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Module 3 - Part
2: Explorations and Exercises
Other parts of this module include:
Index |
Part 1: Overview |
Part 3: Texts and Contexts |
Part 4: Web Resources
The Paradoxical Nature of Medieval Warriors
To respond to these exercises, it helps to have some appreciation of
the cultural assumptions explored in them. Click on Web
Resources for further insights into the way historical events and
the aesthetics of warfare color the literary texts that we are
studying.
These questions are arranged into three color-coded categories:
Level A invites you to look closely at some specific aspects of
individual texts. Answering these questions shows that you have read
carefully and understand the significance of important words and ideas
as they appear in context.
Level B asks you to think more deeply about the implications of some of
the details that you have isolated.
Level C allows you to build on the findings of the first two categories
to theorize broadly about the relationship of the text to social and
historical forces beyond the work itself.
Topics in this module's Exploration and Exercises section include:
Focus on the portrait of the Knight in the General Prologue
Level A
- The portrait of the Knight may be divided into two separate
sections, the first much more substantial than the
second. How do the four opening lines of the portrait tell
us how to read the rest of it?
- How many ways might one interpret line 45, "He was a stout man in
his lord's campaigns"? Who is the Knight's "lord"?
- Review the background materials available in the Web
Resources attached to these exercises and explain the significance
of some of the
place names mentioned in lines 49–65.
- Comment on the information we receive in lines 60–65 and the
judgments offered in lines 65–70. Would Chaucer's
original readers have thought that any contradiction
existed here? Do you?
- How does the last section of the portrait differ from
the first? What do the details about the Knight's appearance
signify? Do they support the opening section of his portrait?
Level B
- Because the Knight is the first pilgrim described by
Chaucer, he sets a standard by which we judge the portraits
that follow. Why do you
think Chaucer chose to begin with the Knight rather
than with the members of the clergy?
- Does your judgment of the Knight change after you study
the portraits of the other pilgrims? What interests Chaucer
when he
describes the Squire? What is the importance of telling
us that the Knight and the Squire are father and son?
- Do you have any sense of the Knight's physique?
How is his portrait essentially unlike most of those that
follow? How important are
physical details in the portraits of most of the other
pilgrims?
Level C
-
How do the Knight and the Squire embody the themes that emerge from
a careful reading of the first 18 lines of the General Prologue?
What is the significance, for example, of comparing the
Squire to the month of May? What lines in the opening
of the Prologue does this
recall?
- Why do we learn at the end of the Squire's portrait
that he carved before his father at the table? What moral
quality does that action imply? In what
ways are the father and the son quite similar, for
all their differences? How much is age a factor in that
difference?
- Why does the Knight tell the first tale? How is he selected?
What may the Host have done in order to arrange the order
in which the pilgrims tell
their tales?
- What is the significance of the way in which the Knight
accepts his designation as the first to tell a story? How
is his readiness in
keeping with the abstract qualities that introduce his
portrait ("truth, openhandedness, and courtesy")?
Compare Chaucer's Knight with other warrior heroes in NAWLEX: Focus on
the European tradition
A real-life knight: Bertran de Born
Level A
- Compare the sentiments articulated in Bertran de Born's In Praise
of War, written
in the time of the First Crusades, with those stressed
in Chaucer's
portrait of the knight.
I tell you there is not so much savor
in eating or drinking or sleeping,
as when I hear them scream, "There they are! Let's
get them!"
on both sides, and I hear riderless
horses in the shadows, neighing,
and I hear them scream, "Help! Help!"
and see them fall among the ditches,
little men and great men on the grass,
and I see them fixed in the flanks of the corpses
stumps of lances with silken streamers. (41–50)
Level B
- How does Chaucer succeed in making the Canterbury knight
a figure of spiritual inspiration when his actual feats
must have resembled those
described with such relish by Bertran? Compare the experiences
of Sir John Hawkwood (1320–94), virtually an exact contemporary of Chaucer's
fictional knight, described in selections available on
the Web Resources page of this site.
Level C
- Notice that Bertran ends up in Dante's Inferno for
setting the son of Henry II against his father. Discuss
the significance of the
father-son bond in Chaucer's pairing of the Knight and the Squire and
speculate on why Bertran's praise of war is consistent
with his scheming.
Beowulf
Level A
- Beowulf succeeds in killing Grendel's mother in her underwater lair
because he finds there a "damascened" sword
when the weapon he received from Unferth dissolves.
Discuss the significance of the engravings on
the hilt that survives the battle:
 It was engraved all over
and showed how war first came into the world
and the flood destroyed the tribe of giants.
They suffered a terrible severance from the Lord;
the Almighty made the waters rise,
drowned them in their deluge for retribution.
In pure gold inlay on the sword-guards
there were rune-markings correctly incised,
stating and recording for whom the sword
had been first made and ornamented
with its scrollworked hilt. (1688–98)
Level B
-
What values are invoked here by the Beowulf poet,
who writes of a pre-Christian society?
Level C
-
Reflect on the reasons why so much emphasis is placed on splendid
armor in medieval heroic poetry.
The Song of Roland
-
Stanza 87 of the Song of Roland begins with
this judgment: "Roland is good, and Oliver is wise." Explain the significance of those
two words and show why the heroes of this poem do not merit the unified
formula that Chaucer uses to describe the Knight: "And he was wise, /
Despite his prowess" (General Prologue,
65–66).
Focus on Asian warriors
Ferdowsi's Shahname
Level A
- How does Ferdowsi's physical description
of Sohrab and Rostam illustrate the difference
between the mythic dimension of the Shahname and the more realistic
view of events in the Canterbury Tales?
- What lord does Rostam serve? Compare the Knight's relationship with
his "lord." What does the difference imply
about the values and concerns that dominate the Persian
poem?
- How do we see Rostam upholding those values when he
kills his youthful rival?
- Why does the father not recognize his own child? To
what extent is Sohrab's behavior the cause of his
death? By contrast, what does Chaucer stress by following
the
portrait
of the Knight with that of his son? What details
emphasize the nature of their attachment to each other?
The Tale of the Heike
Level A
- Comment on the significance of this description
of the youthful Atsumori in Chapter 9 of the Tale of
the Heike:
. . . he was attired in a crane-embroidered nerinuki
silk hitatare, a suit of armor
with shaded green lacing, and a horned helmet. At his
waist, he wore a sword
with gilt bronze fittings; on his back, there rode a quiver containing
arrows fledged with white eagle feathers. (p. 2316)
Level B
- Explain why Naozane is moved to abandon warfare and
become a Buddhist monk after he finds a brocade bag containing
a flute on the
corpse of this young hero.
Level C
- Discuss the emphasis here on the decorative aspects
of Atsumori's
wardrobe and his artistic bent. In what ways do these details suggest
the special character of the Japanese aesthetic? How would you compare
the spiritual significance of Chaucer's Knight's indifference to his
appearance? How would you compare the social contexts in which the
Squire's musicality is praised by Chaucer with the implicit judgment
made by Naozane of Atsumori's nature when he discovers
his flute?
Focus on reading in Texts and Contexts: Chaucer's Tale of Sir
Thopas
-
The only pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales whose tale is cut
off by an impatient audience is Chaucer. Read the truncated Tale of
Sir Thopas on the Texts and Contexts page.
- Compare the physical description of this knightly
protagonist with the description of Chaucer's Knight and Squire.
- What details do you see that indicate that this
tale is a parody of courtly romance?
- At what point in a literary tradition do writers
begin to laugh at it? How does the Tale of Sir Thopas suggest
the social changes that Chaucer's pilgrims embody?
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