Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Well, it is a Christmas story.

Young Gawain wants fame. No one's asking him to lop off a head, but violence is how a knight earns respect, right? And how else to prove your bravery than by killing your enemy on your free shot so he can't retaliate? Except then he can. Ooops.

Gawain is certainly a rich story, more than I'd expected being familiar with just the Lowery film (which I now retroactively like a bit less). He kills ogres and dragons and trolls offscreen, because we already know Arthurian knights can do that and who cares. Instead we spend entire stanzas on his clothes and what they signify, what he thinks he stands for versus what his actions actually accomplish. We never get a pure hero here; just a guy trying to figure exactly what this "bravery" and "chivalry" thing actually means. And it might be bullshit.

Man, the rhythm of this thing. Regardless of translation, that weird structure - free-form alliteration, then slamming on the breaks at the end of each stanza and shifting time signatures like the Feature just stepped in to drop a chorus. But not just the rhythm of the poetry (Armitage calls alliteration the "warp and wheft" of the story, I like that), there's the way the author uses it to tell the story; the introduction of the Green Knight, that magnificent Fitt 3 where they throw us back and forth between the hunting and seduction scenes... Also, yeah, Tolkien calls Gawain "gay" nineteen times and I refuse to believe he didn't know what he was doing because, yeah.

Ah yes, translations. Out of the two I've tried, I think I slightly prefer Armitage over Tolkien. Where Tolkien does... well, Tolkien, and everything ends up sounding like something out of the Silmarillion; stately, eternally ancient, full of ivied Oxford brick walls. It doesn't ever not work unless you already hate Tolkien (and this will never be anyone's first exposure to Tolkien). Armitage's take on it is both more straight to the point and takes more chances. Yes, there are bits where his contemporizin' make you go "Yeah, this is a 2007 translation"
and in the other hand held the mother of all axes,
a cruel piece of kit I kid you not:
while never committing completely to the bit like Maria Dahvana Hedley did with Beowulf. But seriously, the sheer percussive way it hits.

Tolkien:
The pentangle painted new
He on shield and coat did wear
As one of word most true
And knight of bearing fair.

Armitage:
So bore that badge on both
His shawl and shield alike.
A prince who talked the truth.
A notable. A knight.

I guess it's two takes on the old authenticity question; Tolkien wants to present a 500+ year old poem that was already about the Long-Ago Age of Myth, and so presents it in (what seems to this ESL speaker) faux-Tudor; old, but still perfectly readable. Whereas Armitage argues that the poet wrote for the readers of their day, and so tries to square the circle of an early medieval plot with a 21st centuy readership. Both with slightly mixed results. One thing I do miss in Armitage is how he plays down the Fair Folk angle and Tolkien plays it up; as far as I can tell both the original text and Tolkien have the Green Knight as "elvish" where Armitage calls him an "ogre". On the other hand, of course Tolkien keeps referring to "middle Earth" where the original has nothing like it.

The Tolkien also has The Pearl by (probably) the same author, and the unrelated Sir Orfeo, neither of which grab me much.

Merry Christmas, and try not to lop off strangers' heads. It never helps.