#perlesvaus

So one of the bits of D&Discourse I find popping up perennially is the “hit points are unrealistic” thing. Or, at the least, that they shouldn’t represent actual wounds, but instead more of a fatigue/morale abstraction. Combat actually consists of each participant taking repeated sword blows to their body, while they shrug it off & keep fighting, only to then recover with simple rest or a healing potion? Nonsense. Ridiculous.

But if you read old chivalric romance — Chretien, Malory, the undiagnosed author who wrote Perlesvaus — that’s absolutely how knights carry on. Regularly you get descriptions of combat that involve Sir Protagonist and Sir Encounter d’Random fighting ankle-deep in their own blood for like an entire afternoon. Then they go rest in a hermitage until they’re better or — more often than you’d expect — are healed on the spot with Unspecified Ointment. Which is still ridiculous, but it’s ridiculous with a literary pedigree now.

The ointment is usually depicted as rarer than your D&D-style ten-for-a-platinum healing potion, but it’s there. The healing through rest isn’t as handwave-y: it’s usually weeks, not overnight, and the text generally does imply that the hermit or whoever is treating their wounds, not just letting them crash in a spare bed. (Though the fact that it’s often a hermit also gives credence to the “clerical healing” thing.) And there are instances of an injured knight later succumbing to his wounds despite the rest, so you know. It’s not quite as abstracted as D&D healing, but the bones are very familiar.

King Arthur hearing a bell for the first time:

It depends on the text.

In Perlesvaus, the beast is presented as a small white female creature full of babies which burst out of her womb and devour her. According to J. Neale Carman's essay The Symbolism of the Perlesvaus:

Later the Bizarre Beast or Questing Beast first appears to Arthur in the Post-Vulgate The Merlin Continuation and is explained in the Post-Vulgate Quest for the Holy Grail to represent incestual desire and copulation as it pertains to the toppling of empires. A maiden who wants her brother carnally ultimately makes a deal with the devil, becomes pregnant, and the result of that cursed union is the Questing Beast, here a genderless creature full of barking hounds, who appears to Arthur as a reflection of his own sin.

This is explained in great detail by Antonio L. Furtado in the essay The Questing Beast as emblem of the ruin of Logres in the Post-Vulgate.

Gawain does not fuck. Militantly. Multiple damsels try to have casual sex with him and he is like oh me 😇 I would never do such a thing

Kay murders Arthur's son (Loholt) and then defects to Brien of the Isle's army as it attacks Arthur's lands

Lancelot does not cry. Militantly. It is not manly.

Guenevere dies??? Offscreen??? Halfway through??? In ???? circumstances???

Arthur loses the faith of all his knights because he took Brien of the Isle's (he takes Brien of the Isles as an advisor after defeating him because that seems like such a great idea) Wormtongue-esque advice to imprison Lancelot for no reason