Talk:Sir Nigel

Contemporary reviews

 * The Outlook, 24 November 1906:

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is much more widely known as the author of "Sherlock Holmes" stories than as the author of "The White Company," but there is reason to believe that his ambition is to write sound, thorough, semi-historical fiction. He regards "The White Company" as the most serious piece of work he has done. "Sir Nigel" is in the same vein and the same field. It differs from most stories that are vitally related to earlier stories by the same hand because it is a prelude and not a sequel. Sir Nigel is a gallant young Englishman who comes on the scene after the Black Plague and who wins his spurs in France, the story culminating in a daring action at the Battle of Agincourt. Every chapter shows thorough study and careful work; and the novel is not only a spirited story, but a very carefully drawn picture of the age of chivalry, bringing out both the heroism and the brutality of that period and interpreting its spirit in its activities, ideals, dress, and social organization.


 * Beverly Stark in The Bookman, November 1906

It is often held that when an author has once so drenched himself in the atmosphere of a certain period of the history of his own land that he absorbs its very moods and adapts himself to its language, he can never entirely recover his own natural style and mode of expression. In a great way this was true of Thackeray after Esmond; it was true in a measure of Dickens after A Tale of Two Cities; it was true of Blackmore after Lorna Doone; it has been true of a score of lesser men. That Conan Doyle is a marked exception to this rule is perhaps due to the fact that vigorous and graphic as his style always is, he is not, in any sense, a stylist: that his ability to find the mot juste is entirely a matter of natural gift.

Superficially, Sir Nigel is so excellent that the reviewer lays it aside with a feeling of astonishment at his own lack of enthusiasm. Its flaws are few. That it is an admirable picture of the fourteenth century is not to be questioned. It is full of pageantry and colour; it catches the cadence of the speech of the age with which it deals; there is no incident in the text for which good warrant may not be found in Froissart, or Brantôme, or De la Borderie, or some other of the sources to which the author makes acknowledgment; it is fantastic just so far as the institution of Chivalry is fantastic in modern eyes; it is the very essence of romance squeezed from the great chronicles which have come down to us as embodying the temper of that splendid age, and yet somehow fundamentally it seems totally lacking in the romantic spirit. And this deficiency is not easy of explanation.

If we were to confine ourselves to its atmosphere and to the variety of its incidents the book with which Cervantes "laughed Spain's chivalry away" would be pure romance. It is the ludicrous figure of the crack-brained Knight de la Mancha which blinds us to the element of adventure. Somewhat in the same way Conan Doyle's habit of introducing grotesque effects in his romances of chivalry prevents us from accepting his own estimates of his heroes. By way of illustration recall the passage at arms in the lists of Ashby de la Zouche, and the entrance of the Disinherited Knight after the challenged had overthrown all previous comers. Suppose instead of the pathetic and mysterious motto "desdichado" on his armour, Wilfred of Ivanhoe had worn as his emblem a green patch over his eye as Sir Nigel Loring did in The White Company. We might perhaps have acclaimed it as a touch interpreting the fantastic mood of a fantastic age, but would it not at once have killed Ivanhoe as a great serious romantic figure?

As a narrative pure and simple. Sir Nigel deserves unstinted praise. While there is probably in it no chapter which carries with it the thrill that does the chapter in The White Company, where the men in the beleaguered castle under Sir Nigel Loring and Bertrand du Guesclin hear borne to their ears by the wind the song,

that heralds the coming of the Archers, this later story in finish and in workmanship is vastly better than the tale of sixteen years earlier. What Conan Doyle attempted to do he has done well. Sir Nigel is a distinct and dignified addition to the books which bear his name, and yet like every other novel which has come from his pen during the last seven or eight years, it tends first of all to strengthen the conviction that Rodney Stone is so far and away the best of his works that there is no second.


 * The Literary Digest, 20 October 1906:

Every writer who essays the theme of feudal chivalry must of necessity stand comparison with Scott. Undoubtedly Sir Conan Doyle had this master in mind and it is not unlikely that his imagination was haunted and spurred to emulation by the epic romances of Sienkiewicz.

As intimated in his preface. Sir Conan has made ample preparation for what he evidently designed to be his masterpiece in this presumably congenial field. He has steeped his mind in the old chronicles of fourteenth-century chivalry, and as a result he has produced some lifelike types of that rude Norman-English manhood which is at the root of much of England's greatness.

Sir Nigel is the knightly paragon that Scott has made familiar to romance, his bright youthful figure of chivalry shining all the brighter against the frowning castles and gloomy abbeys which form the background of the tale. In general, the firm touch of mastery is exhibited in the character-drawing. The reader feels that under the steel corselets of the knights and the rough serge of the monks there are the beating hearts and surging passions of a humanity not very different from that of to-day—except in its intensity and primal rigor. From the first to the last chapter of the book the music of clashing arms keeps up with a brave crescendo. Excellent as the story is in general, it is not flawless—what story is? The author is not immune from the besetting sin of the Celtic temperament—exaggeration.

Floermel
Should be Ploermel. Skoboldi (talk) 18:23, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * ✅ Fixed, thanks very much for pointing it out. If you want you can quite easily correct similar typos yourself if you come across any again: Just click the edit button and go on :-) --Jan Kameníček (talk) 18:46, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * In Breton : https://br.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploermael. In "French" : Ploermel. There might be a mistake. Skoboldi (talk) 09:25, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * OK.Didnt think I was authorized to change, as i cant check the original. Skoboldi (talk) 09:27, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The link to the original is at the top of this talk page. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 19:40, 31 December 2023 (UTC)