“Those crazy knight-errants”: ideals and delusions in Arthur Conan Doyle’s portrait of a fourteenth century knight

Abstract

In The White Company (1891) and Sir Nigel (1906), Arthur Conan Doyle reconstructed the fourteenth century and explored the culture and visions of chivalry. He created many different knights with the intention of dissecting the mind and conduct of this historical type. He was concerned with his human as well as his romantic aspect, and he addressed the conflicts the divergent obligations of external duty and personal aspirations caused. Doyle’s reflections focused on the dreadful and illusory game played by knights like Sir Nigel Loring, the most curious and significant representative of idealistic and delusional chivalry in his medieval fiction. His youth and adult age show the tensions between the two worlds whose paths he must tread. His life is a long struggle for virtue and honour, oscillating between the responsibilities of a nobleman in the days of Edward III and the Hundred Years War and the pursuit of chivalry.