The Merriest Knight: The Collected Arthurian Tales of Theodore Goodridge Roberts
(Noted Canadian author and poet Theodore Goodridge Roberts...)
Noted Canadian author and poet Theodore Goodridge Roberts was fascinated with Sir Dinadan, perhaps the most practical of the Knights of the Round Table. Roberts expressed his affection for the character Malory dubbed "the merriest knight" through a cycle of bright and witty tales published throughout the 1950s in the popular magazine Blue Book. Toward the end of his life, Roberts created a final Dinadan adventure and set about collecting the stories into a single volume, but he died before that book saw publication Under the guidance of editor Mike Ashley, The Merriest Knight gathers for the first time all of Roberts' tales of Sir Dinadan-including the previously unpublished "Quest's End"-and several other long lost Arthurian works by this master of the stylish adventure yarn and the historical romance. Within these pages, readers will find a collection of Arthurian tales that are sometimes poignant, often humorous, and always ingenious, as well as a Camelot made fresh by the wry and often scathing eye of Sir Dinadan, who never rushes into battle without first being certain of the need to fight at all.
Theodore Goodridge Roberts was a Canadian novelist, poet, and historian. It has been pointed out that he is a man's poet; he is also a man's novelist. His many novels of adventure and romance have wide popularity in English-speaking lands.
Background
Theodore Goodridge Roberts was born on July 7, 1877, in Fredericton, Canada. He was the fifth and youngest child of Reverend George Goodridge Roberts and Emma Wetmore (Bliss) Roberts.
The Roberts patriarch, George Goodridge, was an educator and Anglican minister who brought his children up in the faith. Three years after Theodore was born, his elder brother, Charles G.D. Roberts, published "Orion, and Other Poems" (1880), a collection that made him one of the most pivotal figures in Canadian literature. Charles was seventeen years older than Theodore and closer in age to their cousin, the equally prolific and influential poet Bliss Carman.
Education
Growing up in a dynamic household full of literature, art, music, religion, and politics, Theodore set out at an early age to prove himself as a writer. He published his first poem at the age of eleven (in 1889) in The Independent, a New York weekly where Carman was editor-in-chief, and published his first non-fiction piece about the similarities between the Battle of Gettysburg and the Battle of Waterloo for Century magazine in June 1891.
Roberts attended the Fredericton Collegiate School. He also briefly attended the University of New Brunswick before setting off for Stanley, New Brunswick, in one of several attempts at farming. Years later, in 1930, the University of New Brunswick would bestow upon him a Doctorate of Literature in recognition of his contribution to Canadian letters.
In the summer of 1897, Theodore Roberts moved to New York City and took a position as a sub-editor at The Independent. His brothers Charles and William both worked at The Illustrated American, and the three Roberts boys lived together on East 58th Street until Theodore was sent as a special correspondent to Tampa, Florida, in May 1898 to cover the Spanish-American war. Seconded to General William Rufus Shafter's regiment, Roberts contracted malaria aboard ship on the way to Cuba and returned to Fredericton as soon as he became better.
After a one-year convalescence at home, Roberts traveled to Newfoundland and stayed for more than three years, during which time he helped found and edit The Newfoundland Magazine and published "Northland Lyrics" (1899), his first poetry collection, and "The House of Isstens" (1900), a quest-romance novel. In this period, Roberts amassed a wealth of knowledge about outport life and local history that would eventually inform his Newfoundland novels and his tales of the Beothuk people.
He also went to sea for five months, working his way to the Caribbean and South America on a barkentine; the voyages would become an inspiration for numerous Caribbean seascape poems, short stories, and his novel "The Wasp" (1914). Shortly after his return, Roberts had a relapse of malaria while living with Charles in New York and had to be hospitalized for several weeks until he was taken home to Fredericton.
The Roberts family traveled extensively over the next twenty-five years, living in France, England, Toronto, Ottawa, and other parts of Canada. They returned to Fredericton periodically, and Roberts's inability to stay away from his beloved home province became a prevalent theme in his poetry. Roberts averaged three novels a year from 1908 until 1914, at which time he enlisted in the army and went off to war.
In the summer of 1915, he was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the 12th Battalion under the command of Lieutenant colonel Harry Fulton MacLeod. Roberts wrote official reports and battlefield accounts and published three works in collaboration with others: "Patrols and Trench Raids" (1916), "Battalion Histories" (1918), and "Thirty Canadian V.C.'s" (1918).
By any standard of evaluation, Roberts was a prolific writer. He published thirty-four novels and more than one hundred poems and short stories in periodicals such as Acadie, Blackwood's Magazine, Canadian Author and Bookman, Century, Esquire, Maclean's, National Monthly, Saturday Night, and Scribner's. He also published three volumes of poetry, including "The Leather Bottle" (1934) and an anthology of verse entitled "Northland Lyrics" (1899) along with his siblings William and Elizabeth. Roberts's novels encompass a variety of genres, including historical romances such as "Captain Love" (1908); war fiction like "Hemming the Adventurer" (1904) and "The Fighting Starkleys" (1922), which are based on his military service in the Spanish American War and World War I, respectively; Newfoundland tales such as his best-known novel, "The Harbor Master" (1913), which was first published in England as "The Toll of the Tides;" and "Native tales like The Red Feathers" (1907) or "Brothers in Peril" (1905), a story collection about sixteenth-century Beothuk life.
In more than thirty novels, poetry collections, and histories, Theodore Goodridge Roberts celebrated adventure in the Canadian outback, on the high seas, and on the New Brunswick shoreline, he called home. His love of homeland and nature emerge through his attention to plant life, geography, and portrayal of local customs and dialects. His novels often included pirates, native peoples, soldiers, woodsmen, and their escapades, as well as romantic adventures.
Connections
Theodore fell in love with his nurse, Frances Seymour Allen, and the two married in November 1903. They extended their honeymoon in Barbados into a two-year stay, and the first of their four children, the painter Goodridge Roberts, was born there on 24 September 1904.