Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Arthurian Ethics before the Pentecostal Oath: In Search of Ethical Origins in Culhwch and Olwen
- 2 Too Quickly or Not Quickly Enough, Too Rash and Too Harshly: The Arthurian Court’s Lack of Ethics in Hartmann von Aue’s Erec and Iwein and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival
- 3 The Ethics of Arthurian Marriage: Husband vs Wife in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein
- 4 Arthurian Ethics and Ethical Reading in the Perlesvaus
- 5 Translation Praxis and the Ethical Value of Chivalry in the Caligula Brut
- 6 Imperial Ambitions and the Ethics of Power: Gender, Race, and the Riddarasögur
- 7 Lowland Ethics in the Arthur of the Dutch
- 8 Contesting Royal Power: The Ethics of Good Lordship, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the March of Wales
- 9 “As egir as any lyoun”: The Ethics of Knight-Horse Relationships in Lybeaus Desconus
- 10 Malory’s Ethical Dinadan: Moderate Masculinity in a Crisis of Hypermasculine Chivalry
- 11 Virtus, Vertues, and Gender: Cultivating a Chivalric Habitus in Thomas Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth
- 12 Kingly Disguise and (Im)Perception in Three Fifteenth- Century English Romances
- 13 “Adventure? What is That?” Arthurian Ethics in/and the Games We Play
- 14 The Ethics of a New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur – and More Evidence for the Superiority of the Winchester Manuscript
- 15 The Ethics of Writing Guinevere in Modern Historical Fiction
- Afterword
- Index
9 - “As egir as any lyoun”: The Ethics of Knight-Horse Relationships in Lybeaus Desconus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Arthurian Ethics before the Pentecostal Oath: In Search of Ethical Origins in Culhwch and Olwen
- 2 Too Quickly or Not Quickly Enough, Too Rash and Too Harshly: The Arthurian Court’s Lack of Ethics in Hartmann von Aue’s Erec and Iwein and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival
- 3 The Ethics of Arthurian Marriage: Husband vs Wife in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein
- 4 Arthurian Ethics and Ethical Reading in the Perlesvaus
- 5 Translation Praxis and the Ethical Value of Chivalry in the Caligula Brut
- 6 Imperial Ambitions and the Ethics of Power: Gender, Race, and the Riddarasögur
- 7 Lowland Ethics in the Arthur of the Dutch
- 8 Contesting Royal Power: The Ethics of Good Lordship, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the March of Wales
- 9 “As egir as any lyoun”: The Ethics of Knight-Horse Relationships in Lybeaus Desconus
- 10 Malory’s Ethical Dinadan: Moderate Masculinity in a Crisis of Hypermasculine Chivalry
- 11 Virtus, Vertues, and Gender: Cultivating a Chivalric Habitus in Thomas Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth
- 12 Kingly Disguise and (Im)Perception in Three Fifteenth- Century English Romances
- 13 “Adventure? What is That?” Arthurian Ethics in/and the Games We Play
- 14 The Ethics of a New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur – and More Evidence for the Superiority of the Winchester Manuscript
- 15 The Ethics of Writing Guinevere in Modern Historical Fiction
- Afterword
- Index
Summary
If medieval, as modern, society sought to draw strict theoretical boundaries between the animal and the human, literary examples from noble lions to werewolves to beastly giants abound to suggest that in practice these boundaries were both tenuous and porous. This fragility, and the possibility of slippage between one category and another, is on spectacular display in Lybeaus Desconus, a fourteenth-century Middle English romance in the “Fair Unknown” tradition sometimes attributed to Thomas Chestre. Its eponymous hero, an illegitimate son of Sir Gawain, seeks to rescue the Lady of Synadoun, who has been turned into a serpent by malevolent enchanters. Readers of the romance have produced a rich body of scholarship on the resonant image of the feminine serpent, an image signifying both the transformative potential of the Lady's metamorphosis and a dangerous monstrosity that the text attempts to contain. By comparison, the text's many horses initially seem mundane, part of the ubiquitous construction of the knight on horseback that serves to signal a romance hero's chivalry.
I argue, however, that the horses of Lybeaus Desconus merit further attention as an important marker of its hero's ethical development and as part of the poem's exploration of the appropriate relationship between animals and humans. As Paul H. Rogers asks in his argument about the complex signification of horses in medieval French literature, might the ubiquity of the horse convey its value “not only as an intelligent, wondrously effective means of transportation, but more importantly as a faithful animal companion to be cherished?” The many steeds of Lybeaus Desconus are not named or cherished as Arondel in Bevis of Hamptoun and Gawain's Gringalet are, but this very lack of personal loyalty between the hero and his horses suggests the significance of these steeds in Lybeaus Desconus's growth from wild child to Arthurian knight. Even as the romance indicates that Lybeaus's “stedes” are chivalric combatants in their own right, the text's repeated attention to their wounding and death suggests that corporal frailty and vulnerability to violence connect the animal to the human. Such a connection prompts a reading of the romance that is critical of the violent hero and perhaps of chivalry more generally.
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- Ethics in the Arthurian Legend , pp. 198 - 218Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2023