LLT 180 Lecture 21 Part 1 Laudine is hoodwinked, tricked into taking him back. A fairly unsatisfactory conclusion since women usually do the tricking and not men. But I guess it's Lunete who's really doing the tricking, so that's kind of in keeping. Again, we're gonna have a test on Monday. First things first, though. Let's get through the rest of this. And sequentially, as far as use of time in here, we've been doing pretty well in our class meetings. It seems when we come up to the tests, though, we always seem to run a little short. We'll see how we do today. Again, we pick up on page 343 to the end, and so we don't have a lot to do. And the important fact here is that he is now being known as the Knight with the Lion as opposed to Yvain, and this is gonna facilitate Laudine taking him back later because she doesn't know who he is. Nor does Gawain, nor does anybody. So it's important, as far as the plot goes on here, that he is not identified. The only person who knows who he is is Lunete, again the person carrying the action forward. Now, the lion has been his big helper and the lion has come to his rescue, but the lion is in bad, bad shape now. And so he's carrying the lion. Again, I guess, Yvain is a major stud. He's been pumping iron, using that bow machine they sell on TV, and is just all pumped up like Arnold. Again, we have to help maidens repeatedly, and so we're gonna be told the story and this is gonna lead to helping a lot more maidens. In this whole second part, once he has a falling out and once he's a bad boy and doesn't return after a year, he has to help women, women, women, and no more tournaments and such. And so we have this dispute between two daughters. And the older sister is being a jerk, doesn't want to give her younger sister anything, and the older sister has gotten to court first and has gotten Gawain -- of course, who's depicted as being the best of the knights, the strongest of the knights -- to help her. But in a strange piece of stuff -- and this is all setting up our conclusion, this last battle -- he says that she can't tell anybody who her champion is. And that's important for their battle later, when they don't know who's fighting, when Yvain is battling Gawain. And so the younger sister can't find a champion and so she's given 40 days. And we've talked about numbers -- I hope not too much that you're becoming ill by it. But we read at the bottom of page 345, about line 4798, "If she wishes, she can have" -- and this is Arthur. And Arthur, it says repeatedly in here, is for fairness, is for justice, is for being treated fairly, and so he doesn't like the older sister. He thinks she's a jerk. And he says the younger sister can have 40 days to find a champion. So a long time. A long time, 40 days. So she goes searching for this Knight with a Lion who has a reputation of what? Helping women, helping damsels in distress. And they refer to this as her quest. So knights aren't the only ones who go on quests, but also damsels go on quests. For some reason -- and I don't know why this is the device, but we have a damsel helping a damsel in this quest. Because she falls ill, so somebody else takes up the quest. We're gonna have a series of adventures, again trying to move toward the end. And as she moves along, we have not a retelling, but a reminding you of the great feats that Yvain has been doing. Because she comes along -- she comes to the castle where there's a dead giant outside. And they say, "Oh, yeah," you know. "He's been here, he's gone," and everybody directs her on the right path, until finally she catches up with him. On the bottom of page 348, on the top of the next page, she sees a man accompanied by the lion. So again, nobody knows who this is except he's the Knight with the Lion. She speaks with him, explains her problem. And we get back to this idea of inactivity is bad. And so we get back to what happened to Erec, that Erec ended up just staying with his wife. It wasn't really a lack of activity but the lack of proper activity, in that particular case, that got him in trouble. And so if you have a lack of knightly activity, I guess -- well, not n-i but k-n. I assume this won't fall on the floor someplace in the cutting room. That no one can win by inactivity. Well, let's just go on. Anyway, they come to a fortified town. Now he's with the damsel who's been hunting for him for the sister, right -- for the second sister. And they come to a fortified town where -- this is almost Kafka-esque. If any of you are familiar with Kafka. A very famous work by Franz Kafka. Maybe in a high school class you read the Metamorphoses. Recently there has been a revised edition of one of -- a couple of Kafka's novels come out. One, The Castle, which actually has been made into a movie twice. In The Castle, Kafka is always concerned with keeping justice. That's one of his main themes. And in The Castle, when the protagonist, a character by the name of Kay -- all Kafka's characters are always Kafka, of course -- is trying to find justice and no one will give him housing at the castle. They're all admonished not to. And one of the things that struck me about this, here we have somebody who's writing in the first half of the 20th century, which everyone thinks, "Gosh, this is so -- you know, this is such unique stuff." And here -- wait, you know. Here we are in 1170 and we're reading the same ideas. And so what's new? About 10 lines from the bottom, anyway, it says, "And the custom [so we keep being told about custom] is that we dare not, come what may, offer shelter in our houses to any gentleman coming from outside." So everybody is apparently being rude to him, but evidently they're not really being so much rude to him as being concerned for his safety. And the task here is going to be -- when he gets inside, what does he see? He sees a Nike factory or somebody making Kathy Lee Gifford clothing. See, you didn't read this part and you laugh about it. We have 300 damsels, 300 maidens, inside a stockade, all emaciated and working for nothing. They can basically not even make enough so they're making Michael Jordan's shoes or something. Anyway. That's one story. So they're thin, they're pale, look like Calista Flockhart or something. Wind, blow her away, please. Anyway, he's gonna take on this task and it's a good deal. He's been saving maidens individually and now he gets to save 300. What a sweet deal. It just doesn't stand him in good stead with Laudine. And with God, all right, because he keeps calling on God. So they're all very unhappy, they're all weeping. Ah, poor things. And when did all this start? Again, we've talked about time, we've talked a little bit about -- you know, at the beginning of fairy tales are what? Once upon a time. And here again, this kind of timelessness that we weave in here. We're not told, like, 30 years ago or something, but they say "a long time ago." Well, it turns out it's really not that long a time ago. 'Cause if there are only 300 maidens there -- they tell us later he has to send 30 a year -- it's obviously only 10 years ago. Which doesn't seem that long to me. To you, yes; to me, no. "A long time ago the King of the Isle of Maidens" -- hey, that sounds like a good place to be king of. Isn't that in Monty Python or something? -- "went round the courts and countries in search of new experiences . until he rushed headlong into the danger here." He's stupid. He's 18 years old. He thinks he's immortal. He doesn't put on his seatbelt. He drives too fast. And what does he encounter? He encounters two devil sons. There's a couple of words in here -- so I'm sitting there with my dictionary and I always hate it when, you know, they use words and definitions that make you look up another word. And so we run into a couple of words here. One is "fiend." And the word "fiend" historically comes from the word "enemy." And so the first meaning is "archenemy of man," so the Devil or Satan. "Generally, a person of extreme wickedness." But we also say, you know, "God, that guy's a fiend" and we use that in the sense of fanatic.