Sir Gawain and the Green Maiden

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.

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