Wil nu horen naar mijn lied

Wil nu horen naar mijn lied is the opening phrase of a song Piak sings about the eastern battle and the knights of King Dagonaut. The song’s decisive role is not simply to recall a royal campaign: its roll call identifies Tiuri’s father, Tiuri the Brave, and brings the young traveler’s private family history into the realm of public heroic memory.

The Song in the Night

Piak introduces the song after recognizing Tiuri’s name. Half-rising and speaking quietly, he asks whether Tiuri is indeed called Tiuri, then says he knows a song about the knights of King Dagonaut and the great battle in the east. The low voice and unadorned setting matter: a traditional account of kings and warriors enters an intimate conversation between two travelers, rather than a court ceremony or formal recital.

The song’s opening invitation, “Wil nu horen naar mijn lied,” announces an act of telling. Piak does not initially offer Tiuri an explanation of his own life; he begins with a familiar story and lets its names and images lead to the personal question. As the verses unfold, Tiuri stops him to ask about the figure in the song. The exchange turns listening into recognition: Piak carries the remembered account, while Tiuri is the person whose family the song unexpectedly names.

The Battle and Its Roll Call

The surviving verses frame the song as a recollection of King Dagonaut’s eastern campaign. The king marches with his men as the enemy approaches, and the song sets him on a white horse, as proud as if seated on a golden throne. The elevated image presents royal leadership through a scene of confident, public display; the verses then make the king’s authority visible by naming the knights who ride beside him.

Tiuri the Brave rides at the king’s right hand, carrying a blue-and-gold shield, and the song says that the king trusted him greatly. The placement and shield identify him within the king’s company, while the stated trust gives the image a personal bond as well as a military one. On the king’s left rides Fartumar, distinguished by a white shield and a horn whose call gathered many. The song thus preserves its heroes through concrete emblems—position, shield, and horn—rather than presenting them as an undifferentiated crowd of warriors.

That structure also makes the passage more than a general celebration of battle. Each named knight enters through a particular place beside the king and a distinctive sign. Piak’s recitation gives listeners a compact map of the royal company: the king at its center, Tiuri the Brave at his right, and Fartumar at his left. The song’s martial world is remembered through relationships and recognizable details as much as through the fact of a campaign.

Tiuri the Brave and Family Memory

When Piak reaches the knight named Tiuri, he interrupts the song to ask whether Tiuri the Brave is the young traveler’s father. Tiuri answers by recalling his childhood and training. In Tehuri, he had been his mother’s page and his father’s squire; at thirteen, he became the squire of Fartumar, the other knight Piak has just named. Afterward, he entered King Dagonaut’s service, a necessary stage for anyone who wished to become a knight.

The sequence makes the song’s two names personally consequential. Tiuri’s father belongs to the celebrated generation at the king’s side, while Fartumar belongs both to that remembered company and to Tiuri’s own apprenticeship. Piak’s song therefore joins public reputation to the route by which Tiuri himself was raised and trained. Its history is not distant ornament: the people in its verses are the people through whom Tiuri understands his childhood and the beginnings of his own service.

The contrast between father and son is left intact. The song remembers Tiuri the Brave as a trusted knight riding beside the king; the living Tiuri is still a young man on a journey, recounting the stages of his training. The encounter does not make the two lives identical. Instead, it places the son within a lineage of service while allowing him to remain at the beginning of his own path.

Chivalric Memory and Present Violence

The song’s ordered company of king and knights also throws the book’s other scenes of violence into relief. In the account of the White Shield knight, the Red Shield knight arrives at an inn, challenges his opponent, and rides away with him into the forest. The formal signs of a duel suggest a contest governed by a recognizable code. But the wounded knight later tells Tiuri that there was no duel: the Red Shield knight lured him into an ambush, where the Red Riders attacked in numbers and sought to destroy both him and the letter he carried.

Bendoe’s later account sharpens the contrast between a knightly claim and the conduct behind it. The masked Red Shield knight describes the encounter as a duel and insists that he would have killed his enemy only in fair combat, even as Bendoe confronts him over the White Shield knight’s murder. The song’s images of service, trust, and named companions offer a different register of chivalric memory from this dispute, where martial honor is invoked amid suspicion and lethal deception.

The political revelation in Unauwen extends the contrast from personal violence to statecraft. King Unauwen explains that his younger son sought peace as cover for a plan to have the Crown Prince killed and take the throne; Edwinem’s message preserved the information that exposed the scheme. The king concludes that the danger is known and calls his people to prepare for defense. Against these later disclosures, Piak’s song remains a recollection of a heroic campaign, but its emphasis on trust and recognizable allegiance acquires a pointed counterweight: in the present, appearances of peace and honor can conceal betrayal. The song’s value lies in what it preserves—a shared account of courage and service—and in the questions its ideal creates when the story’s living knights fail to match it.