LLT 180 Lecture 12 1 Today we're gonna talk about the part I'm not gonna have you read and I'm not gonna ask any questions on this. But we need to go through and talk about the part on Lancelot, the ill-made knight, as he refers to himself -- the Chevalier Mal Fet -- because it has an effect upon the outcome of the work. It's just kind of a long section and we don't get a lot out of it, I can just tell you, and I didn't want to spend such a significant part of the semester reading just White's book. I wanted to get on and read some other stuff. And so we're just gonna kind of go through this. And rather than having you write down everything -- I'm such a nice person -- I thought that if I gave you some basic notes so you can kind of scribble stuff that might be informative to you as we went along. And so if I get too tele-grammatic and kind of function in my own brain but not in reality, would somebody say, "Wait, you know, dumbling. You're not making any sense." This part is referred to as the ill-made knight. Lancelot refers to himself as that. And we really deal in this part -- these sections overlap. We pick up with the story of Lancelot from the time he's about 15 years old into his forties somewhere. So we get an overview of who Lancelot is. And we saw in our preceding material -- maybe it was even the very first chapter -- we talked about him being the son of King Ban, one of the two kings came to Arthur's aid when he became king at the end of the very first book. And he grows up in France in the Castle of Benwick. His initial name -- now, he's gonna have a son later with Elaine the pure, the LLT 180 Lecture 12 2 super-pure -- she was boiled in water for five years -- and they're gonna call him Galahad. And we know by later tradition, Galahad is gonna be the one who finds the grail. Galahad was Lancelot's original name and his name changed when he became a knight. Lancelot always loved Arthur. Remember he was a kid at Arthur's court when they had the games afterwards and he did so well. And he's very much interested in Arthur's order of chivalry and this fight against might, and they give you the French word for it there which Lancelot says is also how the world functions in France. Lancelot calls himself, in French, Chevalier Mal Fet -- a nice trivia question. And unlike the pretty boy in the movie, Excaliber, Lancelot -- and this is not a tradition; this is White trying to say something super simplistically -- is Ugly with a big G. I think somewhere else I typed in here -- about halfway down I typed in about five G's and a couple of extra L's. The boy definitely was in a battle with axes and lost. I mean, he's really, really ugly. He's not romantic and not debonair. So, you know, we immediately ask, "Well, how come he and Guenever get together later?" Everybody in here has tutors. Of course, Merlyn was Arthur's, St. Toirdealbhach is the Orkney's faction, the four boys. And so we look to tutors as being symbolic of somehow how the product's gonna turn out. The old thing about the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. And his tutor is gonna be Uncle Dap. And Uncle Dap, whose real name is Gwenbors, plays Merlyn's role, then, for Arthur. And he is a great armor. He is like -- supposed to be the best armor in all of continental Europe. And so what we expect for Lancelot, then, is to be the perfect knight more in a LLT 180 Lecture 12 3 sense of prowess. In other words, he's a great swordsman, he's all these things, but he doesn't have any socialization. His socialization -- he has like half the education that Arthur has. He just has the athletic part of the education. Guenever -- by the time he's gonna show up in England, Guenever and Arthur have been married for quite some time and they have gotten a present from her father, King Leodegrance, of a table plus 100 knights. And so this round table that Leodegrance gives them is supposed to seat 150 knights. Big thing. Big thing. And he gave them, as part of the wedding present, 100 knights. And Arthur on his own, through knighting people, admitting them to the round table, has filled another 29. This kind of upsets Lancelot because he hoped to be one of the first ones. In other words, he thinks he's been honing himself to be the perfect knight, to be the perfect representative of chivalry. He is jealous of Gawaine, of the fact that Gawaine has become a knight of the round table, and he hears about Guenever. And kind of interestingly, Guenever here has black hair and blue eyes. And so I think if, you know, somebody in Hollywood was casting these movies generally, they'd probably pick out some blonde. But you notice in that material, and really in a lot of Germanic material, your heroines or your main characters do have brown hair and whatever color eyes. But here, Guenever has black hair and blue eyes. We refer once again to the Orkney faction, just trying to keep some of these terms familiar to you, which remember is Gawaine and his group. Lancelot -- and this gets back to original sin -- had this intrinsic feeling that not only was he ugly but that he was bad, and so that he had to do good because he was LLT 180 Lecture 12 4 bad. And so he is going to endeavor at all junctures to do good as a very conscious effort on his part. He has lots of adventures and there's a lot of, you know, characters that turn up in here like Sir Kadagost, Sir Turkin, who represent two of the very evilest knights, kind of like Sir Bruce Sans Pitié but much, much worse. And so we have all these adventures where he's saving maidens, he's saving fellow knights. He saves Gawaine. He saves Gaheris. And so when we get to the last part of this book, Candle in the Wind, at one point Gawaine, I think, says in Candle in the Wind -- you know, when Agravaine and stuff is after Lancelot -- "How can you guys be after him? He saved all of us at some point." Well, it doesn't matter to Agravaine. It doesn't. But that refers to stuff that happens in this particular part. There's a civil war of ideologies, new versus old, and obviously the new is the Arthurian view of things but the old is still out there. And it's gonna take a certain period of time. We're going to have a time lapse in there. In other words, if we're taking Lancelot from the time he's 15 and bring him over, we have about 20 years. And so we're, you know, back to the old cyclical aspect. It's one of the things I always get a kick out of, when people always talk about the '60s, you know. "Well, that was true in the '60s." Well, having gone to high school in the '60s and started college at the end of the '60s, that's so strange for me to hear. Because the early '60s were much more like the '50s than what most people think of the '60s. When most people say the '60s culturally, what they're thinking of is really about LLT 180 Lecture 12 5 the last two to three years of the '60s and the early '70s. You know, things in the earlier part of the '60s was much more of a forum culture. I grew up in Long Island, I think I told you, and actually Saks Fifth Avenue had a fashion board. And they invited two people from each of 10 high schools in the New York City area to be on this thing. It was a sweet deal, let me tell you. And, you know, it's reflective of how forum was. I mean, when I went to high school -- my wife is 7 years younger than I am. When she went to high school in Des Moines, you couldn't wear jeans to school. I mean, it was still very much of a forum culture. That really changed very late in the '60s or early '70s. So again, we're having a civil war of ideologies. Arthur is trying to put in more of a forum. We know what he's trying to put in. We talk about the relationship of Guenever and Arthur. And remember, this is a made marriage, so to speak, or not made. That Guenever has no passion -- this is kind of sad. There's some really sad stuff in here. Has no passion for Arthur. She likes him. It's kind of like First Knight. He's a nice guy. But we say here at some point their relative ages -- Arthur's supposed to be about 30 and Lancelot and Guenever are supposed to be seven, eight years younger.