April 7, 2007

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

  

  
  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  has always left me a little on edge.  Really, it’s such a strange story.  I didn’t get the point and was left shrugging my shoulders. 

  This time, reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s alliterative translation was pure delight. Maybe as I age I can find beauty in works without demanding that they conform to my modern sensibilities.   Reading Sir Gawain was as delicious as reading and listening to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.  They really are companion books.

  Do you know the story?  Sir Gawain, a knight of the Round Table, enters a be-heading (!) game with a Green Knight.  He finds himself at a warm castle at Christmas, knowing he is engaged to meet and be beheaded by this Green Knight on New Year’s Day.  His host tests him with another game in which the host’s wife enters Sir Gawain’s bedroom and offers herself to him.  Three times he refuses, but the last time he accepts a gift from her.  The rest of the story, gentle reader, is in the book.

  In the introduction, Tolkien writes:

  The story is good enough in itself.  It is a romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and color; and it has virtues that would be lost in a summary, though they can be perceived when it is read at length: good scenery, urbane or humorous dialogue, and a skilfully ordered narrative.

  and

  Let us be grateful for what we have got, preserved by chary chance: another window of many-colored glass looking back into the Middle Ages, and giving us another view.

  I feel like the lady in Costco, passing out samples, persuading you to come, buy and eat.  Here are some morsels:

  The fair head to the floor fell from the shoulders,                    
  and folk fended it with their feet as forth it went rolling.           
                                          p.39 this just makes me laugh!

   After the season of summer with its soft breezes,
  when Zephyr goes sighing through seeds and herbs,
  right glad is the grass that grows in the open,
  when the damp dewdrops are dripping from the leaves,
  to greet a gay glance of the glistening sun.                                
                                          p.43 more lush seasonal descriptions follow
  
  soups they served of many sorts, seasoned most choicely,
  in double helpings, as was due, and divers sorts of fish;
  some baked in bread, some broiled on the coals,
  some seethed, some in gravy savoured with spices,
  and all the condiments so cunning that it caused him delight.
                                             p. 57  what a feastly description!

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  Quick story:  I was teaching a literature class and mentioned Sir GAH-win.  After some discussion, one of my students erupted, “OH! Sir Guh-WAYNE!  I didn’t know who you were talking about!”  

  At that point, I realized that I had never heard the Sir Gawain’s name spoken!!   My student  hadn’t either.  I’ve listened to a Teaching Company tape and the lecturer said GAH-win. Now we know!

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  A bonus find:  A lovely site on alliterative poetry called Forgotten Ground Regained.  Paul Deane offers his 1999 translation of parts of Sir Gawain.  If you like poems, check out  A Cry to Heaven (after Psalm 6). The site is worthy of time to explore.  Great fun.

  • 3:05 pm
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