The Green Knight Rides Again
I don't know how many of you noticed the review of a new translation of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight.I can't wait to get my hands on it. When I first read the Middle English text I was as transfixed as the reviewer. It was wild, errie, an alliterative wonder. All through Grad school I thought about it off and on. I wrote a Freudian interpretation. The poem takes place Christmas week, in fact, if I remember rightly on the feast of the circumcision.The Green Knight comes to Camelot on that special day to ask one of the young knights to cut off his head as long as he has the right to a return blow in a year and a day. You can imagine what a Freudian would make of that.Many years passed and I lost my Freudian creed but I still loved the Green Knight. Finally I wrote my own version in The Beheading Game. It's a bit too late for Christmas shopping but I'd suggest if any of you have to return gift books after Christmas that you exchange them for Sir Gawain and The Green Knight...
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Thomas Dotson says:
I'd love to hear your thoughts
An interesting suggestion for reading and one I think I'm going to take you up on. I am curious about your own thoughts regarding this poem. Also, do you know if the poem itself has any pre-christian era, predecessors? Any insight or resources you could point me too would be much appreciated.
Brenda Webster says:
The Green Knight-- a new interpretation
There are lots of predecessors. It's hard to remember them now but Kittridge, collected many of them in a book. He divided them into two groups: stories relating to the beheading theme and stories relating to the temptation Gawain undergoes towards the end of the poem. The beheading stories included one in which the Green Knight is actually Gawain's father. The temptation ones included a story called the Faithless mother. Kittredge and most scholars felt that the two themes had nothing to do with each other. I felt they had everything. That the temptation was Oedipal but the sequence is mixed so that instead of having only a temptation followed by a punnishment you have beheadings or feints bracketing a temptation. First the father figure is beheaded and then the younger man receives a token punnishment at the end. I think the whole pattern is used to re-enforce the idea of knightly obedience to one's lord--a sort of coming of age story. In my own novel I allow my hero to protest and want to take history in another direction.If you read Spanish, I have a long essay in Mythpoesis:Literatura, totalidad, ideologia ed. by Joan Ramon Resina. The title in English is Blow for Blow: A New Interpretation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I'd be glad to send you an offprint. The analogues and notes to relevant articles are all there.