Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ~ Unknown and Simon Armitage

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem from the fourteenth century whose author is unknown. This particular version was translated and adapted by Simon Armitage. On Yuletide, a stranger interrupts the festivities in Camelot. The stranger is completely green. He challenges one of King Arthur’s knights to a wager. The terms are as follows: the knight will get to deliver one blow to the green knight with his own weapon and then, next yule, he is to meet the green knight and receive a singular blow. Sir Gawain, Arthur’s blood, accepts the challenge and decapitates the green knight, who picks up his head, reminds Gawain of the challenge and departs.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the first book on my uni reading list. It’s not very long at one hundred and fourteen pages but is a little dense in some places. I really enjoy Arthurian tales and thought it would be an easy enough start to the long list of classics I’ll be reading over the next few months. 

Weirdly enough, despite Gawain being the protagonist, there’s not a huge amount in this poem about who he is as a person. He’s not really given much of a personality outside the ideal knight of Camelot. Given that there’s not a huge amount of character description, in my head, I was constantly visualising the characters from BBC’s Merlin (which I absolutely adore).

I had one big issue with this poem (and I’m hoping this will give me brownie points when I come to study it) and it was the historical accuracy regarding religion. Part of me knows that this was written in the fourteenth century and that the Geoffrey of Monmouth tales included lots of Christian imagery, however knowing that Christianity wasn’t widespread during the time when Arthur is supposed to have existed really pulled me out of the story. Things like having pictures of the Mother Mary on the back of your shield and recognising Christmas just didn’t seem right for a story set in early medieval times. It was just a little bit heavy-handed with pushing Christianity.

At the end of it all, it was a solid story that had a moral about honesty and chivalry. It was an easy enough read and I gave it three stars.

C🌙