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I feel incredibly late to this thread! It's the single best narrative poem in the English language. Better than Milton, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, anyone. Everything about it, its knotted language, which fits with the gnarly old landscape it's evoking, its twisting, erotic, baffling story, its deconstruction of Gawain as a hero, its beautiful religious symbolism, I could lap this up. It's very serious in mood compared to Chaucer and a lot of other Middle English literature, especially romances of the time, but it makes up for it. I think I'm going to reread a fitt at a time in the original Middle English, it will be cool to see what I get out of it this go around. Can I talk a bit about Lud's Church and green? It's theorised that the 'green chapel' at the climax of the book in Fitt IV is this place.  What a picture of the place can't quite convey to you is that even in the depths of winter this place is really green. There are loads of different shades of green as you walk down, the moss and lichen kind of shimmers. It's spooky as hell, it feels alive. It's got that eldritch feeling. Green is interesting, and possibly deliberate. Every colour in the Middle Ages was usually associated with some kind of liturgical property, some kind of myth. Everything was God's signature on the Creation, and things were linked symbolically in often esoteric ways. But green is very indeterminate. It can be associated with bad things like envy (as it still is today) but also, obviously, good things like the bounty of nature. The greenness of the poem feels purposefully ambiguous and elusive. It's not the Green Man by the way. The illustrations in Cotton Nero A.x. are kinda bad compared to its contemporaries, but they illustrate that the Green Knight's greenness is different, it's darker and more golden (sorry for the unwieldy link). I'm not sure whether to read anything into why all the men in the illustrations look like Arthur, who looks like the dreamer in Pearl, which is in the same manuscript.
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Dec 11, 2017 01:50
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Stuporstar posted:Thikk. Middle English. Who knew https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/lookup.html Make sure you have headword and forms selected on the left of the search bar, and make sure to use as many of those wildcard characters because they have weird conventions for ordering the stuff
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Dec 15, 2017 03:11
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