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If the Western dragon lies on one end of a mythological axis, signifying the incomprehensible, inhuman threat empowered by otherization, the knight does not stand in opposition to it; rather, the knight in shining armor is the counterweight on the other end of the same axis: the incomprehensible, superhuman force empowered by otherization. Indeed, when viewed from afar, the wicked dragon and the knight in shining armor may be almost impossible to distinguish from one another. Both are quadrapedal beasts clad in nigh-impenetrable scales, set apart from their kin by two great and terrible extra limbs that are signature to the havoc they wreak (wings for the dragon, weapon and shield for the knight).
The mounted knight is a creature alienated from humanity first—but not last—by its appearance. A closed visor to hide the face, plate armor that melds with a warhorse's barding making it difficult to distinguish the line between man and beast. It should be no surprise, then, that a figure standing so high above his fellow man in stature and in physique should be the subject of such extensive mythologization. The first lineage of myths, in the classical Arthurian style, heightened the superhuman aspects of the knight. King Arthur's knights of the round table had strange powers and backgrounds that had more in common with stories of Greek demigods than a man of noble breeding, a mythic tradition that can be traced back to the mythos's original Welsh roots. With the advent of the romantic era and "courtly love," the knight was dragged from its superhuman peak to the dirt and mud of painful humanity via the creation of Lancelot and his affair with Guinevere, turning what was once nigh-godly in power and virtue into a myth that gave the illusion of relation to the "common man"—at least what the nobility of the era thought as the "common man," i.e. themselves.
Over a thousand years of recording these stories, re-recording them, rewriting, then rewriting the rewrites have passed, each iteration translated back and forth across languages like a ping-pong ball's skewed trajectory being further altered by each swipe of the paddle. It is in this way that the myth of the knight has become inextricable from its history, so much so that the currents of chronology that gave rise to the shape of the knight myth, the points where the superhuman hero and the medieval weapon of war meet, are not often examined. The simple fact is that knights do not gallop onto the scene ex nihilo; springing into reality already atop a barded horse and ready to scour the realm of evil. The conditions that allow for a knight's existence provide form for the myth, and to understand the roots of the myth that lie beyond the knight and spread wide to cultures all over the world, a basic question must be answered:
How is a knight made?