Literature
- The knight who narrates Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale is described as having served with the Knights.
- The Order and its relations with Poland, Masovia, and Lithuania are the main subject of Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz's historical novel The Teutonic Knights, which describes the era of the Battle of Grunwald from the Polish point of view. A Polish film based on the novel, Krzyżacy, was released in 1960.
- The conflict between the Order and Poland is featured in James A. Michener's historical novel Poland.
- In the Conrad Stargard science fiction series, by Polish American writer Leo Frankowski, the Teutonic Knights are depicted in an extremely hostile way, including repeated references to their "bad body smell". The title character, a modern Polish engineer who is sent back in time to the 13th century and introduces modern technology, encounters Teutonic Knights who are taking children into slavery, whereupon he kills them and sets the children free. Stargard's later conflicts with the Teutonic Knights culminate with his exterminating the entire order by flooding the city of Torun with poison gas.
- Descendants of the Teutonic Knights play an important role in the novel "Le Roi des aulnes" (translated as "The Erl-King" or "The Ogre", taking place in Nazi times, which was written by the French Goncourt Prize winner Michel Tournier.
- Author Bruce Quarrie, a historian of the Third Reich, titled his study of the elite Waffen-SS Panzer Divisions Hitler's Teutonic Knights.
Read more about this topic: Teutonic Knights In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“There are people whom even children’s literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)