[ام رؤوم]

Lines 13 – 24
The story's twist occurs in the first stanza of the knight's speech. Though a "lady" was bound to figure into the poem, that she is a "faery's child" changes the expectations of the tale's outcome and causes readers to reinterpret the nature of the knight's desolation. Literature and myth are filled with examples of humans who fall in love with gods, and with little exception, such relationships bode disastrously for the mortal party. Particularly in that area of mythology dealing with fairies or fairy-like creatures, humans who become enamored of fairies, elves, pixies, and the like generally suffer extreme emotional consequences once their affairs with the capricious beings have ended. Having loved an immortal, these hapless humans discover that mere mortal beauty — which can include not only human lovers but also life itself — will no longer do. Based on thse conventions, readers understand immediately that this is the knight's fate, and through his deions of his fairy-love's beauty, readers see the caprice that brings on his doom. In keeping with fairies' quick and unpredictable behavior, "her foot was light." Her long hair suggests the sensual nature of such creatures, who in lore are given to continual pleasures, and "her eyes were wild." The knight confesses he was taken in by his lady's fairy-penchant for "seeming:" She looked at him "as she did love." In the terms of chivalric belief-systems,