I recently picked up a small book at Booksamillion entitled Rules for a Knight. Written by Ethan Hawke, the four-time Academy Award nominated actor and author, the book is purported to be a translation and reconstruction of a letter and rubric written in July of 1483 by a certain Sir Thomas Lemuel Hawke. Sir Thomas is supposedly a knight of Cornwall during the reign of Richard III Plantagenet, whom the author claims to have as an ancestor, and that the letter was discovered amongst Ethan Hawke's great-grandmother's belongings after her death.
The letter amounts to advice written by a father to his four children, whom he believes he will not see again due to the battle he is to fight the next day against the forces of the "Thane of Cawdor". The letter is divided into 21 sections (not really long enough to be called chapters), consisting of a prologue and twenty "rules" of knighthood, each rule with an anecdote and accompanying advice. Some are lessons learned while Sir Thomas was a squire under his maternal grandfather, while others are after his accolade on the battlefield. Each of the rules have an illustration by Ethan Hawke's wife Ryan. The rules are solitude, humility, gratitude, pride, cooperation, friendship, forgiveness, honesty, courage, grace, patience, justice, generosity, discipline, dedication, speech, faith, equality, love, and death. The grandfather, who remains unnamed, is full of pithy and humorous sayings. The book also has a poem, The Ballad of the Forty-Four Pointed Red Deer, a homily about a stag, whom after being spared by the king, is prepared to sacrifice his life for a doe with an unborn fawn. The royalties for the book are being donated by Ethan and Ryan Hawke to organizations helping children overcome learning disabilities, although these organizations are not named.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. At 169 pages, the book is a fun, short read. Normally, I'm not a big fan of epistolary style writings, but this book is not dull (well, except for maybe the poem). There is little time for character exposition which, given the familiar nature of the story, is unnecessary. There are anachronisms, such as the serving of tea (not introduced until the sixteenth century in Europe) or the ideals of equality, not only between social classes, but the sexes as well. While some of the rules would have pertained to knighthood, the anecdotes themselves are not much more than modern philosophical ideas shellacked with medieval trappings.
The book is published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2010, and is available in hardcover ISBN 978-0-307-96233-1.
