Palamon

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A noble knight in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales who loves Emily and rivals Arcite for her hand ; a shrimp of the genus Palaemon found in coastal and estuarine waters
2. The chivalrous Theban knight from Chaucer's Knight's Tale who competes with Arcite for Emily ; a palaemonid shrimp belonging to the genus named for a sea deity
3. Chaucer's imprisoned knight who falls in love with Emily and fights Arcite for her ; a marine decapod shrimp classified within the genus Palaemon

Etymology: Palamon is the name of one of the two Theban knights in Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale," the story that opens the Canterbury Tales. He and his cousin Arcite are imprisoned together in Athens, both fall in love with Emelye, and they fight a tournament for her hand. The name is not Chaucer's own invention: he took the story from Boccaccio's "Teseida," where the two lovers are called Palemone and Arcita, and Boccaccio's name was itself a borrowing from classical and medieval sources, so Chaucer inherited a name already shaped by earlier retellings. The name belongs to a story rather than to a common word, so its history is largely that of its characters. Chaucer's Palamon is a proper noun that English readers have kept as a literary name, used for the knight himself and occasionally for other figures inspired by him. Its spelling and sound were shaped by Chaucer's English, which is why modern readers meet it in this form rather than the Italian one.