Wikipedia:Peer review/The Ill Made Knight/archive1

The Ill Made Knight

Please review this and/or make corrections. I would like some feedback --Paul Pinson 02:59, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I have done a major reworking of the article. On the whole, it was very good, but had a lot of opinion sections that didn't seem appropriate to an encyclopedia article. I left most of those parts in the HTML comments, in case you feel that some part of them should be saved. I also moved the page to The Ill-Made Knight, which is the punctuation used on the page for The Once and Future King, added some information, and moved the picture over to the right-hand side, adding a caption. Mpolo 09:59, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)

Missing the inspiration

The current article misses that a large part of what White was doing, that is adapting all the Lancelot material from Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, often in an explicatory fashion with emphasis on psychology and often taking the same events and providing a different meaning to them. White read Le Morte d'Arthur and fell in love with Malory's work, became obsessed with it. The Ill-Made Knight is in part an explanation of what White got out of Malory, an attempt to explicate Malory's tales and an attempt to retell them to bring out the feelings they inspired in White.

In Malory Lancelot adopts the name Le chevalier Malfait as an incognito when he recovers his sanity in the Grail castle. He explains it thus:

said syr Launcelot my name is le Cheualer Malfet that is to say the knyght that hath trespaced

That is, it is a shortening of Le Chevalier qui a mal fait 'The Knight who has done ill'. Lancelot had trespassed against the queen by lying with Elaine the daughter of Pelles. White takes the French differently and more literally. White seems to have asked himself, what kind of person could describe himself as ill-made, a description which White may have thought applied very much to himself. The quotation given in this article is very much to that point. The psychology of Lancelot in White part comes from such concerns.

Various legends had cited various persons as the finders of the Holy Grail. White allows all three of the most commonly-cited discoveres to find the grail, Galahad, for his purity, Parceval, for his innocence, and Bors, for his doctrine.

Very wrong. There is no allowing here. White's treatment of the grail quest is entirely from Malory, including the parts played by Galahad, Perceval (note spelling) and Bors, all of whom take the grail to Sarras together. White makes almost no changes in the events he includes from the grail quest, other than to summarize them and to present them second-hand as commentary, as a way of explaining Malory's text, a way of focusing on details that many readers don't notice, countering common misunderstandings of the story, trying to explain show how this tale which in style and purport is so contrary to much modern expectation and convention is meant to be read and appreciated. This section is perhaps the best appreciation of the grail quest in Malory ever written.

Jallan 16:50, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This article, and The Sword in the Stone and The Book of Merlyn, should be merged into The Once and Future King. Discussion of sources and treatment can then cover all five books. Gdr 01:15, 2004 Nov 3 (UTC)