BORING! (an objective summary of Erec and Enide)
Am I the only one who was bored to tears by “Erec and Enide”? Sure, it was cool for the first 20 pages, in which Erec wins for Enide the Medieval Miss Universe pageant by jamming his sword into some fool’s skull (after which he appeared to be relatively ok), but after all that it was the same story repeated five or six times. This is the general outline of the story:
Erec (the most handsome, most loved, most revered, most muscular, bravest, wisest, fastest, strongest man in the history of the human race) and Enide (the most beautiful woman ever, which, simply put, makes her the most perfect woman ever) love each other more than anything in the world (because that’s what happens when two beautiful people get into a relationship; the love that they share is directly proportional to how beautiful they are). People love Erec mostly because he kills other knights and looks damn good while he does it. People love Enide because she is pretty and because she is polite. Trouble arises when Erec stops killing people to have sex with his wife. People don’t like the new Erec and think he is a pansy. Erec proves that he is not a pansy by journeying all about the country killing everyone. The people who survive with only severe injuries become bff’s with Erec. After 60 or so pages of this, Erec vanquishes a particularly tall knight, and then they party for 10 pages.
The storyline had the finesse and complexity of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Which is cool if it’s a movie. Or a videogame. Some people are going to say, “Why, of course there’s no plot. Of course there are no characters. It’s only an oral tradition meant to entertain (pg. 37)!” Fine. It was entertaining (kind of). Although by the end of the story I found that no descriptions of rich clothes, or food, or fighting skill could impress me. But maybe we can all learn something from “Erec and Enide.”
“Erec and Enide” taught me that every princess is the mst beautiful woman in the world…until the next most beautiful woman in the world gets discovered, and that every knight is the best fighter he’s aware of…until he fights Erec.
It taught me that everyone is so rich that he can endlessly give expensive gifts, so much that “rich” and “expensive” become meaningless terms.
It taught me that if you are beautiful, you are “destined for good fortune” (94).
It taught me that the fastest and most effective way to resolve an argument is by fighting.
Surely you all are more insightful than I am. What did you learn?
Agravaine wrote:
If you thought this was repetitive, there are more than a few chapters of Malory (in fact, several hundred pages in the middle) that would make you yearn for this were we to read them (we won’t). I love Malory but he takes the hyperbole of the “most beautiful” “bravest” etc that you’ve identified in Chretien to an extreme.
In terms of entertainment, I would give it a little more credit than you did. For example, I found the mystery of the “Joy of the Court” (page 71 in my book) to be moderately interesting while it lasted, and some of the fights were fun.
As to what I learned: don’t have one’s vertically challenged manservant break out the cat o’ nine tails without good reason. On a serious note, you get a sense of what the society valued, if not always practiced. A weird devotion to honor was practiced (i.e. kings were captured and ransomed just as with the knights here, albeit for money rather than a compliment to a maiden of choice). The relatively elevated role of women (compared to Geoffrey) reflects the time period of Eleanor of Aquitaine, arguably the most powerful figure in Europe, and the trend of having women run the home front while the men Crusaded (think Rosie the Riveter in WWII). Enide’s father elevates her intelligence over her beauty (8). Moreover, while Erec condemns her for speaking out of turn, I would say that Chretien implicitly praises her for her actions. Her violations of his ban save him, and it must be remembered that her pride, not her assertiveness, caused the split in the first place.
Finally, as you noted with your Arnie quip, this was popular entertainment. It’s not meant to be a Scholastic treatise in high church Latin but an accessible vernacular piece. It didn’t teach them much, but it gives us a bit of a window into a culture alien to ours on many way, while offering a moderately entertaining story along the way.
Posted 16 Sep 2007 at 9:54 pm ¶
Josh wrote:
Well, the sentence-long description of the story on the back of the book says the story shows how honor in a relationship can be restored through acts of public duty. Looked at from this angle, it’s safe to say that the story aimed to have some moral or purpose other than just entertainment. The moral seems to be a fairly common one: Good things will come to those who help others. In this case, Erec’s good deeds to strangers (which usually do involve hacking at someone or something) repair and strengthen his relationship with Enide.
As to the actual story itself, both characters are hyped up and exaggerated to a great extent, but that’s to be expected. After all, the story is named after them, and as we saw with Geoffery, realism wasn’t a guiding factor in the telling of these tales. While I agree that the story and details got repetitive, I bet that has something to do with the fact that we saw it in the form of a written text as opposed to an oral tale or something similar.
Posted 17 Sep 2007 at 11:04 pm ¶
ajc02005 wrote:
This is going to be a short, disorganized response because it’s late, but I feel obliged to defend this story. While the others seem to have gotten all sorts of interesting morals and meanings out of the tale, no one has really addressed the “it’s boring” part of your post. I actually thought it was a lot of fun, especially when compared to Geoffrey or the small amounts of Mallory I’ve read. For instance, a review of my favorite part:
Erec collapses, and Enide, a count and his whole posse all assume he’s dead (of course, no one thinks to actually check…). With Erec’s body literally still warm on the table, the count decides he’s going to marry Enide because, of course, she’s gorgeous, even after tearing her hair and rending her face. So they drag Enide off to the church and force her to marry the count, at which point the “Princess Bride†jokes start kicking in (“Deawy bewoved …â€). After the wedding, they all head back to the count’s hall to have a wedding feast with Erec’s body still lying on the table amongst all the food. And in the middle of the party, Erec gets up and unceremoniously cleaves the guy’s head in half. (pgs. 92-96)
If that section didn’t get a laugh or a gasp or some reaction out of you, your threshold of humor is way too high. I blame it on an excess of Schwarzenegger movies.
Posted 18 Sep 2007 at 12:34 am ¶
koricature wrote:
I also thought this was pretty fun. This is a lot closer to what I am used to from T.H. White. The entire section of Lancelot is basically the same as this, with his hidden love for Guinevere in conflict with his vows of chivalry. The descriptions of Erec as one of the best knights in the world, after Gawain but before such-and-such, is very similar to the way White writes it. Also a part of it, as others mentioned, was the strength of woman in the novel. Enide is very similar to White’s Guinevere in that her intelligence matches her beauty.
And remember, as these are stories in the like of Geoffrey’s ‘history,’ of course every princess is beautiful, every Round Table knight gallant, every fight just and necessary. Back then, before civil courts and the like, the best attorneys were the strongest fighters. Every dispute was solved by combat, and the winner (or whomever had the better Champion) was correct, no questions asked.
The only part I found strange was how Erec reacted to his wife’s comment of his loss of knighthood. From the way he had acted before, this sudden movement with so little explanation or care for his wife, was unlike him. The whole ‘don’t speak when spoken too’ thing was a test in my opinion. He was seeing if she loved him enough to go against his direct wishes in order to warn him of imminent danger, despite the threat of some punishment that never actually comes. She did it several times, and he never did what e said he would, only continued to warn her against it. This makes me think he was never going to do anything to her at all.
Yes, they are exaggerated in their looks and abilities, but this only makes the story more readable. People can imagine these near-immortals more clearly than they can regular people, and it makes the deeds they do, real or not, all the more characteristic of the time and type of story.
Posted 18 Sep 2007 at 1:19 pm ¶
cristinamabob wrote:
I mentioned in class how most stories about knights seem to be exactly like this one. It isn’t necessarily boring, but it can become repetitive. Knights battle for materialistic goods and famous reputation, they fight in honor of their women or they fight to save the damsels in distress. That IS it. There aren’t really many ways of changing the basic plots of any Arthurian Romances. I enjoyed the story because I expected the repetition and could then pay even more attention to the detail of a story.
Posted 25 Sep 2007 at 10:09 pm ¶