Topical Guide 188
Mark Dorset
Friend; Friendship; A Friend in Need
LARRY’S FRIEND, buddy, copain, comrade, Rocky King, was the perfect pal for someone like Larry—or for someone like me. He was big and strong, older, a young man more than a boy. He had a past about which we knew little, other than the fact that he had lost his parents at an early age and had had to shift for himself, a necessity that had toughened him. When he first appeared on the scene, in that very first book, The Shapely Brunette, it was to come to Larry’s aid, much as Arthur comes to the aid of Guyon in The Faerie Queene (Book II, Canto VIII).
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
Arthur comes to the aid of Guyon (a paraphrase and condensation of a portion of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book II, Cantos I through VIII, adapted from hoakley, “The Faerie Queene 8: Saved by Prince Arthur,” at The Eclectic Light Company):
Sir Guyon meets a grisly man who reveals that he is Mammon, from whom all worldly riches flow, and offers Guyon great wealth if he’ll pledge himself to him and his riches.
Guyon declines Mammon’s offer, declaring his devotion to honour rather than riches. Mammon invites Guyon to view his fortune, and they descend through a cavern to Pluto’s underworld. Along the way, Guyon sees Pain, Strife, Revenge, Spite, Treason, Hate, Jealousy, Fear and Sorrow, and black-winged Horror.
They enter Mammon’s house, where there are mountains of gold. With the knight still unmoved, Mammon tries to tempt him with his daughter, who takes Guyon into the Garden of Proserpine, where there are the golden apples of Discord.
The knight starts to feel weak from his exposure to the underworld. When Mammon returns him to the surface, he falls unconscious, so deeply that he appears to be dead.
Sir Guyon is approached by the brothers Pyrrhochles and Cymochles and the sorcerer Archimago. The brothers take Guyon’s shield and start to remove his armor. Archimago sees Prince Arthur approaching, and warns them.
When Prince Arthur arrives, he politely warns Pyrrhochles and Cymochles to leave Guyon alone. The two brothers fight fiercely with the young prince. Arthur obtains Guyon’s sword and uses it against the brothers. Cymochles wounds Arthur slightly, but the prince returns a mighty blow that kills him. Pyrrhochles is enraged and throws himself at Arthur, who grapples him to the ground.
Arthur offers to spare Pyrrhochles’s life if he renounces evil, but Pyrrhochles refuses. Arthur swings his sword and beheads Pyrrhochles.
Sir Guyon awakes, bows low to the prince and declares his debt to him for his actions. Arthur says that there is no debt because he has only done his duty as a knight.
By this Sir Guyon from his traunce awakt,
Life hauing maistered her sencelesse foe;
And looking vp, when as his shield he lakt,
And sword saw not, he wexed wondrous woe: …
But when [he] saw the tokens trew,
His hart with great affection was embayd,
And to the Prince bowing with reuerence dew,
As to the Patrone of his life, thus sayd;
My Lord, my liege, by whose most gratious ayd
I liue this day, and see my foes subdewd,
What may suffise, to be for meede repayd
Of so great graces, as ye haue me shewd,
But to be euer bound?
To whom the Infant thus, Faire Sir, what need
Good turnes be counted, as a seruile bond,
To bind their doers, to receiue their meede?
Are not all knights by oath bound, to withstond
Oppressours powre by armes and puissant hond?
Suffise, that I haue done my dew in place.
So goodly purpose they together fond,
Of kindnesse and of curteous aggrace ….Adapted from hoakley, “The Faerie Queene 8: Saved by Prince Arthur,” at The Eclectic Light Company
See also: Friends, Imaginary TG 27; Friends, Real TG 27; Friendship TG 27; Friendship; Friends, Imaginary TG 38
Reading in bed before falling asleep:
There are no known representations of the Tower of Babel before the Cotton Bible (fifth or sixth century). It next appears in a manuscript perhaps from the end of the tenth century and then on a relief from the cathedral of Salerno from the eleventh century. After this, however, there is a flood of towers. It is a flood, moreover, that has its counterpart in a vast deluge of theoretical speculation about the confusion of tongues. It was only at this point that the story of the confusion came to be perceived not merely as an example of how divine justice humbled man’s pride but as an account of a historical (or metahistorical) event. It was now the story of how a real wound had been inflicted on mankind, a wound that might, in some way, be healed.
It thus happens that as soon as Europe was born as a bunch of peoples speaking different tongues, European culture reacted by feeling such an event not as a beginning but as the end of a lost harmony, a new Babel-like disaster, so that a remedy for linguistic confusion needed to be sought. I have already told the story of this quest.1 It is a quest that took two different paths: on one hand, people (from Raymond Lully to Leibniz and further) looked ahead, aiming to fabricate a rational language possessing the perfection of the lost speech of Eden; on the other hand, people tried to rediscover the lost language spoken by Adam.
[more to come on Friday, February 3, 2022]
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