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Sometimes a story just takes over

A while back I worked out a plot for a novel that I thought I might write.  That story turned on the discovery of a long lost manuscript, which was to be the second poem about Gawain by the fourteenth century poet who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. That novel wasn't written, but I did start to think more about what that second poem might look like, what story that poem might tell.  Once that had arrived, and the title Sir Gawain and the Green Maiden, it was a short step to writing the opening lines of the poem, and then a bit more.  And then fleshing out the whole of the tale. Sometimes a story just takes over.  I asked myself who wrote the poem, where and when, and under what circumstances.  And as I started to answer these questions new people just arrived, bringing with them their own lives and interests, and wrapped themselves around my tale of the Green Maiden.  Soon they were walking and talking on my pages, going about their love-lives, their career choices, and res
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THE BOOK

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What is  Sir Gawain and the Green Maiden?   A new novel connected to Arthurian mythology, and a different way of writing about Arthurian things.  There are three storylines, one of which involves Gawain. The Gawain story is told as though The Gawain Poet who wrote the fourteenth century poem  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,   returned to his material to develop and finish what he'd started so many years before. That second poem is here, in  SGGM , as though it's been translated into modern English for today's reader.  And? Another story.  A story that's more down to earth, something everyday. What happens to Mark Thomas Redman, a young man who gets married, in a small township somewhere in the north of Wales towards the end of the fourteenth century.   Over the span of four days he hears an itinerant bard deliver a further tale of Sir Gawain, and his life changes, subtly, but profoundly and irrecoverably. Anything else? Another story.  A framing story of two of the las
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The project

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As is usually the way, the project changed as it went along. Starting out , the task was an academic question, founded on a piece of guesswork about what the content of a second poem by the Gawain Poet might be.  Thinking along those lines took me back to the sources, going beyond Malory to the Welsh mythology about Taliesin and Gwalchmai that the Gawain stories came from.   As the new story took shape, once the presence of a Green Maiden instead of a Green Knight had arrived, it seemed natural to weave back into the plot the beheading game -- or a version of it that might belong to a story in which the instigators were women.   I wanted to keep the idea of chivalry in focus as well.  Gawain's chivalry is  important in the original poem, but because I was putting a lapse of years between the first and second poems, I wanted to revisit the merits of chivalry and imply  disillusion on the poet's behalf.  My poet of the second poem was an older man, and the kingdoms he's known
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The Green Knight on Film

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The Green Knight,  Directed, written, edited & produced by David Lowery.  Starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris and Ralsph Ineson. I was very interested to see this film when it was released.  I wanted to see how successfully Arthurian legends had come to the big screen on this occasion, and how it compared to Boorman's  Excalibur  and other sword-and-sorcery films actually rooted in mythology and legend.  Here are the thoughts I had at the time.  It looks amazing , visually superb.  Control of setting, lighting, staging, camera, lighting is flawless.  The music is moody, appropriate, expertly done.  The performances from all of the cast are excellent.  There is a great deal to enjoy.   More, the film manages to avoid some of the traps that stalk large-screen adaptations of the material.  One: it never reminds you of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and its pretention-skewering of fake medievalism.  Two, we never feel that this is jus
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Some manuscript images

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The first page of the manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,  currently held in The British Library.  There are four poems bound together in this volume.  The others are Pearl, Cleanness,  and Patience. In this image from the manuscript the Green Knight, mounted on his green horse, holds up his severed head in front of Gawain, who still holds the axe.  Above, Arthur and Guinevere and other people of the court look on. Here, the sleeping Gawain is visited by the wife of Sir Bertilak as part of the temptation scenes within the poem. Here the Gawain Poet himself is pictured in an accompaniment to the poem The Pearl.  In his grief at the loss of his daughter, the poet falls asleep alongside the brook he cannot cross.
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Inspirations

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Two works more than any others -- apart from the medieval poetry itself -- provided inspiration.   But not recently.  I first read T. H .White's majestic The Once and Future King as a child, as you're supposed to read it, and it's never failed as a book to return to.  Not least for its masterful narrative voice, suspended somewhere and nowhere in time between the then he's imagining and the time you're reading it.  I know of no better lesson in how to tell an old tale with a modern voice. The second inspiration is Mary Stewart's 'Merlin' trilogy: The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment.   The people in Stewart's books live in a plausible historical period, and she pulls off the remarkable feat of making everything credible, and giving you a reason to care at the same time. I remember when the film of the musical Camelot came out..  I went with my mother to see it at the cinema.  In those days they still played the national anth
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