Knightly pursuits

On Thursday evening I realised it would be better to read a good book than twiddle my thumbs, so I picked the Wordsworth edition of Dante’s Inferno from the shelf, of which I had only finished the first canto. Alas, I could not get through two pages without getting bored. Reading a translation from 1844 is clearly not beneficial for creating a text that feels vibrant and alive. The prose is overly verbose and the sentence structures were awkward. The translator seemed convinced Dante would have written like Shakespeare, had he been English. But Dante was no Shakespeare (and I mean that in a positive way) and he wasn’t writing a play. I guess I’ll either have to find a better translation or read it in the original language eventually.

So I put down Dante’s Inferno and took another important piece of medieval literature off the shelf: Chrétien de Troyes’s Li conte du graal, which tells the stories of the Arthurian knights Percival and Gawain. They’re not exactly what you expect of Arthurian knights. Percival is no more than a peasant when he decides to become a knight. He has never ventured out of the forest he grew up in and he is not only unfamiliar with civilisation, he responds to it in strange ways (mostly played for laughs, but some of which will have dire consequences). He very slowly improves his understanding of those around him, but he remains mostly egocentric until he makes a brief return in the second half of the novel, seeking and receiving absolution.

Sir Gawain, on the other hand, is already the ideal knight when Chrétien begins to talk about his adventures. Yet even he does not meet expectations. Gawain is first presented as a knight who shies away from violence and advocates the parley rather than the duel for ending a dispute. But he is accused of killing a knight – we never do find out if he is guilty – and wherever he goes, people hate and despise him for disappointing or slighting them in some way. Not only the response to his actions implies he is no proper knight, halfway through his horse is stolen and he has to continue on what is possibly the worst horse in the world, while being followed and taunted by a woman who takes pleasure in his discomfort. It certainly seems like a subversion of the knightly stories popular in the high middle ages. Of course, that’s not to say these stories are anti-chivalric: far from it. Although they hint at a grittier reality where duels can lead to fueding and endless and pointless bloodshed and where peace is preferred over war, this mirrors the knightly ideals. Everything that goes wrong is because someone decides not to follow the code, and much of the comic relief – especially the opening with clumsy Percival – is humorous only because the behaviour is distinctly non-noble. Even if the characters are rendered in grey-scale rather than black and white, knights are protecting the innocent, the church and, of course, ladies. And a justified knight mounted on the worst horse in the world can still win a joust from a lesser man.

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