The archetypal Knight is a very different animal from the knight as a noble rank, as a military rank, or as a modern title. The archetype is affected by its real-world counterparts, but it is defined by generations of fiction about a fabled (and fabricated) era of chivalry and valor. When a modern person is asked to describe a knight they will probably describe something with more basis in arthuriana than in reality. This is not a unique feature among archetypes that are also actual, definable roles or jobs -- especially among archetypes founded on roles that are now largely outdated -- but it's an interesting feature nonetheless. It provides a grounding thread to an often fantastical role. While the archetype can never really be detached from the roles it was founded on, it can float quite freely from them.
I have always been adjacent to the Knight. I am a medieval warrior with a sword; even without getting into my personality or whatever complex I have about being guardian, it's an obvious comparison. I've had mixed feelings about it. I cannot begin to describe how much I don't want to take on the role of an historical knight. I do not want to deal with feudal politics, I do not want to be some idiot's vassal, plate armor sounds like a nightmare, and so does trying to sit in a saddle with digitigrade legs. When I came to consciousness in this system I associated knighthood with men who dealt more death and risked less because the same power that allowed them access to better tools of war also made them worth taking ransom. I wanted nothing to do with being infantry again, but I wanted less to do with that. And yet the Knight was the closest I really got to seeing myself in art, in fiction, or in my own communities. You don't really stumble upon paintings of medieval infantry often, and we don't seem crop up in otherkin spaces much. I related in a certain way to elves and fae and fantasy-fiction rangers, but the Knight shared not only my broad era but also my skillset and a kind of mundanity that I did not often see in other people of vaguely medieval settings. The Knight was earthly, and physically violent, and had no distance from that violence. There was a banality or pointlessness that often came into play in art that centered on the Knight. The Knight was a variation on the Soldier that had been heightened and sharpened into pure iconography, even as aet was many other things -- and since every other soldier I seemed to run into was either from some far-flung future or tightly wrapped up in the contemporary state of war, the Knight held a certain significance to me. Even so, I hesitated to really associate myself with the Knight -- not just because of the historical knight, but because I thought of the archetypal Knight as a romanticization of the archetypal Soldier, and I feared unlearning lessons I held in importance by romanticizing the thing whose flaws I learned them from.
As I have grown around the Soldier, and as I have loosened the grip in which I held the good and bad of it together, I have found myself growing more comfortable with the archetypal Knight. It is still important to me to maintain a somewhat realistic, unromantic understanding of the Soldier, but in spite of its similarities the Knight is not the Soldier. There are no knights dying in wars today. The archetypal Knight is not meaningfully used to sell feudalism or the divine right of kings to a modern audience. The warring knight was real once, but the archetypal Knight as it exists today is a fictionalization and understood as such. Aet is a communicative tool, a shorthand, a symbol that has been used in service of all disparate ideals. To me, I think aet can be a fictionalization of the Soldier. In the same way that my fictotype is not the past life I associate with it, but is something of a more narratively satisfying and more handleable way to think of the events and outcomes of that past life, I can through the Knight explore the traits and flaws of the Soldier outside of the grounding and banality of the Soldier as I relate to it. It is a more positive, more whimsical framework through which to look not only at the way that I am and have been, but at the potential that the same traits might have in a different context.
One of the central problems that I have with the Soldier, and for me one of the central attractions of the archetypal Knight, is the issue of subordination. The archetypal Soldier is subordinate. Aet may be an officer, but aet isn't the top of the chain. One generally does not characterize a head of state as a Soldier except for the purpose of characterizing them as on level with their subordinates, even if they are a soldier by definition. The archetypal Knight does not carry this association nearly as strongly. There are royal Knights, rogue or errant Knights, dark Knights and evil Knights, leaderless or egalitarian knights’ orders. There is still a sense of being beholden to something -- a knight who acts only in their own interests is likely evil, or an intentional subversion of their archetype; even the devil as the "false knight" follows strict rules -- but compared to the Soldier the Knight is much more frequently beholden to something other than a person or state. Even when the Knight is subordinate to another person, aet is often also beholden to a code or ideal that supersedes the chain of command -- or, if it does not supersede command, conflicts with command and military loyalty as something equally important. Duty in the Soldier is an abstraction of or justification for subordination, but in the Knight duty and honor are the central driving force and subordination, when present, is an expression of that force.
Because the habit of deferring to authority is seductive to me, and because this is a feature of my person that I find both irritating and difficult to escape, I see the Knight's relationship to duty and subordination as a kind of compromise between deference and autonomy. For me the Soldier is hard to detach from the idea of deference to a person or state because it is my experience as the Soldier that makes me so critical of that kind of deference. In the Knight I find a greater opportunity to engage with that habit of deference without rejecting it outright, but also without deferring to something truly outside of my control. If I am committed to an ideal or to a code of honor before I am committed to any person or thing, then I have a degree of control over what directs me. Someone writes the code of honor, someone defines the ideal; I may be that person, and if I am not, it is my right and responsibility to interpret what they've written. A reciprocal relationship with duty, one where I define it as much as it defines me, has greater potential for growth and less for harm than one in which I am a slave to duty. It is also much more possible to achieve than totally rejecting an instinct that has been central to my sense of self for as long as I can remember. I like the idea that a trait that I have often thought of as a flaw could be made positive outside of a fascist or feudalistic worldview. I find it encouraging to think that I can work with my base instincts to improve myself and the world around me. It is easier to redirect a force than to reverse it, after all.
It is easier to redirect a force than to reverse it; it's a more efficient use of energy to cast a blow aside than to stop it. I like my battle metaphors. I think of and in terms of violence more often than I care to quantify -- not as an impulse, but as something that I am often aware of and something through which I understand other things. I associate this with a past life. If you aren’t inclined to believe that you may think of it as a quirk of my psychology, or you may think that I am a bit of a try-hard, but whatever the reason behind it the habit stands. Here and now I lead a fortunately peaceful life. I am glad for this, but it does lead to an odd sense of missing knowledge or context that I feel I should have. I have done little to pursue that missing knowledge, in part for financial reasons and in part because this is a place where I find it difficult to differentiate between what I want to be and what I feel I am meant to be. I know that I want to pursue HEMA or other martial arts; I know that I do not want to be a soldier by occupation again, even in the moments that not being one feels like trying to make an olive branch out of a knife. Between this thing that I know I want and this thing that I know I want to avoid, there is an unreadable smear. Do I actually want to understand medieval battle tactics, do I actually want to remember what it feels like to be struck, or do I just feel like I should? It's hard for me to say. I am too ambivalent about the subject, perhaps because it isn't a single subject. Violence as a skill, as an action, as a tool, a necessity, a threat, a metaphor, a perspective... these are different things that I feel differently about, but they are entangled with one another. The skill drags along with it the capacity for action, and behind that drags the power of threat. There is a limit to understanding the perspective and the metaphor without experience.
This is not a moral issue. It is, frankly, an overthinking issue. There are absolutely ways to responsibly pursue the kind of knowledge and experience that I feel I lack. I have even done so, if, as I said, not as much as I might. But I make too much of responsibility and discipline, because I have known people who made too little of them. I fear becoming the person whose foremost tool is violence, so I hesitate to put it in my toolkit at all. I said something a moment ago: "I find it difficult to differentiate between what I want to be and what I feel I am meant to be." This is true. With a little variance, with some overlap between fate and obligation, this has been true in many areas of my life. It has only been less of a problem in those areas because I respond to the uncertainty by wading into it. Do I want this, or do I feel like I'm supposed to want it? Well, let's try it and see. But there is baggage to violence that does not come with yoga or gardening, and baggage to the archetype of the Soldier, and it seems that many people take these things and run in directions that I do not want to follow. I hesitate and philosophize. I fear that I will fail again to live up to the responsibility of being a weapon.
I return to the difference between the deference of the Knight and the deference of the Soldier. The archetypal Soldier's violence is always in the service of a superior or a state; the archetypal Knight may act, or not act, in service to an ideal. The archetypal Knight is defined by tales of chivalry and courtly love, codes of honor and behavior that, while inconsistently defined and at times outright stupid, define a great deal more of the Knight's life than wartime and often emphasize circumstances under which the Knight must shun violence at least as much as those that require it. Actual soldiers in the modern day are often held to very strict standards of behavior as well (and actual knights, historically, to considerably lower standards than their fictional counterparts), but when this makes it into the archetype it's generally to the tune of uniformity and external control. Knightly or chivalric codes of honor are in contrast written, rightly or not, as challenges of self-control. If the Soldier represents discipline, the Knight represents specifically self-discipline.
I hesitate to trust myself at times, especially with the potential of violence. It is easy to solve this problem by handing control over to someone else. It is easy to think that this absolves me of responsibility. But even if I take it upon myself to find the infallible, honorable king and swear myself only to that, I will never escape the fallibility of my own judgement or the mutability of other men. The infallible king does not exist. The honorable man is always at risk of falling from grace. There is no single decision that I or anyone else can make that will protect me from error for the rest of my life; anything approaching goodness or even harmlessness requires continuous revisiting of the values and reasoning behind my actions. It requires me to understand the effects of those actions. This is at odds with turning the onus of reasoning over to someone else. Discipline in the form of unquestioningly following orders may feel like a lesser burden than that of making my own judgements, but both are outmatched in the end by the burden of knowing what I have done in someone else's name.
If I hesitate to trust myself, it is impossible to solve that problem by handing control over to someone else. For a long time my alternative solution has been, by and large, to avoid what I do not trust myself with -- but, you don't gain surer footing by never walking. If I worry that in a dire situation I will make the wrong move, then I should make an effort to assure myself that I will not. If I worry that I am not sufficiently in control of myself, then I must learn to control myself. I cannot rely on a single authority to tell me what to do; I must seek out a sufficient range of experience and knowledge to make sense of the world myself, and to make sense of myself. I must earn my own trust.
To make a goal of this is to put myself in the shoes of the Knight errant. The Soldier does not journey out alone to find himself, but the Knight may. This is one of the reasons that the Knight has a greater weight toward self-discipline than the Soldier: the Knight may well strike out on his own in a way that the Soldier generally does not, and aet remains beholden to aets code or king in every context. Aet may be accountable to others in the places that aet roams, but aet is first accountable to aetself. This framework may be an antidote to my tendency to think of myself -- of my violence, of my competence -- as a tool, something that can either be used and misused by others or be placed out of their reach. I belong to myself. If I have trouble deciding how to behave just from that, if I spin my wheels when I have nothing to defer to, then better for me to defer to something that still ultimately places me in charge of myself. If I must choose something to guide me, better for it to be something that I can be in active dialogue with, something that evolves with me rather than a rigid law or a leader who may not follow me where I roam. The self-written code, the interpretable ideal, the responsibility of the self. Whatever allows me -- and whatever forces me -- to act as an individual and not as one of an army's many hands.
The Knight may at times be literally faceless, being often represented as a suit of armor, but even when the Knight is used to explore facelessness and expendability aet is rarely portrayed with the same kind of uniformity, the same lack of focal point, that is often present with the Soldier. The Knight may have a round table or a knightly order, but aet does not blend into the crowd of an army. Perhaps this is because of the focus on self-discipline over external discipline, as enforced uniformity is often a part of externally enforced discipline. Perhaps it relates to the historical knight's status as nobility and cavalry; an army would not be made entirely or even primarily of knights. Perhaps the Knight as a largely narrative concept has no use for a trait that is difficult to use in narrative. The Soldier's status as a person whose individual identity does not exist or does not matter is still used to sell people on situations that will, necessarily or not, stifle expression of personal identity -- including the extant job of soldiering. While the Knight is still very much used to sell ideals of honor and duty, you do not see advertisements in the theater trying to convince you to become a knight. Nobody needs to convince you that the experience of being a knight is good, and nobody needs to convince you that it is a bad idea to become a knight. The Knight is one more step removed than the Soldier from the literal implementation of the ideals sold through him. Yet here am I, discussing a literal implementation of, if not knighthood itself, at least the ideals that I associate with it. Because it is that step removed I find it more malleable than the Soldier. Easier to redeem, if I want to be uncharitable to both of them.
In the end that perceived malleability is the greatest difference between the Knight and the Soldier. The Knight, as a narrative construction and especially as something that is actually acknowledged as a narrative construction, has more leeway than the Soldier has as something that still lives very close to aets namesake and is seen by a certain portion of the population as sacrosanct. As much as I may go on about the differences that I have drawn between them the venn diagram of traits present in the archetypal Soldier and traits present in the archetypal Knight is, if not a circle, very very close to one; had I been aiming to write about the archetypes themselves and not about my relationship to them, this section of the essay may well have been about the Knight as a subset of the Soldier rather than about how they differ. There is the duty, there is the discipline, there are the violence and the looming death. Though they take them in different measurements, they feed on the same ideas. They speak to each other. Because they speak to each other, I can use them to speak to myself.