The Frat Bros of the Round Table

Some stories are more than they appear.

An excerpt from the Tale of The Brothers True:

Now hyt befelle whan the lande was in grete turmoil, that yt was overron with mony bandits and brigands, masked on mouth and blue on hayre, whych dede grete myschief abroade on lande. And the tore down the colours of the lande that they myght raise on hy that of the Sarassens, to meke shewe of lawlessnesse and ruin. But the Brethryn of the Fraternite wente not that thys should stande, that they dud brave the tauntes and missiles of the bandits, and raised on hy the true blazon with its ryt noble colours of redde, wyt, and blue.

“Now it came to pass that the land was in great turmoil, overrun with blue-haired brigands and masked bandits, who did great mischief abroad. And they tore down the national flag to be replaced with the Palestinian flag, a symbol of lawlessness and ruin. But the Fraternity Brotherhood thought this should not stand, and so they endured the mockery and projectiles of the bandits, and raised the true flag on high with its noble colors of red, white, and blue.”

I’ve been reading Sir Thomas Malory, the elusive author who stitched together all the tales he could find about King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. What really gets me about it is this: we have a picture in our heads of chivalric literature as too good for this world. We think of it as an impossibly elevated depiction of what was in truth the brutish and sordid Middle Ages. Decades of cynicism in scholarship has contributed to a general impression that Knights and Ladies are just petty scoundrels in disguise. We imagine that all the romance and adventure is an attractive gloss the nobility used to paint over spats and politics just like ours.

But one thing I can tell you from reading Malory—and this goes for other books in the same vein, like Gawain and the Green Knight or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain—is that no one in these stories trying to cover up anything. We’re the ones living in delusion if we think the point of Round Table stories is to make the lords of England look better than they were. What is highest and most beautiful in these stories is the ideal, the shining vision of what humanity could be. If anything the real people seem less perfect because of it, because of how they fall short.

And they are always falling short. At one point Arthur sees a woman get abducted in the middle of his own wedding feast, turns back to his pals, and says thank God she’s gone—all that screaming was distracting from the feasting! Merlin, the otherworldly representative of truth from a higher plane, has to remind him that it’s the king’s job to save the damsel. Gawain, one of the younger heroes, is constantly letting his libido get the better of him and having to repent embarrassingly in front of his brother knights. It’s practically the definition of his character.

I thought of all this when I, like everyone else on the internet, watched a group of frat brothers at UNC Chapel Hill stand firm against a howling mob and hold up the American flag. In that moment they looked like Arthurian knights to me, and not just because what they were doing was in fact gloriously noble. It was also because they seemed, from one perspective, like normal dudes. I’m sure they’ve got their flaws, because we all do. And the flaws of frat boys in particular have been exhaustively catalogued, even magnified out of all proportion, in recent years.

The spiteful little journalists who go hunting for grim stories to use as emblems of white male sin imagine that if they find one clan of bros behaving badly, they have destroyed the mystique of brotherhood for good. The excellence of male camaraderie and the virtues of banding together are supposed to be exposed and debunked by these lurid tales, as if an ideal is shattered by one failure to live up to it. And since we all fail, no ideal can survive.

But Malory’s secret is that every valiant band of warriors is also, from a certain perspective, a fumbling gang of doofuses. The same could be said of Homer’s heroes: they are vain, sadistic, glamor-obsessed. Modern readers love to point this out, as if in doing so they’ve noticed something Homer wasn’t aware of. But the whole genius of the Iliad is that these flawed men are also towering demigods. It’s the ideal that arches over them, the unreachable star they’re aiming at, that makes them great.

And this is true, also, of the “boat-shoed Broletariat” that gathered underneath that flag. I don’t at all mean to accuse them of any secret vices—I don’t know practically anything about them. I do know they’re people, young men, and that no person in himself is a shining emblem of perfection.

But here’s something else I know, something Malory reminded me of: in the service of valor, even mere humans rise to become, as the psalmist says, “a little lower than the angels.” That’s a truth too, as real as the more mundane facts of our pedestrian existence. The story of the frat bros is just a passing news item about a group of guys. But it is also, and forever, the Tale of the Brothers True.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

Image from University of North Carolina, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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