Welcome goonlings to the Awful Book of the Month! In this thread, we choose one work of Resources: Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org - A database of over 17000 books available online. If you can suggest books from here, that'd be the best. SparkNotes - http://www.sparknotes.com/ - A very helpful Cliffnotes-esque site, but much better, in my opinion. If you happen to come in late and need to catch-up, you can get great character/chapter/plot summaries here. For recommendations on future material, suggestions on how to improve the club, or just a general rant, feel free to PM me. Past Books of the Month [for BOTM before 2014, refer to archives] 2014: January: Ursula K. LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness February: Mikhail Bulgalov - Master & Margarita March: Richard P. Feynman -- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! April: James Joyce -- Dubliners May: Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- 100 Years of Solitude June: Howard Zinn -- A People's History of the United States July: Mary Renault -- The Last of the Wine August: Barbara Tuchtman -- The Guns of August September: Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice October: Roger Zelazny -- A Night in the Lonesome October November: John Gardner -- Grendel December: Christopher Moore -- The Stupidest Angel 2015: January: Italo Calvino -- Invisible Cities February: Karl Ove Knausgaard -- My Struggle: Book 1. March: Knut Hamsun -- Hunger April: Liu Cixin -- 三体 ( The Three-Body Problem) May: John Steinbeck -- Cannery Row June: Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood (Hiatus) August: Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Between the World and Me September: Wilkie Collins -- The Moonstone October:Seth Dickinson -- The Traitor Baru Cormorant November:Svetlana Alexievich -- Voices from Chernobyl December: Michael Chabon -- Gentlemen of the Road 2016: January: Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome February:The March Up Country (The Anabasis) of Xenophon March: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco April: Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling May: Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima June:The Vegetarian by Han Kang July:Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees August: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov September:Siddhartha by Herman Hesse October:Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse November:Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain December: It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis 2017: January: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut February: The Plague by Albert Camus March: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin April: The Conference of the Birds (مقامات الطیور) by Farid ud-Din Attar May: I, Claudius by Robert Graves June: Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky July: Ficcionies by Jorge Luis Borges August: My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber September: The Peregrine by J.A. Baker Blackwater Vol. I: The Flood by Michael McDowell Aquarium by David Vann Current: Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight [Author Unknown] https://youtu.be/BVnu-X3SK_Q?t=66 Book available here: Tolkien's Translation Tolkien's Critical Edition of the Middle English Text Simon Armitage facing-page alliterative verse translation Free Teaching Edition version based off translation by John Gardner (author of Grendel) (makes some cuts to the text): https://www.northallegheny.org/cms/lib4/PA01001119/Centricity/Domain/1312/sir%20gawain%20text-0.pdf http://ouallinator.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Sir-Gawain-Gardner-Translation.pdf Alternate verse translation by John Ridland: http://www.spdbooks.org/Content/Site106/FilesSamples/9781927409756.pdf additional free online versions including Middle English text: http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/gawaintx.htm (Tolkien critical ME text here: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;idno=Gawain ) Prose translation : http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/sggk_neilson.pdf About the book: quote:It describes how Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table, accepts a challenge from a mysterious "Green Knight" who challenges any knight to strike him with his axe if he will take a return blow in a year and a day. Gawain accepts and beheads him with his blow, at which the Green Knight stands up, picks up his head, and reminds Gawain of the appointed time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight This isn't your standard King Arthur story like you're used to. I went over this in more detail in my King Arthur Megathread a few years ago, but the Arthur legends can be divided into two "cycles": the original group of Celtic myths, and then the later French romances. Most of the stuff you're familiar with as "King Arthur" stories -- the Sword in the Stone, the Holy Grail, Sir Lancelot, Galahad, etc. etc. etc. -- all come from the later French romances, mostly written in the 12th century, and weren't part of the original Celtic stories of Arthur. Gawaine is older, Celtic, original. Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight was probably written somewhere around 1400 -- roughly contemporaneously with Chaucer -- and probably by someone who was at least somewhat familiar with the French "cycle", but it's much more strongly derived from the Celtic tradition; Gawaine is the protagonist, not Lancelot; the Beheading Game a more primal, wild, Gaelic magic more terrifying than anything you'll find in the French legends. This is why you won't find the story of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight in most standard editions of "King Arthur Stories"; it isn't part of the French tradition that Malory synthesized in his Morte D'Arthur, and we only know it from one single manuscript (though various versions of similar stories can be traced back hundreds of years in the Celtic sources). There is one downside: unlike Chaucer's works, which are generally readable today because our modern English is largely derived from Chaucer's London dialect, the Gawaine poet wrote in a more rural dialect that can be impenetrable to modern readers. So, lots of translations linked above. Compare and contrast, or brave the original if you dare. quote:Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the finest representative of a great cycle of verse romances devoted wholly or principally to the adventures of Gawain. Of these there still survive in English a dozen or so; in French—the tongue in which romance most flourished—seven or eight more; and these, of course, are but a fraction of what must once have existed. No other knight of the Round Table occupies anything like so important a place as Gawain in the literature of the middle ages. He is the first mentioned of Arthur's knights, for about 1125, ten years before Geoffrey of Monmouth dazzled the world with his revelation of King Arthur, William of Malmesbury in his Chronicle of the Kings of England had told of the discovery of Gawain's tomb in Ross, Wales, and had described him as Arthur's nephew and worthy second. In all the early romances Gawain is peerless for utter courage and courtesy. Where other knights quailed, Gawain was serene; where other champions were beaten, Gawain won; and where no resolution, strength, or skill could avail, Gawain succeeded by his kindness, his virtue, and his charming speech. quote:Naturally, to the trained medievalist the poem is perfectly readable in its original form; no translation necessary. And even for the non-specialist, certain lines, such as "Bot Arthure wolde not ete til al were served", present little problem, especially when placed within the context of the narrative. Conversely, lines such as "Forthi, iwysse, bi zowre wylle, wende me bihoues" are incomprehensible to the general reader. But it is the lines that fall somewhere between those extremes - the majority of lines, in fact - which fascinate the most. They seem to make sense, though not quite. To the untrained eye, it is as if the poem is lying beneath a thin coat of ice, tantalisingly near yet frustratingly blurred. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/dec/16/poetry.simonarmitage About the Author quote:We know a good deal about Chaucer considering our distance from him in time, but about the Gawain-poet we know virtually nothing. For some scholars it is not even absolutely certain that the five poems we commonly ascribe to him are all his.' More important, whereas we read and enjoy Chaucer's poetry, much of the Gawainpoet's work, despite its excellence, is still hard to appreciate as literature. One reason for this is the difficulty we have with his language-a difficulty which inhibits not only reading but also translation. We read Chaucer in the original with relative ease, for the London dialect in which he wrote evolved in time into modern English; but the Gawain-poet is accessible only to specialists, and not fully accessible even to them, for his northwest Midlands tongue, never adopted in linguistically influential cities, has remained the curious, runish language it probably was to the average Londoner of the poet's own time. The dialect survives, drastically altered, here and there in rural England; in America, traces of it appear among backwoods or mountain people-in rural Missouri, for example, where the expression "I hope" can still mean "I understand, I believe." quote:Part of our trouble is the temperament of the man. He knows and uses the technical language of hunting, hawking, cooking, chess, and the special terms of the furrier, the architect, the musician, the lawyer, the courtly lover, the priest; he knows the names of the parts of a shield, the adornments of a horse, the zones of a knight's bejeweled helmet; he knows too the names of the parts of a ship, the parts of a coffin, the accouterments of farming; knows the Bible and its commentary (probably even commentary in Hebrew), the chronicles, old legends, the ecclesiastical traditions of London. His knowledge rivals that of Chaucer, but it is in some respects knowledge of a very different kind. Chaucer's technical language comes mainly from books-on astrology, on alchemy, on medicine, and so forth. The Gawain-poet's technical language seems to come less from books than from medieval occupations. quote:We know next to nothing about the author of the poem that has come to be called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was probably written around 1400. In the early 17th century the manuscript was recorded as belonging to a Yorkshireman, Henry Saville of Bank. It was later acquired by Sir Robert Cotton, whose collection also included the Lindisfarne Gospels and the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf. The poem then lay dormant for over 200 years, not coming to light until Queen Victoria was on the throne, thus leapfrogging the attentions of some of our greatest writers and critics. The manuscript, a small, unprepossessing thing, would fit comfortably into an average-size hand. Just as it fitted comfortably into my hand, eventually, when a contact at the library took pity on me and invited me into that part of the building which operates under conditions of high security and controlled humidity. Now referred to as Cotton Nero A.x., not only is it a precious possession, it is considered one of the finest surviving examples of Middle English poetry. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/dec/16/poetry.simonarmitage Themes Sparknotes might be helpful for this one: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gawain/ Pacing Read as thou wilt is the whole of the law. Please bookmark the thread to encourage discussion. I encourage people to read whatever translations they find and compare notes in the thread. I plan on making some more detailed critical posts as we get our teeth into the poem, but if others want to tackle such, please do so and save me the work! References and Further Reading As mentioned above, for general background on Arthuriana (a suprisingly complex field!) see my earlier King Arthur megathread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3617881 Final Note: Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys the book! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Dec 5, 2017 |
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# ¿ Dec 4, 2017 02:54 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 14:47 |
Guide to reading middle english: https://faculty.franklin.uga.edu/ctcamp/content/guide-reading-middle-english quote:King Arthur lay at Camelot over Christmas . .. .
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# ¿ Dec 4, 2017 03:46 |
Here's a clip of a reading of the beheading in Arthur's hall, translated above, in the original west midlands dialect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ObooLYEqSU I strongly recommend listening to this so you can get the original sound of the poem into your ear. Here's a recording of a reading of the original Middle English with a scrolling translation. It just covers the opening "This all connects up with Aeneas, really" tradition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl4KYZ9JrUw Forty minute BBC documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nAd6fffVvs&t=4s Another reading from later in the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax6sXDxhc4s Simon Armitage sixty-minute BBC documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74glI1lg1CQ Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Dec 4, 2017 |
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# ¿ Dec 4, 2017 14:17 |
Jack B Nimble posted:I had a collection of illustrated King Arthur stories as a kid and the story of the green knight always scared me. I've downloaded the teacher's version and after I've familiarized myself with the narrative using that translation I'll use those great aids to try the rural middle English of the original. Thanks! I put a lot of work into that one and I'm still a little mad at myself for not finishing it -- I got to the part where the story takes off and just kept reading. Still, I figure that there's enough in that thread to get people "over the hump" to where they can read it on their own. CestMoi posted:Other than the specifically poetic side of the poem (which is amazing but I probably can't offer much insight beyond what you would get in a half decent translators introduction) I don't have anything to say until people have had a chance to finish the thing. Rest assured it's amazing and it gets better the more you think about it. It's better than Chaucer but don't tell anyone I said that I just went by the Barnes & Noble to look at physical copies and compare the translations they had on hand. Surprisingly they didn't have Tolkien's, but of the ones they did have, the Simon Armitage one really stood out, to the point that I ended up buying it -- it's a facing-page translation, which I didn't have, and the sound of Armitage's translation seems to be fairly in ken with the original. Plus it's got a jacket quote by Seamus Heaney.
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# ¿ Dec 5, 2017 00:51 |
He's Gawaine in Howard Pyle and that's where I met him Also if I called him Galvagin or Gwalchmei it would just be confusing
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# ¿ Dec 5, 2017 04:13 |
Tree Goat posted:i can make an effort post about yogh and ash and thorn etc etc if that would be useful (unless it's in the op somewhere) pretty please edit: oh wait you did awesome
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# ¿ Dec 5, 2017 13:51 |
Gonna get a mythical here, incoming text dump (feel free to ignore!) The Golden Bough, 1922 Edition, by Sir James Frazier, Chapter XXVIII: The Killing of the Tree-Spirit quote:
http://www.bartleby.com/196/67.html Frazier is, of course, largely discredited; but it's hard not to gloss this section onto Gawain and suspect an underlying pagan myth of a yearly-beheaded sacrificial King; elsewhere in Frazier there are examples where each King is slain by his successor, who then reigns for a term, and is then slain in turn by his successor. Just as in Beowulf, we've got the tension here between the then-modern Christian narrative, laid atop and reworking the underlying pagan mythology. Arthur himself -- even in the very earliest sources -- is clearly and explicitly Christian, but the challenger here, the Green Knight, is a figure from celtic, pagan folklore. So, thing to think about : the King Arthur stories fall into a few "standard formats" and tropes. A petitioner comes to Arthur's hall, asking help, and a knight is sent out. A rebellious king refuses Arthur's reign as High King of Britain and must be subdued. In very early stories, Arthur as a Christian has to subdue various pagans and non-Christian invaders. Here, all that's sortof combined and subverted. The Green Knight comes into Arthur's hall, at Christmas, a holy Christian festival -- but instead of a Christian seeking aid, he's a creature of pagan magic, bearing pagan symbols (the holly bough). And this pagan challenges Arthur! He's challenging Arthur's right to rule, and he's challenging Christianity itself! Plus, if we buy into a Frazier-type interpretation of the underlying myth, the challenge is a trap: if Arthur accepts the challenge directly, then he's not ruling under Christ, he's only a pagan king for a year, and in a year he'll have to go submit to the next challenger. So Gawain heroically steps in . . . Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Dec 5, 2017 |
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# ¿ Dec 5, 2017 14:10 |
VileLL posted:you fellows might also want to check out this site if you enjoy: oooooooh quote:e: Yeah, I left out forest encounter stories because Arthur's in his hall in this one, but yeah, especially if you read the Green Knight as a "Green Man" type figure, this is quite literally a forest encounter! And yeah "subversion" was probably too strong. I just meant that someone's coming into Arthur's hall as a challenger rather than as a supplicant. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Dec 7, 2017 |
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# ¿ Dec 7, 2017 13:51 |
I'm reading through the footnotes in Tolkien's critical edition and he throws shade left and right: Footnote to line 992: quote:Possibly, as Hulbert and Knott suggest [citation omitted], knyet should be read, as more likely than lord to give rise to the MS error kyng; but lord is more than thirty times applied to Bertilak, and alliteration rather than internal rhyme is normal in the wheel. That kyng is an error, and not a mysterious vestige of a mythological analogue, cannot be doubted in light of the poet's words everywhere else. So much for my golden bough king-of-the-year theory
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# ¿ Dec 10, 2017 18:58 |
J_RBG posted:
The Simon Armitage documentary visits this place (but not in winter for some reason): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74glI1lg1CQ&t=3084s Stuporstar posted:Is this a similar edition to the Simon Armitage facing page edition linked in the OP? Because it seems to be the version published within Canada and it might ship a little faster. Also the Kindle edition linked on that page is not the same thing at all. Yeah, the Kindle edition short-circuits over to some random cheapo public domain translation that should be free anyway. I *think* this is the Kindle version of the Armitage translation : https://www.amazon.ca/Gawain-Green-...gawain+armitage . I found it by searching for "Simon Armitage" in the Kindle Store. This is the cover on the facing-page edition I got at the Barnes & Noble: Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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# ¿ Dec 11, 2017 04:40 |
Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:halfway through, it's a blast so far Tolkien's critical edition has a footnote about the "wheel" sections; from the name I thought the "wheel" was the main text block and the "bob" was the little blurb, but actually the wheel is the tiny blurb at the bottom and the bob is the line connecting the wheel to the text block. The wheel sections also appear to have been written after the main text -- nothing narrative happens in them, they're purely descriptive additions -- but before the poem was written down by the scribe of the surviving Norfolk manuscript. Went googling trying to find tolkien's exact quote for a copy/paste and found this blog entry: quote:Probably the most notable aspect of Gawain and the Green Knight is its poetic structure. It was written at the height of a period called the Alliterative Revival, which briefly brought alliterative verse back into vogue in parts of Europe. Alliterative verse is similar to rhyming verse except that it uses – you guessed it – alliteration instead of rhyming to form the primary structure of a work. Gawain and the Green Knight is an eccentric work because it combines a strong alliterative structure with a “bob and wheel” – a rhymed, four-line stanza (the “wheel”) with a very short line (the “bob”) connecting it to the previous stanza. https://offwhitestuff.wordpress.com/tag/bob-and-wheel/ I hadn't really thought about the use of heavy alliteration in the poem because in my head the line goes Beowulf --> Gawain, but of course there's a seven hundred year gap there. quote:The Alliterative Revival is a term adopted by academics to refer to the resurgence of poetry using the alliterative verse form in Middle English between c. 1350 and 1500. Alliterative verse was the traditional versification of Old English poetry; the last known alliterative poem known before the revival was Layamon's Brut, which dates from around 1190. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliterative_Revival Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Dec 12, 2017 |
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# ¿ Dec 12, 2017 17:42 |
DeadFatDuckFat posted:Arthur would have totally hosed Greenwife and gotten his headchopped for it King Arthur and the Green Cuck Like, that's almost not even a joke, the whole "ok I'm gonna go hunting, you stay here with my hot wife, when I get back let's make out" thing is just bizarre And I doubt contemporary audiences would have missed that either: I could be wrong but I suspect that was not an era for casually leaving women alone with strange men
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# ¿ Dec 14, 2017 18:05 |
Hope everyone is still enjoying this but it's time to start gathering suggestions for next month!
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# ¿ Dec 21, 2017 17:39 |
There's a genuinely brilliant but little-known modernization of the Mabinogion written by Evangeline Walton that deserves a lot more attention than it has gotten. https://www.amazon.com/Mabinogion-Tetralogy-Evangeline-Walton/dp/1585675040
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# ¿ Dec 22, 2017 17:36 |
These are all good suggestions (I think I've actually pushed Njal's Saga in a poll before now, it didn't get chosen) but I'm a little leery of going Double Ancient Text two months in a row -- it'd probably be good for the next book to be something written in the past century or so. It's also a big help if people give me a sentence or two explaining why their pick is a good idea because while I've read almost everything that's a free english-language kindle download I haven't read everything else and a little background helps me sell your pick to everyone else.
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# ¿ Dec 29, 2017 20:49 |
It'll be Njal's Saga for January; starting the new with the old.
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2018 15:08 |
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# ¿ May 22, 2024 14:47 |
Arthur's not wrong Plus he's got a bad track record with the nephews anyway
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2018 20:35 |