I am sick of knights in shining armor.
I’m a language and literature major though, so I get a lot of them.
They show up in European Literature, British Literature and in Literature of Love classes, not to mention a variety of German courses.
Their stories are about honor, virtue, beauty, idealized love, bravery and longing.
I guess they’re supposed to be romantic.
These tales do nothing for me, though.
The love is uninteresting and unappealing. Even the adventure I find boring.
One problem is that the plotlines and descriptions are far-fetched and ridiculous.
Men can slay dragons, every hero is the best rider, fighter and singer the world has ever seen.
Every woman is the paragon of beauty, every sword is the shiniest, every red the deepest. The superlatives get pretty old when they’re applied to everything connected to the epic’s hero.
A more fundamental problem for me is the way these love stories present fighting and war.
Knights are always striving to be the alpha male, assuming that victory will make them virtuous, good and attractive. That doesn’t suit my taste at all.
In books, my favorite characters tend to be anti-heroes, and my “knight in shining armor” would more than likely be a pacifist.
Romanticizing war is something I just don’t understand.
I see nothing attractive in blood and killing, revenge or blind hatred.
Such things seem hardly compatible with (and certainly not the root of) love.
That doesn’t mean one can’t put love and war into a story together.
Hemingway does it excellently. Instead of victory and virtue, he’s got injury and defeat, ugly bleakness contrasted with chess playing in a Swiss chalet.
It’s love in spite of war, not because of it.
Another problem I have with knights is the chivalry thing.
To serve women is nice, I suppose, but it also implies weakness.
And in spite of the fact knights are all about honoring women, they don’t really seem to respect them.
A scene in Gottfried von Strassburg’s “Tristan” (the book that finally tipped the scales and triggered this column) consists of the main character trying to win a dog for his lover.
The dog is rainbow-colored and kind of magical, so the owner doesn’t want to part with it.
When Tristan accomplishes the feat (a giant-slaying) that should win him the dog, the owner suggests he take his sister and half his possessions instead.
I guess it makes sense that the sister is relegated to the role of a trade good.
Holding women up to near goddess-standard isn’t so much different than objectification.
In spite of my complaints about knights and knighthood, I realize I’m not as immune to its charms as I might like to think.
It’s nice to be defended or to have someone take up your cause – to be fought for in some way that doesn’t involve killing. Or maybe even then.
On the day I first moved in at Baker, my brother and I went for a walk down Eighth Street, out to the residential section past the Zeta Chi fraternity house.
All of a sudden, a huge dog came out of nowhere and started barking at us.
Dogs kind of scare me, especially when they’re large and particularly when they’re barking.
My brother beside me stayed calm. “It’s OK, Justine,” he told me. “If he tries to do anything, I’ll kill him.”
Under basically any circumstance, I’m against killing. With only a few less reservations, so is my brother.
But it felt good to hear him say that, not because I needed saving (I’m pretty sure my body’s capable of producing its own adrenaline), but because he was willing to save me.
I guess this knight stuff’s all right then, if it’s watered down, modernized and taken with a grain of salt.
Unfortunately, no moderation exists when it comes to “Tristan,” or any of the other courtly romances that appear on literature syllabi.
I guess I’ll just have to look forward to the chronological shift away from overdone tales of love and valiance and be glad I’m not enrolled in a medieval history course this semester.