Wednesday, February 26, 2014

I have been really enjoying the readings in this class so far. Usually I hate reading for classes, but these readings are what interest me so it is less of a  chore. There are two readings that have really been fun to read. They are,The Knight of the Cart and The Saga of the Mantle. The Knight of the Cart had me from the first three pages. Every page made me want to keep reading to find out what happened next. Since I talked about the first part of this story in my last blog, I will talk about the second half this time briefly. The parts that I found the most interesting were the parts with Meleagant. Even though Meleagant's father, King Bademagu, refused to give aid or assistance to him in fighting Lancelot, Meleagant still wanted to fight. Throughout the story he  wants to fight Lancelot and always his father says he is alone. Going off of that, the part where Meleagant walks into the room where Kay and Guinevere sleep, he sees blood on both Kay's and Guinevere's sheets and immediately wants to have Kay killed. This just shows that Meleagant is always wanting to fight and always ready for someone to die. One part that I found confusing at first is after Lancelot has come all the way from Arthur's court and after going through many obstacles and fighting many opponents, Guinevere doesn't want anything to do with him. At first this just gave  me a big slap in the face because I was expecting her to throw her arms around him and thank him justly, but instead she turns and walks away. After reading further I came to find out why she did this, but it still seemed weird to me. One aspect of Lancelot that I admire is he always keeps his word. The Saga of the Mantle, at first, was a little slow. But after the women start to put on the mantle it becomes interesting. At first, the women do not know that the mantle will reveal whether they have been faithful or not. But after some have tried it on,they find out that it tells if they have or have not. Despite knowing what it will do, all of the women still put the mantle on. Throughout the story I was thinking that at least one would be found to have been faithful but instead there were none. It was only at the very end that a girl is found in a room alone and brought to the mantle that someone was found pure. This was interesting because until I read this I thought that women in this time period were going to be very faithful to their men. These are, to me, the most interesting readings so far.

4 comments:

  1. Part of me thinks that this is a cautionary tale for women to "Beware!" Or "see "what happens if you_____" (fill in the blank). It seems that everyone suffers some degree of humiliation except the last couple. As far as humiliation goes it was fairly egalitarian.

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  2. i agree with you, everyone in some way gets embarrassed. i also think this is a story to "scare" women into being faithful

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  3. It's funny to see how some of the texts are clearly aimed at a female audience and then you have a text like the Saga of the Mantle that is there to keep them in check in a sense.

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    1. I agree, but this is a way for women to enjoy these tales but for men not to feel threatened by their women achieving some sense of power or love through these stories. By having a check for women it would keep them from pursuing anything too threatening their husbands.

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