2 References to the Knight of the Sorrowful Face

I just started Gene Wolfe’s novel The Knight, and the first thing I encountered was this epigraph by Lord Dunsany which just happens to mention my favorite knight:

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.

And then I came across this quote by George Bernard Shaw:

“Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.”

And congratulations to Danielle at A Work in Progress for finishing Don Quixote!