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Arthur Q1: Adventure romps
I think these stories were meant to be fun adventure romps, intended for entertainment above all else. Did they work like that?
Did you enjoy the stories? Were you keen to keep reading? Were they entertaining? What were your favourite moments or scenes from them?
What about the plots? Did they hang together, or were you distracted by the series of improbably coincidences?
Comments
I think they were intended for several things. Primarily as entertainments, and primarily as entertainments for rich people in their halls. Which means that secondarily, they are also role-model tales which attempt to establish some sort of ideals of behaviour, which is why so much of it hinges on matters of honour.
There's some fantasy element (of the potions and giants kind, rather than the fireballs and dragons kind) to give them some exoticism. I'm not sure how much humour I detected, but some of the scenes or events might have been funny to their audiences.
The tone and tenor really resemble those of other folktales (or folktale inspired novels) I've read, including Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa (Japan), A Hero Born by Jin Yong (China) and Italian Folk Tales by Italo Calvino (Italy).
I did expect these to be rather like those, and I got what I expected.
To say I enjoyed them might be a stretch. I'm glad I read them to now have this context, but they aren't really my kind of story. The mores that drive the characters don't really speak to me. The events and encounters often seem a bit silly by today's standards, or over dramatic. But I suppose if I wanted to run a Pendragon campaign, these would be quite valuable references.
I'm not educated enough on the history of these stories to know exactly why they were written, but as light-hearted fun stories that seemed to want to tell a sort of mostly straightforward morality tale, they did the job.
I enjoyed the Yvain story more than the Lancelot one as I enjoyed the protagonist more and it had less plot weirdnesses (though they clearly both had lots of that!)
The Lancelot story in particular I found was difficult to really take seriously even as a fun story as it was just too full of inconsistent things. An example is at one point he needs to cross the sword bridge that slices him all up, just to arrive at his destination. But then when it's time to do battle we find out a bunch of starving girls show up to watch the fight. How did they get there? Would'n't they need to cross one of the deadly bridges? Stugff like that really felt jarring.
One thing I found interesting was that the rock where the water was poured over it has a real life location France. Watched a little video on it that was kind of neat.
I enjoyed them. There were a lot of strange complications, but these were written by a pre-modern person, with a pre-modern mind. That's why I never run games set before the Renaissance. Pre-modern minds just worked differently.
I liked them, especially as they made no attempt to justify or explain the driving forces behind people's actions... things happened, and the main characters responded to them without agonising over them! Oddly (perhaps) the social drivers felt more alien than really old stuff like Egyptian or other Ancient Near Eastern hero tales I have come across. More weird even than Beowulf (provided you just accept the monsters therein). It's as though the middle ages took a wild swing out to some storytelling extreme. Some of my thoughts probably belong with other discussions so I'll hold back on them
I couldn't see an obvious place to comment on this, but it seemed to me that another narrative successor to this kind of tale would be the Western. Again you have clear demarcations between good guys and bad guys, and the imperative to keep persevering at a task even if it seems hopeless or pointless. Truth-telling is important. And there is the background assumption that one person who's in the right can defeat hordes of enemies.
Agree they were meant to be fun adventure romps, with a heavy dose of self-legitimisation, but I think the intended audience was quite small. I don't think we can draw much about the majority culture's thoughts on fun and adventures were.
I enjoyed them. I thought the plots were very typical of what we now call genre literature of all types, which are really literatures intended to help individuals understand who is "in" and who is "out."
One thing I was thinking about when I was reading these stories was about how they constituted society. Not really on topic for the question, but I didn't see somewhere else to bring it up. Society, as Proust makes clear, is not the collection of people living in a place. It's a self-interested economic enterprise that trades on human intimacy to subvert common community to advantage some over others. See definitions 1 and 2 at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/society, and also https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/company
@Apocryphal : I was curious about why they articulated honour as the measure of mores, rather than say obedience, or loyalty. I think the stories also raised questions about the relation between honour and love, or maybe passion. I suppose this might go back to the Socratic/Platonic division between passion and reason,with passion being "bad," i.e. the Republic and it's distrust of poetry. That too was a very peculiar take on the ideal person, e.g. Both South- and East-Asian thought agreed that what we now call emotion needed to be educated and controlled (mores), but both articulated that it needed to be redirected away from the individual society's self-interest. These stories do not see a need for that.
I got the feeling that the honour extolled in these stories just a cover-concept for winning at violent combat. admittedly more so in the Lancelot tale. This is great until it isn't - again the Lancelot tale. I thought there was quite a bit of angst about that - hard to criticise what your paycheck depends on.
Anyway, easy to see the relation of that with TTRPGs, CRPGs,and so forth. Do people here think it is something else?
I agree these texts have had a massive influence on the development of modern literature, and all of modernity as it is presently constituted. Not bad for such weird tales.
@kcaryths : Yeah the plots seem really linear at some points, and then suddenly they aren't. I think this ties in with what @clash_bowley said. I prefer to speak of non-modern rather than pre-modern minds, but the point is certainly true. I think players for the kind of game these tales speak to would have to be educated in ways that very few in North America are. I don't know about the rest of the world.
@RichardAbbott : Do you think the differences with the ancient civilisations you mentioned might simply be due to the fact that these people are not civilised? I wonder if they were not justifications for a new elite that wanted to cut it's relation with the previous (Roman) elite's ideas of obligation and commonality without losing the authority and legitimacy of those fading structures. Of course, what does civilised mean anyway?
Your insight about the Western is persuasive. Both are stories about people with technological advantages who are beyond civilised control, and in habit a magical world where things either are or are not what they are. Cosmopolitan it ain't.
That puts it very well, I think. There were many perils in the ancient world, but by and large people reckoned they knew what the order of things ought to be, and how they fitted into it. But here, your place seems to depend totally on the whim of the powerful, in a way that one hopes isn't the case, and the society that de Troyes describes seems hugely fragile. The society as a whole, I mean, not just the individuals within it who have their own personal fragility to manage.
What do you think are the main differences? Or at least, what differences do you see?
Agreed. These are stories about, for, and by the elites of the society.
I think "honour", as a general idea, is something that develops among violent societies in an attempt to limit the violence. In these stories, honour prevents knights killing women and peasants, and most other knights without some form of excuse or reason.
But it's very clear that the stories mostly equate "good knight" with "deadly in combat". There's a religious dimension to that too, with the assumption that God will intervene to ensure the right person wins a fight.
This was not a society with a 'police force' or 'legal system', at least in so far as it pertained to daily life. The people with the power to enact justice - the carls, or knights, by virtue of their relationship with the king - were also the very people best poised to enact violence. So a code of honour was needed to keep them in check. Breaking the code would empower other knights to act against you, which they otherwise would have trouble doing. An early ethical standard, I guess, in a time when ethics were not really known in this part of the world, at least outside the church. This in turn could lead to misleading claims of dishonour as a way to ostracize an enemy knight. The system could (and was) be gamed in this way.