So the king goes off on his jaunt, and when he comes back he gathers his knights at the jolly round table and orders them to drop trou. Everyone’s hacked up bad, and it’s ugly — except virtuous Galahad, who’s entirely mens sano corpus sanum apparently. That the King’s delighted is too soft a word. So he asks Galahad what’s to be his reward, but Galahad’s not talking, because his tongue’s been lopped off.

And that’s the truth of the chivalrous knight. It was only a literary technique to stimulate the ladies and baffle the young. Of course, it had it’s victims and so on, but western chivalry had nothing really to do with drawing room games and novels for the barely literate.

The problem is the western world, especially the cultural part of it which is Anglo-American, which looks at things like the cult of chivalry, takes it literally, and imagines it just so, and doesn’t realize it was just the literary veneer. The reality was very different.

Also, chivalry did not stem from the languedoc and this cult that the article mentions — courtly love.

One was the Greek branch exemplified by Achilles. The goal of the Greek branch is glory, and glory is achieved through greatness and power. By attaining glory one cheated death to a certain extent by having one’s name live on. That was what Achilles was after in Troy, not any moral purpose.

The second branch is the Christian branch. It is one that elevates the meekest of all men ever to have lived, Jesus Christ. A man who allowed himself to be crucified even though he had the power to smash the entire Roman Empire. It posits that you defeat death by placing trust in the power of God and following his commandments. That all other forms of power and glory in this world inevitably fade.

These two halves are present in the Knight.