ABSTRACT
This chapter contrasts an idealized view of knightly powers in the thirteenth-century Lancelot do Lac with three more ambivalent works, the Perlesvaus, the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, and the Merlin Continuation. It focuses the debate over the three-fold usage of the term chivalry falls on prowess, on the expert, bloody, sweaty, muscular work done with sword and lance. The chapter results in miraculous than merely uncanny approximates an atomic bomb explosion, with rings of gradually decreasing devastation. A great part of the castle wall falls, hundreds within the castle die from pure fear, in the surrounding town many die and others are maimed and wounded as houses tumble into rubble; no one dares to enter the castle for several days, as a sense of divine wrath akin to radiation lingers. The obvious dangers of knightly violence were more indirectly but no less powerfully portrayed in accounts of a dolorous stroke or demon knights.
