Sir Gawain and the Green Maiden

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

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

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

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