Actor Dev Patel plays a young Gawain in the new David Lowery film, “The Green Knight.” (Photo courtesy of A24)
Atrio of literary scholars at the University of Virginia are among those reacting to a new film dramatizing a British tale of King Arthur’s court, held for a year due to the pandemic and now in theaters. “The Green Knight,” released this summer, is based on “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” an English poem that has survived more than seven centuries.
Associate professors of English Elizabeth Fowler and Clare Kinney have been teaching the anonymous 14th-century poem for many years and will do so again this fall semester. One of Kinney’s teaching assistants, doctoral student Katherine Churchill, recently published a critique of the movie on Electric Lit.
The story of the poem begins during a New Year’s Eve feast at King Arthur’s court, when a strange figure, the Green Knight, pays an unexpected visit. He issues a challenge for any knight to strike him with his own axe, on the condition that the challenger find him in exactly one year to receive a blow in return. Sir Gawain takes the challenge and chops off the head of the Green Knight, who, to everyone’s surprise, picks up his severed head and rides away.
As the year’s end approaches, Gawain leaves Camelot in search of the Green Knight. After a long journey with hazardous adventures, Gawain finds a castle, where he is welcomed by the lord and lady. The lady tries to seduce Gawain several times, to no avail. Then Gawain must leave, to seek the Green Knight and to meet his fate.
English professors Clare Kinney, left, and Elizabeth Fowler gave criticism and praise for the new film based on the medieval poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” (Photos by Dan Addison, University Communications)
[WTJU introduction, not transcribed]
[:32 sec] Anthony Spearing, now retired and living in his native England
“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is one of the stories of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. It was written in the late 14th century, the age of Chaucer, and it survives in only one manuscript – one small, messy vellum manuscript in the British Library, and it contains four poems, which we think are all by the same poet. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ is one of them, and none of them is found in any other manuscript. We don’t know anything about the poet for certain. What scholars tend to think nowadays is that he was a cleric because there’s a lot of religious material in his poems, and that he might have been a cleric from the area where the dialect of the poems comes from – the northwest midlands of England.
[1:37] C. Kinney: In this poem a mysterious green knight challenges the knights of the Round Table to a fearsome beheading game in an exchange of axe blows. Gawain becomes their champion and discovers that the Green Knight has the power to recover from decapitation. A year later he must journey north to keep his promise to receive the return blow. Encountering many dangers, some of them unexpected, as in a northern castle where the host’s wife becomes all too friendly. But even before that, his journey has unexpected trials, as you can see in the following extract from it, which is my own translation:
[from Clare]
He climbed over clifftops in no man’s land,
Far flung from his friends, a stranger he rides;
Beside every ford, wherever he fared,
He found a foe waiting (unless fortune smiled)
So foul and so fierce, he was forced to fight.
And so strange and so many these mountainside clashes
It’s tough work to tell you of even a tenth:
Sometimes he’s warring with serpents and wolves,
Sometimes with wild men who lurked in the crags,
And with bulls and with bears, and even with boars,
And giants who harassed him from the high hills:
Had he not been so dauntless and served his Lord duly
He’d doubtless have perished, died many times over—
And though the fighting was fierce the winter was worse,
When cruel cold water fell from the clouds
And froze as it flinched from the pallid earth.
Nearly slain by the sleet, he slept in his steel,
More nights that enough amid the bare rocks,
Where, clattering from the hill crest the cold stream ran
And hung high above his head in hard icicles.
So in perilous plight and punishing pain
Gawain rides cross-country, ’til Christmas Eve,
Alone.
And still the knight, that tide,
To Mary made sad moan—
Prayed that she be his guide,
Direct him to some home.
[3:48] Spearing: And this is the same stanza read in medieval English. [reads middle English]
[5: 38] One of the attractive things about Gawain in this poem is that he isn’t a superman, is he? He’s one of the best of Arthur’s knights but he’s frightened, and he shows his courage in just overcoming that fear. There’s the moment where he finally arrives at what must be the green chapel where he thinks the Green Knight is going to cut his head off. And it almost looks for a moment as though he’s going to shout out his challenge, and then the moment there’s no answer, he won’t be able to see him for snow dust …
[6:20] Clare: then you hear the grinding of the axe that the Green Knight carries. It’s so visual. “If the Gawain poet were living today, he would be writing screenplays or he’d be a great cinematographer, because of the visual sense, the point of view, the use of perspective. There’s an amazing moment when Gawain is keeping his promise, is receiving what he thinks is the blow of the axe that is going to decapitate him, but the Green Knight only gives him the tiniest nick on the neck, and you can see from Gawain’s point of view a little drop of blood falling on the snow in front of him.
[7:04] Fowler: One of the great things about great poetry is that it changes so much in time. It begins to mean something different to you as you move through your life. I find with teaching things that that is particularly true.
I have thought about this as a very beautiful, intricate artifact full of color and life, very witty, but not profound – until I was scheduled to teach it on Sept. 12, 2001. When I started talking about Gawain that day, I started the beginning of the poem, and the beginning of the poem actually goes way back to the fall of Troy, and it talks, rather like a Hitchcock movie, it zooms in from way in the distance and then it zooms into a particular window, and it talks about history and the way that large tragedies in history are markers and bring England into being in the myth of the time, that there is a Brutus who came to found Britain. So talking about the image that the poem uses, which is the destruction of a borough, it was a way of making sense for us of what had happened with 9-11, and why it was the sky-scraping towers that were the object of that violence – that they stood for a kind of imperial history that meant something around the world that was quite different than what it meant to Americans usually.
So it was suddenly a much more sobering and dangerous poem, the entirety of it – the beheading game, the violence in the poem, which coincides with the intricate etiquette and manners of this incredibly stylish court, the deadly violence that speaks to the mind of the body is very moving, and it became a very different poem for me – at least until the next big event. I’ll always think of it in a different and more complex way.
Kinney, who will teach the poem in a few weeks in the large survey on “History of Literatures in English, Part 1,” emphasized the poem’s visual quality in a 2013 UVA Today interview.
“If the Gawain poet were living today, he would be writing screenplays or he’d be a great cinematographer, because of the visual sense, the point of view, the use of perspective,” Kinney said then.
“There’s an amazing moment when Gawain is keeping his promise, is receiving what he thinks is the blow of the axe that is going to decapitate him, but the Green Knight only gives him the tiniest nick on the neck, and you can see from Gawain’s point of view a little drop of blood falling on the snow in front of him.”
This summer’s film doesn’t show this scene, however, and emphasizes the poem’s more mysterious side, she and the others said.
Due to filmmaker David Lowery’s changes, Kinney said, “The movie strikes me as not so much as an adaptation of the poem as a wildly inventive riff on it. The original work is a very tightly crafted narrative of the questing and testing” of Gawain, Arthur’s nephew.
The professors and Churchill specifically noted that the movie’s Green Knight character departs from the poem’s.
“Lowery’s Green Knight is emphatically and wholly ‘other’: more tree than man,” Kinney wrote in an email. “The director is apparently fond of J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of the poem and the leisurely episodic design of the film seems to owe a fair bit to ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (and this Green Knight is rather Ent-like).”
All three scholars expected some changes, but Churchill pointed out that the old poem is more suggestive of sexual experimentation than the contemporary film, which is squarely heterosexual.
Doctoral student Katherine Churchill, who is Kinney’s teaching assistant for an English literature survey course, recently published a critique of “The Green Knight.” (Photo by Dan Addison, University Communications)
Churchill, in her Electric Lit critique, wrote that the Green Knight – although indeed green – was depicted as incredibly handsome and alluring. The medieval author took more than 100 lines to describe him, she quotes, including some of the Middle English words: “the Green Knight’s huge, muscular body, on his square and thick neck and abs (‘swyre’ and ‘swange’) and big long sides and limbs (‘lyndes’ and ‘lymes’). He is the biggest smokeshow of his size (‘the myriest in his muckel that myght ride’)! His luscious hair is splayed out over his shoulders (‘fayre fannand fax umbefoldes his schulderes’)!”
As Fowler wrote in email, “The film takes masculinity up as a pressure for ‘greatness’ in the context of the (slightly tired) theme of male inadequacy in the face of women’s desires and the (very tired) American romanticization of prostitution. …
“The film wants viewers to think about rot and decay. Its Green Knight isn’t even really green, but brown – he’s certainly not the charismatic hunk described by the poet (whose erotic muscularity Katherine Churchill points out so well), instead he’s an old fibrous tree…”
Echoing Kinney, Fowler pointed out, “Cinematography’s skills are just now catching up to the kinds of visual experiences that medieval poems produced centuries ago.
The scholars noted that the movie’s Green Knight character, played by actor Ralph Ineson, departs from the poem’s description. (Photo courtesy of A24)
“Gamers (‘The Green Knight’ creators are already advertising a video game), readers and cosplay [short for ‘costume play’] folks have known for a long time how exciting the stylings of medieval romance are.”
Fowler, who will teach at least part of the poem in her seminar, “Dreams and Visions in Medieval Poetry and Art,” recalled that teaching the “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” poem the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks made her think about it in a more complex way.
“I have thought about this as a very beautiful, intricate artifact, full of color and life, very witty, but not profound – until I was scheduled to teach it on Sept. 12, 2001. … The beginning of the poem actually goes way back to the fall of Troy, and it talks – rather like a Hitchcock movie, it zooms in from way in the distance and then it zooms into a particular window – about history and the way that large tragedies in history are markers.”
With this new film, she thinks “It’s a worthy retelling and bound to spawn even more, proving again that the old stories are the richest, because they accrete power over time and speak to us with so many, many voices.”
Tôi nghĩ, cho đến thời điểm này, phong trào thơ Tân hình thức Việt đã xong giai đoạn lập thuyết, và đã bước hẳn sang giai đoạn thành tựu. Tại sao lại nói như vậy? Xin thưa, bằng nỗ lực của Khế Iêm và những người đồng chí hướng, bạn đọc đã được chứng kiến hàng loạt các tiểu luận và thực hành thơ đã được in ấn hoặc trên các trang mạng suốt từ những năm 90 của thế kỷ trước đến nay, tức là đã hơn 20 năm có lẻ
Tiểu sử: Frank O’ Hara (1926- 1966), là nhà thơ và nhà phê bình nghệ thuật, thuộc trường phái New York. Ông chịu ảnh hưởng của nhà thơ WilliamCarlos Williams, viết bằng ngôn ngữ thường ngày. Năm 1964, ông xuất bản tập thơ "Lunch Poems" (Những Bài Thơ Trong Bữa Ăn Trưa), mỏng, với 37 bài thơ, 70 trang, nhưng là tập thơ được tái bản mỗi năm, và được những nhà phê bình coi như là tập thơ của thế kỷ 21. Thơ ông thường ghi chep những chuyện vụn vặt thường ngày.
Chúng ta đã có tiêu chuẩn đánh giá một bài thơ: cái mới trong ý tưởng và cái hay trong nhịp điệu; cùng cách làm thơ Tân hình thức Việt, và bây giờ là thời điểm của vận động sáng tác. Thơ Tân hình thức Việt tái định nghĩa, thơ là một hành trình hồi phục người đọc, so với điện ảnh và ca nhạc, đó là tham vọng chẳng có gì phải thất vọng, vì đó là thơ. Nhưng để hồi phục người đọc, phải hồi phục nhịp điệu thơ, và để có nhiều người đọc, phải có nhiều người sáng tác. Chúng tôi mong muốn có những sáng tác mới, áp dụng theo cách làm thơ Tân hình thức Việt, và ngoài việc sáng tác, xin các thân hữu bỏ ít nhiệt tâm vận động thêm người tham gia. Sáng tác xin gửi về cả 2 email: baogiaytanhinhthuc@yahoo.com ~ tanhinhthuc@gmail.com ~ info@thotanhinhthucviet.vn
