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bloodygranuaileSometimes when I am sick I like to read poetry, and sometimes in the winter I like to read Arthuriana. Last week I was both so I decided to read the ancient paperback copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that’s been sitting on my shelf for I don’t know how long. I can tell the copy is ancient because the price on the front cover is 95 cents. You can’t buy anything for 95 cents anymore.
I’d read J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of this a few years ago, but it was long enough ago that I was ready to give the poem a “reread,” although this translation is by one Brian Stone. Brian Stone may not have written The Lord of the Rings but he does seem to know what he is about as far as medieval poetry goes, as well as the art of translation. I found this version of the poem gripping, surreal, and full of lively, concrete detail. The story itself is fey and freaky, and also seasonal–Gawain’s deadline is the New Year, so most of it takes place during that liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s when time comes unmoored and we are all confused and full of cheese.
The storyline is simple enough. One New Year’s, the Green Knight comes to Arthur’s court and demands to play a game–one of Arthur’s knights will cut his head off, and then in a year, the Knight will return the blow. Young Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, takes up the challenge and beheads the knight. The knight picks up his head and is like “See you in a year! Come find me” and rides out. Gawain procrastinates trying to find the Green Knight again until after Halloween, then goes riding around the countryside looking for the Green Knight’s chapel, to no avail. Around Christmas, he finds himself in a strange castle in an icy wood, and becomes the guest of the jovial castellan and his lady. The castellan tells him that he knows exactly where the Green Knight’s chapel is, and it’s less than two miles away, so Gawan should feel free to just hang out and celebrate Christmas week. This he does. In the days between Christmas and New Year’s, the castellan goes out hunting, and Gawain stays in and gets in a set of awkward politeness dances with the castellan’s lady, a sorceress who is trying to seduce him. In an interesting set of scenes, which read as very gender-swapped from a modern perspective, Gawain tries to defend his chastity without doing anything as impolite as overtly refusing the lady, caught between two opposing standards of honorable behavior. Gawain navigates this dilemma mostly cleanly but does find himself succumbing to the temptation of letting the lady give him her girdle as a favor, although this is less because he wants the lady’s favor than because it is a magical green girdle that is enchanted so the wearer of it can never be harmed. Gawain wears this convenient item to his appointment with the Green Knight, whose blow cuts through the skin of his neck but stops at the muscle, leaving Gawain with just a superficial cut, which will scar to remind him forever that he did do a tiny little sin in order to save his own life. Gawain is very penitent about this because a knight should face death fearlessly, but the Giant thinks it’s incredibly funny and that it’s very understandable to value your own life, and forgives him. In fact, the Green Knight, who unsurprisingly is also the castellan, knew all about his enchantress wife’s seduction attempts and thinks that Gawain is a jolly fellow who handled his tests pretty well, and considers them BFFs now. All the rest of Arthur’s knights are also pretty pleased that Gawain’s not dead once he gets back to Camelot.
Thus is the story, in brief, but the point of epic poetry is not to tell it in brief, it is to tell it very dramatically and with lots of scene-setting about the shining and richly embroidered armor and clothes and stuff everyone is wearing, and the food they are eating, and the savage beauty of the northern English or maybe Welsh countryside in the middle of bitter winter. This the poem does beautifully. The introduction tells us that it also describes armor and hunting and other parts of medieval life very accurately, showing that the anonymous author of the poem was well acquainted with courtly life and generally knew what he was about. I don’t know much about hunting so it’s nice to know I am not being led astray.
Really good medieval poetry really is quite like nothing else; the atmospherics are great and the rhythms of alliterative poetry are very unlike that of the rhyming poetry that would come to dominate later eras of English literature. I am always very glad when I revisit one of these types of works when they are translated well.
I’d read J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of this a few years ago, but it was long enough ago that I was ready to give the poem a “reread,” although this translation is by one Brian Stone. Brian Stone may not have written The Lord of the Rings but he does seem to know what he is about as far as medieval poetry goes, as well as the art of translation. I found this version of the poem gripping, surreal, and full of lively, concrete detail. The story itself is fey and freaky, and also seasonal–Gawain’s deadline is the New Year, so most of it takes place during that liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s when time comes unmoored and we are all confused and full of cheese.
The storyline is simple enough. One New Year’s, the Green Knight comes to Arthur’s court and demands to play a game–one of Arthur’s knights will cut his head off, and then in a year, the Knight will return the blow. Young Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, takes up the challenge and beheads the knight. The knight picks up his head and is like “See you in a year! Come find me” and rides out. Gawain procrastinates trying to find the Green Knight again until after Halloween, then goes riding around the countryside looking for the Green Knight’s chapel, to no avail. Around Christmas, he finds himself in a strange castle in an icy wood, and becomes the guest of the jovial castellan and his lady. The castellan tells him that he knows exactly where the Green Knight’s chapel is, and it’s less than two miles away, so Gawan should feel free to just hang out and celebrate Christmas week. This he does. In the days between Christmas and New Year’s, the castellan goes out hunting, and Gawain stays in and gets in a set of awkward politeness dances with the castellan’s lady, a sorceress who is trying to seduce him. In an interesting set of scenes, which read as very gender-swapped from a modern perspective, Gawain tries to defend his chastity without doing anything as impolite as overtly refusing the lady, caught between two opposing standards of honorable behavior. Gawain navigates this dilemma mostly cleanly but does find himself succumbing to the temptation of letting the lady give him her girdle as a favor, although this is less because he wants the lady’s favor than because it is a magical green girdle that is enchanted so the wearer of it can never be harmed. Gawain wears this convenient item to his appointment with the Green Knight, whose blow cuts through the skin of his neck but stops at the muscle, leaving Gawain with just a superficial cut, which will scar to remind him forever that he did do a tiny little sin in order to save his own life. Gawain is very penitent about this because a knight should face death fearlessly, but the Giant thinks it’s incredibly funny and that it’s very understandable to value your own life, and forgives him. In fact, the Green Knight, who unsurprisingly is also the castellan, knew all about his enchantress wife’s seduction attempts and thinks that Gawain is a jolly fellow who handled his tests pretty well, and considers them BFFs now. All the rest of Arthur’s knights are also pretty pleased that Gawain’s not dead once he gets back to Camelot.
Thus is the story, in brief, but the point of epic poetry is not to tell it in brief, it is to tell it very dramatically and with lots of scene-setting about the shining and richly embroidered armor and clothes and stuff everyone is wearing, and the food they are eating, and the savage beauty of the northern English or maybe Welsh countryside in the middle of bitter winter. This the poem does beautifully. The introduction tells us that it also describes armor and hunting and other parts of medieval life very accurately, showing that the anonymous author of the poem was well acquainted with courtly life and generally knew what he was about. I don’t know much about hunting so it’s nice to know I am not being led astray.
Really good medieval poetry really is quite like nothing else; the atmospherics are great and the rhythms of alliterative poetry are very unlike that of the rhyming poetry that would come to dominate later eras of English literature. I am always very glad when I revisit one of these types of works when they are translated well.