I was reading the story in Malory of sir “La Cote Male Tayle” when a question occurred to me. 1 There’s a big fight scene at the end with three brothers: sir Playn de Fors, sir Playn de Amoris, and sir Plenoryus. 2 For anyone who loves allegory (and who doesn’t?) this is the good stuff: sir Brunor the eponymous hero has to simultaneously defeat a knight who’s full of strength and one who’s full of love. Isn’t that the constant struggle when you’re in a medieval romance — How do we meet the Scylla and Charybdis of sex and violence and come out victorious? And our hero does so, by forcing his opponents into a tactical position where he was never caught between them. So far, so good.
But then we get to the third brother. Sir Brunor loses to him, and Lancelot has to bail him out. What does his name symbolize? If you search on the web you find people who say “honor”. But those aren’t etymologically sound; a syllable is missing. And besides, what’s the allegorical interpretation we should make when a knight is defeated by honor? I don’t think that’s it. We could approach the problem as a triad: a knight can fail through an excess of strength, love, and … i don’t know … pride, maybe? But if pride is the problem, Lancelot isn’t the one who will bail you out.
I went rummaging in a dictionary of medieval French, where the best I could find is ore, meaning “prayer”, like the word “orison” today. I can just stretch my credulity to see some meaning in a knight defeated by the power of prayer, but that should happen to the bad guys, not the good guys.
Therefore, I turned to the Arthurian subreddit. A couple of redditors who have apparently read everything came to my aid. Hat tips to u/lazerbem and u/New_Ad_6939 for their explanation. Malory didn’t make up his stories, he adapted them from other romances. In this case, it’s the “Prose Tristan“. In the Prose Tristan, sir Plenorius is an original character, but there were two other unnamed knights in the story. Malory emphasized their role in his telling, which promoted them to the point that he decided they should have names too. Perhaps as a kind of word-play, and because allegory is almost as popular as puns, he picked the names Pleindeforce and Pleindamour as phonetic riffs on Plenorius’s name. But he didn’t take the allegory all the way because that would require (a) thinking up a moral lesson he wished to convey, in a story that’s pretty much just about sword fights and (b) tweaking Plenorius’s name and running the risk that nobody in the audience would recognize Plenorius anymore.
For us readers who picked up Malory first, this is clearly a case of allegorius interruptus.
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