I came to hate,
For the rain, it raineth every day.

"At last I learnt to be a friend,
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
And found a love that doesn't end,
Though the rain, it raineth every day.

"A great while ago, the world begun,
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, my song is done,
And I'll strive to please you every day,
To please you every day."

All the stories I tell about King Arthur and his knights have been told before, some of them hundreds of times. The story of Culloch and the tasks he must do for the hand of the fair Olwen, for instance, is an ancient Welsh story, "How Culhwch Won Olwen," which is found in a collection of Welsh tales called
The Mabino-gion.
All the tasks that I show Culloch doing are from that original story—including such inane tasks as weaving a leash from the beard of Dillus the Bearded. Whoever he was.

The most important source for my book, though, is the story of Tristram (or Tristan) and Iseult (or Isoud or Isolde or Isolt). The story has been told for centuries, and there are ancient versions in French, German, Italian, English, and even Norwegian. I've used two of these ancient accounts, the wonderful version by the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg and the much more long-winded retelling by Sir Thomas Malory in his
Morte d'Arthur.
From these two accounts I took the basic love potion mix-up plot, along with such details as the Horn of Infidelity and the Love Grotto. I also appropriated several minor characters, such as Brangienne (sometimes called Bragwaine) and Sir Lam-orak and Sir Palomides.

In Malory's version, appears the knight named Dinadan, who for some reason often finds himself with Tristram, though he doesn't seem to like Tristram very much. Dinadan's a very minor, but memorable, character in Malory, and as I read the story of that thoroughly depressing pair of lovers, Tristram and Iseult, I found myself liking Dinadan more and more by comparison. He jokes and sings and tells tales and—most rare for a Malory knight—occasionally turns down a fight. Here, I thought, was a knight who deserves his own story, and so I've used Dinadan as a new way to tell this tale that has been told so many times before.

Or sung, I should add. You see, the oldest of the Arthurian stories were not originally written down, or even told. They were set to music and sung by professional singers—called minstrels or troubadours in England,
trouvères
or
jongleurs
in France, and minnesingers in Germany. Many of these artists could neither read nor write but could recite heroic tales in perfect poetic rhythm from memory for hours at a time. Or, if they didn't have hours, they might sing ballads, love songs, or little poetic riddles. The songs that I have Dinadan and Wadsworth the minstrel sing are almost all based on real songs from the Middle Ages or Renaissance. There really is a song called "My Lief is Faren in Londe" (although the original's better than the one I present) and there really is a line in a Renaissance poem that goes "Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo."

Okay, so it wasn't the crowning moment of English literature. They weren't all Shakespeare. But without these minstrels, even Shakespeare wouldn't have been Shakespeare. What I mean by that is that even the greatest poets of the Renaissance—Shakespeare and Dante—owed much to the minstrels. Both of them knew the old songs well and used them often in their own works. (In fact, the ditty that Dinadan sings at the end of the last chapter is borrowed and adapted from the end of Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night.)
Since everyone who writes in English owes a debt to Shakespeare, then we also owe much to these anonymous poets, these early performance artists, these marvelous singers of tales.

—Gerald Morris