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Arthur Q2b: Good MEN
Yvain and Lancelot are, I think, supposed to be "good men." But in these stories, what counts as "manly"? Are they archetypes of manly behaviour and attitudes? Do their actions say anything about what it is to be a man now, and the difference between toxic and healthy masculinity?
Yvain and Lancelot are both noted for being strong and capable fighters, but both often fight for others rather than for selfish gain. Is that the extent of masculinity? What else should we look for in a man?
How to Yvain and Lancelot compare to other men, such as Arthur, Kay, Melegant (abductor of Guinevere), and Bagdemagu (Melegant's father)?
Comments
I think I answered most of this in Q2a. It was a 'might makes right' world, so naturally skill in battle would relate to the moral right.
I wouldn't expect this to have much bearing on what it is to be a man now, except I think quite a few people still rather think this is how the world works today.
Not only might makes right, but more importantly right makes might.
I think it would be considered important to the audience that Lancelot, Yvain etc were fighting for ideals and to fulfil vows rather than just to accumulate loot or usurp a throne. So their battles serve not only to add glory to themselves but also to indirectly enhance the reputation of their king.
Now, set that alongside the perpetual anxiety of a military state that the people the kings/emperors are most suspicious of are those who are closest to them and most successful, and you get a nice dramatic narrative tension built in to the whole thing. So of course Arthur both wants Lancelot to be successful, and is violently suspicious at the possibility of Lancelot and Guinevere teaming up.
People certainly take them to be relevant, which (like @Apocryphal ) is all that matters I suppose.
I certainly don't see Lancelot as anything other than selfish. I consider Yvain a different kind of man in lots of important ways.
@clash_bowley I think you're right that these stories are typical of what I probably mistakenly call tautegorical thinking. I consider it a special sort of grammatical
confusionthat mixes up the copulative and existential function of verbs, but theconfusionis not an error, it reflects the way things actually are.@RichardAbbott : I'm not sure there is much of a "military" here. I see organised groups of violent men, but they show little discipline, tactics, or uniformity. They are not waiting for orders. They count on nothing more than their technology to dominate, and unlike a military do not seem to consider themselves bound together as a "band of brothers" regardless of their individual likes and dislikes. Rather their motivations are all and only about individual likes and dislikes, bound only by meeting for drinking and fighting parties. They don't seem that different from some non-military people I know, and some military people in the lower ranks.
EDIT: But they would obviously be wiped out by any military force that had similar technology.
In the modern mind, we think in terms of cause and effect, where the non-modern mind thinks in terms of ritual and result. The world is pervasively magical, and invoking that magic is no more wondrous than lighting a fire with sparks. Indeed, lighting the fire is a ritual, which, when performed correctly, will induce magical flame. Thus right makes might as might makes right. Correct actions produce proper result. This is magical thinking, and it pervades our society at a level below thought. Our cause and effect lives on a conscious stratum above ritual and result, which has been internalized.
That's very true. God is on the side of the righteous, so they prevail in fighting.
That is the military in that age. People are driven by personal honour and loyalty to their superiors, often connected by bonds of blood, marriage, or wealth. All the relations personal, not to any organisation. The "kingdom" is what the king can hold and control, nothing more and nothing less.
Also, in these stories, we see a kingdom at peace. There are no great internal or external enemies, so the individual knights go off seeking adventure because there's nothing else to do. There's no need for large structures of fighting men, as there's no-one for them to fight.
Indeed this is a classic problem for a military ruler in peacetime - what to do with highly trained skilled and aggressive followers who have no "real" battles to fight. If you;re going to stop them just fighting each other or trying to usurp the kingdom, you have to either invent a previously unrecognised foe, or else come up with cool-sounding and dangerous quests to occupy them
> Indeed this is a classic problem for a military ruler in peacetime - what to do with highly trained skilled and aggressive followers who have no "real" battles to fight. If you;re going to stop them just fighting each other or trying to usurp the kingdom, you have to either invent a previously unrecognised foe, or else come up with cool-sounding and dangerous quests to occupy them
Persuade them to take up religion and battle the enemy of their own self through discipline of some kind (often ritual) has been a popular option in the non-European old world. We don't really know for the Americas of course due to the dominance of European civilisation with its well known focus on enlightened self interest.
I wonder if this social structure is related to the collapse of the institutions of slavery as practised in the Roman empire, perhaps due to a collapse in trade? Slaves require training and education (religious instruction), and these folks are clearly incapable of providing that for their own people.
I don't think slavery ever collapsed, though it's not spoken of much in early England. I'm pretty sure the Saxons and Celts both held slaves in the dark ages. The Norse also took slaves when they arrived. But I'm sure the growing power of the Church gradually put a damper on things in the high middle ages. I do find it curious that we don't really hear about slaver in the west again until the colonial period, when it was suddenly acceptable again. Perhaps slavery was kept very much alive outside of Europe and came back?
I'm also not too sure about the 'the not militarily powerful' comment. 1180 was the age of crusades, so they were powerful enough to mount expeditionary forces and besiege distant cities. It was just over 100 years since the Norman Invasion, and the Normans had pacified Wales and were probably still doing things in Ireland. But not all kings were powerful, organized, and willing to do such grand things - most were involved in petty squabbles like the Anarchy.
I wonder if de Troyes based his description of society on what was actually around him and his audience at the time, or on what people believed life had been like a while back? Again like Homer - it is widely believed that he (if you prefer, the school of poets that he represented) lived a couple of centuries after the likely time he was describing. Some details of Late Bronze warfare and society he got right, others not (so far as we can tell). So by analogy is de Troyes aiming to describe a time before the Crusades and the Norman invasion, or about his own era?
That's a really good question.
Bear in mind that these are stories about the warriors in the society, whose only responsibility is to apply violence when ordered by their lord. These folks aren't lords and landholders, and therefore aren't responsible for the wellbeing of the peasants on that land (needed to produce the wealth they need). Neither are they clergy, and therefore aren't responsible for the spiritual or moral development of anyone.
That's not to say that the lives of peasants were good, with lots of freedom and comfort. But it's difficult to use the content of thrilling adventures about heroic warriors to extrapolate what the rest of the society was like.
I think that's where the concentration on "honour" comes from, and the value it serves. To some extent, you can view "honour" as the reward of social esteem given to someone who performs acts that benefits their peers, even though it has a personal cost. In that light, being honourable is a form of discipline.
(And I think we know enough about the pre-Colombian Americas to know there was plenty of violence there, along with plenty of religion and discipline.)
Ah, I did not know this! I guess I thought they were the nobility as well in some sense. That makes a bit more sense.
Sorry for being unclear. Same class (noble), different roles. I don't know if it applies exactly in this time period, but later settings have the idea of a "household knight". A lord has a lot of land, and income from it, and pays for the upkeep of a bunch of knights from that "household budget". There's no direct link between the knight and a particular patch of land.
This is the sort of arrangement for sons of a landholding knight, or a second sons of a landholder who don't inherit, and so on.
I am borderline illiterate when it comes to this particular period of history
If you go back to the post-Roman pre Normal Conquest time frame then you have a similar sort of situation but not with words like "knight"... you had the king who may well only rule over a small area of land (maybe only the equivalent of a modern English county, maybe a bit bigger) and then a whole bunch of fighters who had thrown in their lot with him. Their loyalty is largely asset-driven - if he keeps giving them tangible wealth such as weapons, gold, horses, women etc they stay because their most profitable bet is with him. If he starts losing then his support rapidly dwindles as this group of fighters drift away to other more promising opportunities. A few folk might have a kinship or personal loyalty, but for most it was totally pragmatic. The Last Kingdom is set in this era and seems to give a reasonable depiction of this kind of drifting pseudo-loyalty.
Knighthood was not considered nobility until the High Medieval - around the time of Chretien. As time went on, it got more and more elaborate, with different orders of Chivalry, and most nobles were knighted as a matter of course.