De brief voor de koning (1962)

The Letter for the King (Dutch: De brief voor de koning, pronounced [də ˈbri foːr də ˈkoːnɪŋ]) is a children's historical novel by the Dutch writer Tonke Dragt, first published in 1962. Subsequently, The Secrets of the Wild Wood (Dutch: Geheimen van het Wilde Woud), was published in 1965, and a collection of follow-up short stories, The Dangerous Window and other stories (Dutch: Het Gevaarlijke Venster en andere verhalen), in 1979. De brief voor de koning was chosen as the best Dutch youth book of the latter half of the 20th century.

The book has been translated in Danish, English, German, Russian, Greek, Estonian, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Czech, Swedish, Spanish and Catalan.

Background

Tonke Dragt took an interest in the Middle Ages from a young age and was especially involved in reading classic English chivalric romances. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dragt worked in a secondary school as a drawing teacher. To keep the students' attention, she told short stories and usually stopped telling at a cliffhanger, after which the pupils were allowed to draw accompanying illustrations. Usually, Dragt forgot about these stories soon afterwards while creating new ones.

One day, Dragt told her students about a teenage squire who has to complete all-night vigil before he can receive his knighthood, but leaves the chapel of his vigil to answer a call for help. She said in a De Volkskrant interview:

'Tiuri has to spend his last night as squire, before he can become knight, in a chapel with his friends. He is not allowed to speak or listen to the voices outside. In the middle of the night, a voice desperately whispers "Please, open the door!".' What would you do? I asked my students. Then they had to draw. I drew a map of the Kingdom of Unauwen and next to it the Kingdom of Dagonaut, the countries through which Tiuri travels.

The story grabbed her more than any before and at night, she decided to complete it behind her typewriter.

Plot overview

The Letter for the King is set in a fictional medieval world. In the story, a youth's adventure is externalized in a search for a letter, which results in a discovery of their own persona.

Synopsis

The Letter for the King

In the night before his accolade and ascension to knighthood, which is traditionally spent as a nocturnal vigil in a small chapel, 16-year-old squire Tiuri, son of a famous knight in the realm of Dagonaut, receives a desperate plea for help from a stranger knocking at the chapel door. Unable to refuse a call for help, he breaks the tradition and goes outside, where the stranger, an old man, hands him a sealed letter and begs him to deliver it to a knight clad in black armor and a white shield residing in a nearby forest inn. Tiuri agrees to deliver it, but upon arriving at the inn, he learns to his dismay that the knight he seeks has in the meantime been challenged by another black knight, this one with a red shield. Tracing the path the knights have taken into the forest, Tiuri finds the knight with the white shield dying, mortally wounded in a cowardly ambush. When the knight learns of Tiuri's possession of the letter, he charges him with delivering it to the neighbouring realm of the west, ruled by the wise King Unauwen, and to seek out a hermit named Menaures living in the mountains separating the two kingdoms, who would show him a secret way through the mountains. Bound by his sense of honor, Tiuri accepts the task and the ring the knight gives him in order to stress the importance of his mission, and remains with the knight until he dies.

Soon, however, Tiuri finds himself hunted by riders clad in red, the henchmen of the knight with the red shield, and is forced to flee for his life. In order to speed his progress, he claims the steed of the knight with the white shield, a formidable night-black destrier who accepts him as his new rider. He also finds himself chased by a quartet of knights in grey, who are eager to kill him for unknown reasons, and temporarily loses his horse to a band of robbers, but finds help with the childish but amicable forest-dweller Marius and the monks of a nearby monastery. He eventually makes his way to a castle named Mistrinaut, where he is found and imprisoned for execution by the Grey Knights, who (as it turns out later) were close friends of the knight with the white shield and believe Tiuri to be his murderer. However, Sigirdiwarth Rafox, the lord of Mistrinaut, and his daughter Lavinia supply Tiuri with weapons to save his life, and in the end Tiuri convinces the knights of his innocence and befriends them, especially their leader, Ristridin of the South, a famous wandering knight from Dagonaut's realm.

From Ristridin, Tiuri finally learns the name of the black knight with the white shield - Edwinem of Foresterra, a renowned hero from Unauwen's realm - and of his steed Ardanwen; the stranger who sent Tiuri on his quest turns out to be Edwinem's squire, Vokia. As it is gradually revealed, the murder of Edwinem and the letter Tiuri carries are pivotal elements in a festering conflict between the realm of Unauwen and the realm of Eviellan, a kingdom south of Dagonaut's domain. The ruler of Eviellan is the younger of Unauwen's twin sons, who is torn by jealousy toward his elder brother and, seeking dominion over his father's realm, has conquered Eviellan to support his own ends. Recently, the King of Eviellan has announced that he wants to reconcile with his brother and father. Edwinem was a member of a party of emissaries sent to Eviellan to discuss the terms for the prince's return, but the party went missing, with only Edwinem having been heard of until his murder.