Plot
De Ortu Waluuanii expands on the account of Gawain's early life given in Geoffrey's Historia, which mentions that at the age of twelve Gawain was sent to Rome to serve in the household of the fictional Pope Sulpicius, who educated and knighted him. The structure and plot revolve around the theme of establishing one's identity. Gawain, the illegitimate son of Arthur's sister Anna, is raised ignorant of his parentage and his relationship to Arthur and is trained as a cavalry officer to the Roman emperor. Known only as "the Knight of the Surcoat", he must first work to establish himself as knight in his own right, and then must discover his biological identity by learning his lineage. The narrative is centered around two major quests, involving Gawain's defense of Jerusalem and Arthur's Britain, respectively. The first quest describes Gawain's battles with Greek fire-equipped pirates and culminates with his single combat against a Persian knight. The second quest involves protecting Arthur's lands from northern raiders. Gawain, traveling incognito, must fight Arthur and Kay before he is allowed to pass, and is eventually rewarded for his service by receiving knowledge of his true identity from his uncle.
In describing the boyhood deeds of Gawain, the romance recalls several other Arthurian works, notably the Enfances Gawain. Other works to deal with the subject include Geoffrey's Historia, works derived from the Historia such as Wace's Roman de Brut and Layamon's Brut, and the romance Perlesvaus. However, De Ortu Waluuanii contains the only complete account. While chiefly serious in tone, The Rise of Gawain contains some humorous incidents; notably, when Gawain pushes Arthur into the River Usk and the king is forced to explain to his wife Gwendoloena (Guinevere) why he is so wet.
De Ortu Waluuanii also contains one of the earliest European descriptions of the processing and use of the maritime explosive Greek fire. The passage recounts how the pirates Gawain fights in the Mediterranean resort to using the substance when they see Gawain will not submit to them, and then goes into a long description of how it is made. The rough, unlearned description combines elements of folklore and literary tradition about Medea's magic as it appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses, but the process described would have resulted in a working, napalm-like weapon of thickened gasoline.
Read more about this topic: De Ortu Waluuanii
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)