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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 9364535" data-attributes="member: 6787503">My advice to read Three Hearts and Three Lions wasn't meant as a refutation of the (+) thread's premise. (I see [USER=7040015]@Jolly Ruby[/USER] was the first to mention the novel in this thread.) I think it's plausible or even likely the knight-errant of chivalric romance could have been influenced to some extent by the Crusades as a cultural event. It was meant as an answer to the questions posed by the OP:I think the idea of a paladin presented in the novel, with its emphasis on purity, chastity, and heroism in a fantasy Abrahamic religious context is fairly well divorced from concepts of religious war. The main conflict in the novel is between Law, jointly represented by the human realms of Islam and Christendom, and the surrounding lands of Chaos, populated chiefly by fairies, trolls, giants, etc. Conflict between Christians and Muslims is seen in the novel as undesirable because it aids the goals of Chaos, and, as the story progresses, [SPOILER]the protagonist, Holger, who discovers he is the legendary paladin of Charlemagne, Ogier the Dane, and a champion of Law, is befriended by Carahue, a Saracen, whose friendship with Ogier goes back to the chanson de geste La Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche (written c. 1200–1215) and who helps Holger on his quest to retrieve the legendary sword Cortana with which he is able to defeat the forces of Chaos.[/SPOILER] So although paladins are presented in the chansons de geste, in part, in the context of religious war, or at least war in which Christians and Muslims are mostly on opposite sides, Anderson's novel chooses to emphasize elements of the story that subvert that context, which I think is a good way to go when representing a fantasy paladin, and focuses on his alignment with the morality of a (in this case) fantasy Christianity as an expression of Law and the source of the paladin's power against Chaos, which I think is something on which Gary Gygax picked up in his design of the class.</blockquote>

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