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Arthur Q5: Magic and realism
These stories are littered with various magical contrivances: Lunete's ring, magical dwarves, a sword bridge, an obedient lion. At the same time, Yvain and Lancelot are larger-than-life chracters, with abilities beyond what most men could achieve. Are these stories "realistic", or are they the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" stories of their day?
Comments
With God all things are possible. They are both realistic and MCU, because that distinction would be meaningless.
I have been watching (for entirely random reasons) a few video reconstructions of ancient and medieval battles, and one thing that strikes you is how small armies that were well-led, well-equipped and well-motivated could defeat and usually slaughter considerably larger armies made up of, well, rabble. So it's not a long stretch to see these highly trained and equipped knights, especially when driven by some moral imperative like a vow, as kind of superheroes able to defeat vast numbers of lesser individuals.
At times the magical side was too jarring for me. Where things were just randomly happening and we just had to let it be what it is. I think that I probably just don't have the education to appreciate what was going on with it all in these stories, but I also am less of a fan of weird and magical tales in general.
It's been quite some time since I read Chaucer but I seem to recall a bunch of magic in his stuff as well, but he seemed more derisive of it. Not sure why, or if that was a function of it being written a lot later, but in these tales the magic was just sort of there and interwoven into the stories, without them being overtly associated with being something that the "evil" people use.
By "heroic", I was meaning the depictions of Yvain and Lancelot as superhuman characters. Partly that's the magic, partly that's the excessive descriptions of combat lasting hours, and continuing despite huge numbers of injuries and great blood loss. That's clearly in excess of what anyone could do in practise.