Knight-errant

[citation needed] In more sublimated forms of knight-errantry, pure moralist idealism rather than romantic inspiration motivated the knight-errant (as in the case of Sir Galahad).

In The Faerie Queene, St. George is sent to rescue Una's parents' kingdom from a dragon, and Guyon has no such quest, but both knights encounter perils and adventures.

Other knights-errant have been assisted by wild men of the woods, as in Valentine and Orson, or, like Guillaume de Palerme, by wolves that were, in fact, enchanted princes.

Both characters share a number of aspects and traits; both are rooted in the myths of a past that no longer exists, and both live by codes of conduct from a previous era.

[6] Don Quixote is an early 17th-century parody of the genre, in reaction to the extreme popularity which late medieval romances such as Amadis de Gaula came to enjoy in the Iberian Peninsula in the 16th century.

In Jean Giraudoux's play Ondine, which starred Audrey Hepburn on Broadway in 1954, a knight-errant appears, during a storm, at the humble home of a fisherman and his wife.

Hedge knights travel the length and breadth of the fictional continent of Westeros looking for gainful employment, and their name comes from the propensity to sleep out in the open air or in forests when they cannot afford lodging.

There is even a popular literary tradition that arose during the Tang dynasty which centered on slaves who used supernatural physical abilities to save kidnapped damsels in distress and to swim to the bottom of raging rivers to retrieve treasures for their feudal lords (see Kunlun Nu).