The project

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, Wales and England, have changed during his lifetime.  

It seemed fair to make the challenge posed by the Green Maiden a verbal conundrum rather than a masculine trial of strength and courage, and from there it was a small step to rework Chaucer's question from the Wife of Bath's Tale, and make it more about chivalry.  The question was not original to Chaucer, and since the Tale also used the old tradition of the 'Loathly Lady,' it was in keeping with the medieval compositional style to combine these and give them a twist that might have been the Poet's own.

The task was then to imitate the style of the original, to see how far alliterative verse could be written in modern English.  The triumphant example of Simon Armitage's translation was there to lead the way, and in the novel I began each section of the new Gawain story with a few verse stanzas to return the reader to the medieval sound world before taking the story on in prose.

Work in progress. As the composition went on I found myself making decisions about how the poem might have been composed, and I found myself imagining the Poet himself, and then the time and the place where his poem might have been performed.  There are parts of North Wales that I know well and it was easy to locate my Poet in some of those places, to imagine the small town at the foot of a hill with a ruined castle on it, and then to populate the town and imagine the people coming together to hear the poem.  No sooner had this process of imagining begun than people turned up of their own accord.  

Mark Thomas, his brother and their father were inventions.  Father Jacob, Magge, Alyss and Anne, on the other hand, arrived uninvited, joining in on the story with their own dialogue, walking about, living their lives around Mark Thomas and the central event of the performance of the poem over a period of four days.  Putting together the lives of these people -- their houses, the wool industry, the woods, the day-to-day experiences of the characters -- was one of the joys of composition.

Coming to an end.  The stories, Gawain's, Mark Thomas', the Poet's and Brea's, all of them were about things coming to an end -- chivalry, belonging within a landscape, ways of making and telling stories -- all closing down or changing.  There was no other end possible than a death, but the reader may be comforted by the happy and long lives lived by Mark Thomas, Magge, and of course little Anne.

Although Mark Thomas' and the Poet's stories are told by men, this is a book of women's stories . . . but perhaps that's a topic for another post.