#Gawain Poet

[illustratus]

The Green Knight by Julek Heller

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

#the green knight #green knight #sir gawain #art #julek heller #fantasy #mythology #esoteric #arthurian #chivalric romance #britain #england #english #medieval #knights #knighthood #chivalry #camelot #knight #gawain poet #middle english #sir gawain and the green knight #gawain #code of chivalry #poem #middle ages #the greene knight #axe

[saintkevorkian]

Honi soit qui mal y pense

#gawain poet

[ephemeriee]

this may be my favourite confidently incorrect thing i have ever read, i love the idea that i actually speak middle english

#not getting into what is the midlands and isn't #i don't consider it midlands #sir gawain and the green knight #green knight #gawain poet #this post has been on my mind for months #still not over it

[greencheekconure27]

The dubberment dere of down and dales

Of wode and water and wlonk plaines

Bilde in me bliss, abated my bales

Forbidden my stress, destroyed my paines

Down after a strem that drightly hales

I bowed in bliss, bredful my branes

The firre I folwed those floty vales

The more strength of joye myn herte straines

As fortune fares theras ho fraines

Whether solace ho sende other elles sore

The wye to wham hir wille ho waines

Hittes to have ay more and more

More of wele was in that wise

Than I couth telle thagh I tom hade

For erthly herte might not suffise

To the tenthe dole of tho gladness glade

For thy I thoght that paradise

Was there other gain tho bonkes brade

I hoped the water were a devise

Between mirthes by meres made

Beyonde the brook, by slent other slade

I hoped that mote inerked wore

Bot the water was depe, I dorst not wade

And ever me longed ay more and more

More and more and yet well mare

Me liste to see the brook beyonde

For if hit was fair there I can fare

Well loveloker was the firre londe

Aboute me con I stote and stare

To finde a forth faste con I fonde

Bot wothes mo ywis there ware

The firre I stalled by the stronde

And ever me thoght I shokle not wonde

For wo there weles so winne wore

Thenne newe note me com on honed

That meved my minde more and more

#music #medieval baebes #pearl poet #gawain poet #medieval english #medieval poetry #Youtube

[almondcroissantsandink]

Remember, it is only a game.

#the green knight #the green knight 2021 #gawain #gawain and the green knight #pearl poet #a24 #dev patel #barry keoghan #screaming sobbing throwing up #this took so long #csp #the green knight fanart #art #digital art #clip studio paint #artists on tumblr #arthurian #dev patel does such a great job of being just a lost mess of a guy #and he's very pretty

[addictivecontradiction]

The Green Knight, 2021

#adventure #drama #fantasy #the green knight #david lowery #the gawain poet #dev patel #alicia vikander #purpose

[werewolf-transgenderism]

mmhm mhm mhm yes I agree

#gawain poet says gawain’s got thick thighs you heard it here first

[videoframe]

The Green Knight

2021 / USA

Director: David Lowery

Writer: David Lowery / The Gawain Poet

Music: Daniel Hart

Director of Photography: Andrew Droz Palermo

Adventure / Drama / Fantasy

#videoframe #movies #pelis #2021 #the green knight #david lowery #film stills #The Gawain Poet

[peaceliliesandtea]

i’m currently reading the chronicles of narnia as exam prep for a module i’m taking. i remember reading tltwatw as a child; i also remember being obsessed with the film, too. after doing an English degree for however many years and taking as many Medieval modules as possible, i can recognise various different Middle English influences on the text (this low-key sounds wanky but i mean it in a like wow, who’d have thought? not me! paul rudd kinda way). like yep, C.S Lewis you truly were a Medievalist. anyway, it’s so satisfying to recognise texts within other texts

#this post is brought to you by me thinking the beginning of the magician’s nephew really reminds me of the Gawain poet’s (probs) Pearl #sophie’s diary #this has been a ramble #i’ll probably delete it later #but yeah it’s nice to think oh maybe this is a reference to this #me: it’s ok sophie this is just a fun little blog you do not have to prove your thoughts on c.s lewis’ work & middle english texts #also me: what if people think this is deeply serious and that i’m wrong #gonna work on not suffering from internet brain

[r-e-c-o-g-n-i-z-e-r]

The Green Knight (2021)

#The Green Knight #David Lowery #The Gawain Poet #Ralph Ineson #Green Knight

[aescheretalks]

“I halde þe polysed of þat plyȝt, and pured as clene as þou hadez neuer forfeted syþen þou watz fyrst borne.”

“I deem you absolved of your sin, and as stainless now as if you had never forfeited your innocence since the day you were born.”

— The Green Knight to Gawain

#middle english #The Pearl Poet #Gawain and the Green Knight

[agnesandhilda]

they just don't discover manuscripts containing narrative poems previously unknown to scholarship like they used to

#bolo speaks #I've really been enjoying old english literature so far and it IS because of how contextless it is compared to modern lit #you're telling me this story is contained in a single manuscript written in a dialect that's weird even for the time period? zoo wee mama 😳 #yes this post is about the gawain poet #but I do think it's fun that we straight-up discover new parts of the epic of gilgamesh every few years 🤭

[saintkevorkian]

Vision literature, on the whole, also favours the enclosure

The Pearl: An Interpretation, PM Kean [1967]

#The Pearl: An Interpretation #gawain poet

[rachel-614]

Okay, let me tell you a story:

Once upon a time, there was a prose translation of the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was wonderfully charming and lyrical and perfect for use in a high school, and so a clever English teacher (as one did in the 70s) made a scan of the book for her students, saved it as a pdf, and printed copies off for her students every year. In true teacher tradition, she shared the file with her colleagues, and so for many years the students of the high school all studied Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the same (very badly scanned) version of this wonderful prose translation.

In time, a new teacher became head of the English Department, and while he agreed that the prose translation was very wonderful he felt that the quality of the scan was much less so. Also in true teacher tradition, he then spent hours typing up the scan into a word processor, with a few typos here and there and a few places where he was genuinely just guessing wildly at what the scan actually said. This completed word document was much cleaner and easier for the students to read, and so of course he shared it with his colleagues, including his very new wide-eyed faculty member who was teaching British Literature for the first time (this was me).

As teachers sometimes do, he moved on for greener (ie, better paying) pastures, leaving behind the word document, but not the original pdf scan. This of course meant that as I was attempting to verify whether a weird word was a typo or a genuine artifact of the original translation, I had no other version to compare it to. Being a good card-holding gen zillenial I of course turned to google, making good use of the super secret plagiarism-checking teacher technique “Quotation Marks”, with an astonishing result:

By which I mean literally one result.

For my purposes, this was precisely what I needed: a very clean and crisp scan that allowed me to make corrections to my typed edition: a happily ever after, amen.

But beware, for deep within my soul a terrible Monster was stirring. Bane of procrastinators everywhere, my Curiosity had found a likely looking rabbit hole. See, this wonderfully clear and crisp scan was lacking in two rather important pieces of identifying information: the title of the book from which the scan was taken, and the name of the translator. The only identifying features were the section title “Precursors” (and no, that is not the title of the book, believe me I looked) and this little leaf-like motif by the page numbers:

(Remember the leaf. This will be important later.)

We shall not dwell at length on the hours of internet research that ensued—how the sun slowly dipped behind the horizon, grading abandoned in shadows half-lit by the the blue glow of the computer screen—how google search after search racked up, until an email warning of “unusual activity on your account” flashed into momentary existence before being consigned immediately and with some prejudice to the digital void—how one third of the way through a “comprehensive but not exhaustive” list of Sir Gawain translators despair crept in until I was left in utter darkness, screen black and eyes staring dully at the wall.

Above all, let us not admit to the fact that such an afternoon occurred not once, not twice, but three times.

Suffice to say, many hours had been spent in fruitless pursuit before a new thought crept in: if this book was so mysterious, so obscure as to defeat the modern search engine, perhaps the answer lay not in the technologies of today, but the wisdom of the past. Fingers trembling, I pulled up the last blast email that had been sent to current and former faculty and staff, and began to compose an email to the timeless and indomitable woman who had taught English to me when I was a student, and who had, after nearly fifty years, retired from teaching just before I returned to my alma mater.

After staring at the email for approximately five or so minutes, I winced, pressed send, and let my plea sail out into the void. I cannot adequately describe for you the instinctive reverence I possess towards this teacher; suffice to say that Ms English was and is a woman of remarkable character, as much a legend as an institution as a woman of flesh and blood whose enduring influence inspired countless students. There is not a student taught by Ms. English who does not have a story to tell about her, and her decline in her last years of teaching and eventual retirement in the face of COVID was the end of an era. She still remembers me, and every couple months one of her contemporaries and dear friends who still works as a guidance counsellor stops me in the hall to tell me that Ms. English says hello and that she is thrilled that I am teaching here—thrilled that I am teaching honors students—thrilled that I am now teaching the AP students. “Tell her I said hello back,” I always say, and smile.

Ms. English is a legend, and one does not expect legends to respond to you immediately. Who knows when a woman of her generation would next think to check her email? Who knows if she would remember?

The day after I sent the email I got this response:

My friends, I was shaken. I was stunned. Imagine asking God a question and he turns to you and says, “Hold on one moment, let me check with my predecessor.”

The idea that even Ms. English had inherited this mysterious translation had never even occurred to me as a possibility, not when Ms. English had been a faculty member since the early days of the school. How wonderful, I thought to myself. What a great thing, that this translation is so obscure and mysterious that it defeats even Ms. English.

A few days later, Ms. English emailed me again:

(I had, in fact searched through both the English office and the Annex—a dark, weirdly shaped concrete storage area containing a great deal of dust and many aging copies of various books—a few days prior. I had no luck, sadly.)

At last, though, I had a title and a description! I returned to my internet search, only to find to my dismay that there was no book that exactly matched the title. I found THE BRITISH TRADITION: POETRY, PROSE, AND DRAMA (which was not black and the table of contents I found did not include Sir Gawain) and THE ENGLISH TRADITION, a super early edition of the Prentice Hall textbooks we use today, which did have a black cover but there were absolutely zero images I could find of the table of contents or the interior and so I had no way of determining if it was the correct book short of laying out an unfortunate amount of cold hard cash for a potential dead end.

So I sighed, and relinquished my dreams of solving the mystery. Perhaps someday 30 years from now, I thought, I’ll be wandering through one of those mysterious bookshops filled with out of print books and I’ll pick up a book and there will be the translation, found out last!

So I sighed, and told the whole story to my colleagues for a laugh. I sent screenshots of Ms. English’s emails to my siblings who were also taught by her. I told the story to my Dad over dinner as my Great Adventure of the Week.

…my friends. I come by my rabbit-hole curiosity honestly, but my Dad is of a different generation of computer literacy and knows a few Deep Secrets that I have never learned. He asked me the title that Ms. English gave me, pulled up some mysterious catalogue site, and within ten minutes found a title card. There are apparently two copies available in libraries worldwide, one in Philadelphia and the other in British Columbia. I said, “sure, Dad,” and went upstairs. He texted me a link. Rolling my eyes, I opened it and looked at the description.

Huh, I thought. Four volumes, just like Ms. English said. I wonder…

Armed with a slightly different title and a publisher, I looked up “The English Tradition: Fiction macmillan” and the first entry is an eBay sale that had picture of the interior and LO AND BEHOLD:

THE LEAF. LOOK AT THE LEAF.

My dad found it! He found the book!!

Except for one teensy tiny problem which is that the cover of the book is uh a very bright green and not at all black like Ms. English said. Alas, it was a case of mistaken identity, because The English Tradition: Poetry does have a black cover, although it is the fiction volume which contains Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

And so having found the book at last, I have decided to purchase it for the sum of $8, that ever after the origins of this translation may once more be known.

In this year of 2022 this adventure took place, as this post bears witness, the end, amen.

(Edit: See here for part 2!)

#sir gawain and the green knight #translations #internet research #english literature #teaching things #dads are the best #long post #story telling #I STILL don’t know the name of the translator but I WILL find out #obscure books

[movie-titlecards]

The Green Knight (2021)

My rating: 6/10

Huh. Arthurian arthouse.

#The Green Knight #David Lowery #The Gawain Poet #Dev Patel #Alicia Vikander #Joel Edgerton #Youtube

[dostoevskydisco]

XXXIV.

The knight, upon his horse, stood still at the bank of the deep double moat which bordered the place; the wall sat in the water wondrously deep, and also rose a great height above, made of hard, carved stone all the way to the top, built under the battlements most skillfully, with gay watchtowers set at intervals and many lovely arrow slits with clear shots. Gawain had never beheld a better fortress! Further in he could see a lofty hall, surrounded by crenelated towers, beautiful turrets, exceedingly tall, with carved roofs carefully crafted. He saw a multitude of chimneys white as chalk upon the bastions, shining very bright. So many painted pinnacles ornamented the area, all of them clustered with embrasures that seemed to be cut from clean paper. The knight on his horse thought it would be wonderful if he could manage to find shelter inside and harbor in that hostel for the length of the holiday                          revels.            He called, and soon there came            a most pleasant porter,            greeting the knight-errant            and asking his name.

(Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 785-810)

#sir gawain and the green knight #amateur translation #i find the aestheticization of watchtowers and arrow slits really bizarre and fascinating #it's like these structures are divorced from their violent purposes in this context #and i don't know if that's meant to be ironic or if the original poet just really thought arrow slits were pretty