New Film Retells an Old Story From King Arthur’s Court

[WTJU introduction, not transcribed]

[:32 sec] Anthony Spearing, now retired and living in his native England

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is one of the stories of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. It was written in the late 14^th century, the age of Chaucer, and it survives in only one manuscript – one small, messy vellum manuscript in the British Library, and it contains four poems, which we think are all by the same poet. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ is one of them, and none of them is found in any other manuscript. We don’t know anything about the poet for certain. What scholars tend to think nowadays is that he was a cleric because there’s a lot of religious material in his poems, and that he might have been a cleric from the area where the dialect of the poems comes from – the northwest midlands of England.

[1:37] C. Kinney: In this poem a mysterious green knight challenges the knights of the Round Table to a fearsome beheading game in an exchange of axe blows. Gawain becomes their champion and discovers that the Green Knight has the power to recover from decapitation. A year later he must journey north to keep his promise to receive the return blow. Encountering many dangers, some of them unexpected, as in a northern castle where the host’s wife becomes all too friendly. But even before that, his journey has unexpected trials, as you can see in the following extract from it, which is my own translation:

[from Clare]

He climbed over clifftops in no man’s land,

Far flung from his friends, a stranger he rides;

Beside every ford, wherever he fared,

He found a foe waiting (unless fortune smiled)

So foul and so fierce, he was forced to fight.

And so strange and so many these mountainside clashes

It’s tough work to tell you of even a tenth:

Sometimes he’s warring with serpents and wolves,

Sometimes with wild men who lurked in the crags,

And with bulls and with bears, and even with boars,

And giants who harassed him from the high hills:

Had he not been so dauntless and served his Lord duly

He’d doubtless have perished, died many times over—

And though the fighting was fierce the winter was worse,

When cruel cold water fell from the clouds

And froze as it flinched from the pallid earth.

Nearly slain by the sleet, he slept in his steel,

More nights that enough amid the bare rocks,

Where, clattering from the hill crest the cold stream ran

And hung high above his head in hard icicles.

So in perilous plight and punishing pain

Gawain rides cross-country, ’til Christmas Eve,

Alone.

   And still the knight, that tide,

   To Mary made sad moan—

   Prayed that she be his guide,

   Direct him to some home.

[3:48] Spearing: And this is the same stanza read in medieval English. [reads middle English]

[5: 38] One of the attractive things about Gawain in this poem is that he isn’t a superman, is he? He’s one of the best of Arthur’s knights but he’s frightened, and he shows his courage in just overcoming that fear. There’s the moment where he finally arrives at what must be the green chapel where he thinks the Green Knight is going to cut his head off. And it almost looks for a moment as though he’s going to shout out his challenge, and then the moment there’s no answer, he won’t be able to see him for snow dust …

[6:20] Clare: then you hear the grinding of the axe that the Green Knight carries. It’s so visual. “If the Gawain poet were living today, he would be writing screenplays or he’d be a great cinematographer, because of the visual sense, the point of view, the use of perspective. There’s an amazing moment when Gawain is keeping his promise, is receiving what he thinks is the blow of the axe that is going to decapitate him, but the Green Knight only gives him the tiniest nick on the neck, and you can see from Gawain’s point of view a little drop of blood falling on the snow in front of him.

[7:04] Fowler: One of the great things about great poetry is that it changes so much in time. It begins to mean something different to you as you move through your life. I find with teaching things that that is particularly true.

I have thought about this as a very beautiful, intricate artifact full of color and life, very witty, but not profound – until I was scheduled to teach it on Sept. 12, 2001. When I started talking about Gawain that day, I started the beginning of the poem, and the beginning of the poem actually goes way back to the fall of Troy, and it talks, rather like a Hitchcock movie, it zooms in from way in the distance and then it zooms into a particular window, and it talks about history and the way that large tragedies in history are markers and bring England into being in the myth of the time, that there is a Brutus who came to found Britain. So talking about the image that the poem uses, which is the destruction of a borough, it was a way of making sense for us of what had happened with 9-11, and why it was the sky-scraping towers that were the object of that violence – that they stood for a kind of imperial history that meant something around the world that was quite different than what it meant to Americans usually.

So it was suddenly a much more sobering and dangerous poem, the entirety of it – the beheading game, the violence in the poem, which coincides with the intricate etiquette and manners of this incredibly stylish court, the deadly violence that speaks to the mind of the body is very moving, and it became a very different poem for me – at least until the next big event. I’ll always think of it in a different and more complex way.