What title does Don Quixote give himself after his encounter with lions?

After his encounter with lions, Don Quixote gives himself the title Knight of the Lions.

The episode occurs in Part Two of Don Quixote, when the knight encounters a wagon carrying two caged lions. Convinced that the animals offer a test worthy of his imagined chivalric career, he orders the cage opened and challenges the lion. The animal refuses to leave its cage, turning the scene into one of the novel’s characteristic collisions between heroic fantasy and mundane reality.

Don Quixote nevertheless treats the encounter as a victory. He declares that the lion’s refusal proves the beast recognized his courage, and he replaces his earlier epithet, Knight of the Sorrowful Figure, with Knight of the Lions. The title reflects his constant habit of transforming ordinary or anticlimactic events into episodes from a romance of chivalry.

The name also echoes older knightly traditions. The lion was a familiar emblem in medieval romance, and Cervantes connects Don Quixote’s title with famous literary knights, including Yvain, the Knight of the Lion. The episode is therefore both comic and literary: Don Quixote is parodying heroic conventions while sincerely inhabiting them.