One day, while reading The Quest for the Holy Grail, I came across a statement by Sir Gawain that made me chuckle:
I have slain more than ten knights already, the worst of whom was more than adequate, and still have met with no adventure.
In what world does someone trek through the wilderness, kill ten knights, and then claim he has found no adventure?
As I kept reading, I found similar passages from other knights, and I started highlighting them as a joke. Over the next few weeks, someone would ask me how my commute was, and I’d respond with something silly like,
I drove 47 minutes and avoided two near accidents but found no adventure.
That first reading was about 10 years ago, and I kept returning to the Quest for the Holy Grail for re-readings. Not only did I continue to highlight moments of “no adventure,” I started maintaining a spreadsheet. I thought it would be funny to make a chart that depicted which knight spent the most documented time “without adventure,” or bored. After all, the Quest and the Grail is often the climax of any Arthurian tale before everything turns terrible (ya know, Mordred).
Messing with the chart was fun in between other projects, and I loved sharing the exercise with random people. For those outside the scholarly world, they can still appreciate a silly endeavor.
But after sharing the concept with a colleague, he expressed, “You might have an essay there. I’d keep exploring.”
Ugh, now it’s not a joke; it’s something potentially real. So I kept exploring, re-reading the Quest in different translations (Shoaf and Burns) and even turning to the Queste del saint Graal in Middle French, especially when those translations disagreed.
I also went through the tedious effort of reading everything prior scholars had written about this 13th-century work, seeing it from their perspective, and confirming no prior scholar had thought to calculate days without adventure. They hadn’t. Why would they?
This process went on for years. I’d get on an elevator at work, and a coworker would look at me inquisitively.
coworker: what’s in the bag?
me: a bunch of books on the holy grail
coworker: heh, fine don’t tell me
me:
Like any article that takes years to research and write, I fluctuated between “I can’t get this right” to “what am I even doing?” to “I think I’ve got something here!” The latter came when the order of knights, ranked by who was documented spending the most days without adventure, did not come in the order I anticipated. Then I had to think through why that was. What was an adventure to these knights? Why was killing not an adventure? The questions plagued me.
The answers are complex, but there are some relatable answers. One day, my dad shared an anecdote about his career as an airline pilot. He was used to meeting people who believed he had an exciting job. His response was often,
Actually, if I do everything right, it’s quite boring.
He’d experience the miracle of flight with about 200 people to Hawaii or Mexico City, and he, like Gawain, often encountered no adventure worth sharing.
In the meantime, I was determined to get the number of adventure-less days as accurate as possible. The author of the Queste del saint Graal was often precise in his accounting of time. For example, the Quest began in 487 AD. Sometimes the author will tell us a knight spent 1, 3, 4, or 5 days traveling with no adventure. Other times, the author is less precise, and amounts of time needed to be calculated implicitly. Eventually, I had a spreadsheet with 29 entries accounting for time in the Queste. All that transformed into 5 tables (4 small plus 1 really big’un), and 1 chart that lists the main knights in the Queste del saint Graal, ordered by the number of days the work tells us they spent sans aventure (without adventure).
And now it’s published in Arthuriana as “Sans aventure: Knights with No Adventure Worth Recording in the Queste del saint Graal,” and it is available via Open Access on Project Muse.
The chart was my grail, but it is still funny to me. I mean, I’m proud of the article and the chart, but, my god, this is the longest joke I’ve ever worked on. And somehow, I was never bored. Frustrated at times, but I enjoy sharing these adventures.