I chose The White Stag by Kate Seredy for my next read for the 1937 Club partly because I've actually read very few Newbery Medal winners, and here was a chance to amend that, at least by one!
The White Stag is the mythical retelling of the origins of a real people, a group which eventually split to become the Huns, whose most famous leader was Attila (a central character in this book), and the Magyars, the latter being the ancestors of modern Hungarians. It is a slight book physically, less than a hundred pages, with perhaps almost half of those being illustrations, so that its cover description as "epic" seems to me to fall a little flat. I didn't find the prose especially beautiful or rhythmic, either, but then I was put off, after the end of the first chapter and the death of the wise Nimrod, by what seemed to me simply nationalistic self-justification. "Looking for the promised land" is a weak excuse for plundering and killing those who are in one's way, especially when said promised land is Hungary and the pillaging and slaughter spreads across an entire continent, as far as Rome, Constantinople, and even Gaul. The Wikipedia article on Attila points out that "the Hungarian writers of the 12th century wished to portray the Huns in a positive light as their glorious ancestors, and so repressed certain historical elements and added their own legends" -- certainly most cultures are not immune to whitewashing their history, but in Attila’s case this is a mind-boggling, appalling repression. Seredy herself -- who was Hungarian-born, and moved to the United States in her early twenties -- admits in her foreword that her version is essentially the fabulous and haunting story that her father told her as a child -- "Those who want to hear the voice of pagan gods in wind and thunder, who want to see fairies dance in the moonlight, who can believe that faith can move mountains, can follow the thread on the pages of this book. It is a fragile thread; it cannot bear the weight of facts and dates." But even if the goal of a story-teller is to make "dry" history vivid and memorable, there is still an obligation to truth, and Seredy herself literally ignores it.
My eyes fell on a paragraph [she writes in the foreword, referring to the concrete-hard, “very modern book” on Hungarian history that prompted her to write down her father's version]: "The early history of the Hungarian (Magyar) race is a matter of learned dispute. Their own traditions declare them to be descendants of the horde which sent forth the Huns from Asia in the fourth century. Our present knowledge of the history and distribution of the Huns tends to disprove this theory."
Disappointed with this "unending chain of FACTS, FACTS, FACTS," she closes the history book and begins instead to write down her father's version. The omission of biographical details such as Attila's early leadership being jointly held with his elder brother -- who is never mentioned in Seredy's version -- leaves one with the unfortunate conclusion that facts are inconvenient here.
If a goal of The White Stag is to show children, as one study guide has it, that "adults may be harsh because they have been hurt and disappointed by life," then there needs to be much more context, for although Seredy points out how deprived of affection Attila has been since his birth and how emotionally hardened he is by that, he is still clearly in her mind the ideal of his people – "greatest of all leaders," there is "no one among [them] ... who would not have died a thousand deaths for him". (The same study guide says blithely that Seredy's story "also features many children, as well as romantic figures such as the Moonmaidens and the princess Alleeta, so that young readers will not grow bored with a steady diet of adult politics and warmongering" (mostly the latter, by the way), when in fact the "romantic figures" of the women are, while beautiful, also flat and unconvincing stereotypes, who disappear almost immediately -- after producing virile male babies -- and the few children in the story are essentially small versions of the adults.)
The illustrations remind me not a little of Nazi graphic art, elongated and idealized, heroically glamorous -- think a mid-1930s Wagner opera poster, even to the winged helmets. (And, yes, Hungary was part of the Axis during World War II.) There does not seem to be anything online about Seredy's politics -- and admittedly, this is the only book of hers that I have read -- but The White Stag does not, in my mind, bear up particularly well on its own, and even less so when one remembers the state of the world at the time of its publication in 1937, and what soon followed.
Links to other readers' reviews of books published in 1937 can be found here.
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