The Knight
Gene Wolfe
Dedicated with the greatest respect to Yves Meynard, author of The Book Of Knights
The Riders
Who treads those level lands of gold, The level fields of mist and air, And rolling mountains manifold And towers of twilight over there? No mortal foot upon them strays, No archer in the towers dwells, But feet too airy for our ways Go up and down their hills and dells. The people out of old romance, And people that have never been, And those that on the border dance Between old history and between Resounding fable, as the king Who held his court at Camelot. There Guinevere is wandering And there the knight Sir Lancelot. And by yon precipice of white, As steep as Roncesvalles, and more, Within an inch of fancy’s sight, Roland the peerless rides to war. And just the tip of Quixote’s spear, The greatest of them all by far, Is surely visible from here! But no: it is the Evening Star. —Lord Dunsany
Ben, look at this first.
I have been reading through the first part of this letter, and there are an awful lot of names you will not know. So I have listed most of them here. If you come across one and wonder who that is, or where it is, you can look here. You would be wasting your time to read this now. It is just to look the names up in.
If a name is not here, I missed it or I do not know either, or I knew you would know already. Here they are.
