Knights of the Round Table

The Knights of the Round Table are a legendary order of chivalry in Don Quixote, represented as an early model for the knights who followed. Don Quixote places himself in their tradition: their stories give him a language for his vocation, a catalogue of exemplary heroes, and a rule of conduct centered on taking up arms for the weak and needy. The order’s importance in the novel lies not in an independently verified history, but in the way its romance-shaped legend becomes a measure of Don Quixote’s idealism and delusion.

Legendary Origins and History

In Don Quixote’s account, the order was instituted during the reign of King Arthur, whom he says Castilian tradition calls King Artus. He repeats the British legend that Arthur did not die but was transformed into a raven and would one day return to recover his kingdom. The novel presents this as part of Don Quixote’s account of chivalric history, not as a separate confirmation of the tradition.

Don Quixote links the order’s history with the story of Don Lancelot of the Lake and Queen Guinevere. He identifies Quintanona as their go-between and recalls a ballad about Lancelot’s arrival from Britain. For him, the order’s legacy includes both love and war: its fame rests on the course of its members’ romantic and martial adventures, transmitted through histories and songs.

A Model for Later Chivalry

Don Quixote describes knight-errantry as an order that spread beyond its original setting into many parts of the world. He places the Knights of the Round Table at the beginning of a lineage that includes Amadis of Gaul, his descendants, Felixmarte of Hircania, Tirante el Blanco, and Don Belianis of Greece. This sequence makes the order a founding precedent within his imagined history of chivalry, rather than an isolated company of heroes.

The order also supplies a practical code in Don Quixote’s view. When Vivaldo challenges the custom of knights commending themselves to their ladies before dangerous encounters, Don Quixote defends it as an established practice of knight-errantry. A knight facing a great feat of arms should look toward his lady and silently ask her favor; Don Quixote adds that this does not prevent him from commending himself to God during the undertaking. The exchange exposes the religious and romantic assumptions that his ideal of chivalry tries to hold together.

Don Quixote’s Claim to the Tradition

Don Quixote calls himself a member of the order of knight-errantry and says that he professes what its celebrated knights professed. His account makes the Knights of the Round Table more than distant literary figures: they are authorities by which he explains his own armor, hardship, and willingness to seek perilous adventures. He defines the purpose of that calling as opposing his strength and person to danger in aid of the weak and needy.

The travelers’ response marks the gap between his conviction and their judgment. They take his elaborate account as confirmation that he is out of his senses, while Vivaldo continues questioning him to discover the form his madness takes. The order therefore functions in the scene both as the source of Don Quixote’s moral self-understanding and as evidence, to those around him, that he mistakes romance for reality.

Narrative Significance

Later, in a dark and threatening setting, Don Quixote again invokes the Knights of the Round Table, alongside the Twelve of France and the Nine Worthies, as models he intends to revive. He claims that the dangers before him are incentives to his spirit and imagines his deeds eclipsing the renowned feats of earlier knights. The recurrence shows how the order’s legend sustains his identity across different adventures: each new danger can be recast as a chance to renew the old chivalric world.

The romance ideal is set against the novel’s awareness of ancestry and social decline. The account of Cervantes’s own family recalls a lineage associated with knights and distinguished service, while also observing that once-great families can diminish over time. Against this historical background, Don Quixote’s appeal to legendary chivalry is both earnest and comic: the old order remains potent as an imaginative standard, but its revival belongs to his private vision rather than to the world shared by the other characters.