#finchjpeg

[queer-ragnelle]

just wanted to say the most enormous thankyou for your response it was so enlightening!!! it must have taken loads of effort and I really appreciate it 💌💌 now I need to go read more about Reynard

oh you are so welcome! happy to help. :^)

here are a couple translations i found for you as well.

The History of Reynard the Fox by William Caxton

The History of Reynard the Fox by Thomas Roscoe

[queer-ragnelle]

hi there @finchjpeg! :^)

let it be known that i'm not a medievalist, so i'm by no means an expert on any of this, but i'd be happy to help give you a jumping off point. i'll include links to the texts i reference so you can read them for yourself if you'd like to learn more and study the quotes in context.

let's begin with the fox...

so in the middle english poem sir gawain and the green knight, sir bertilak returns from the third hunt with a fox for gawain. the significance of this animal is linked directly in the poem to medieval literary character, reynard the fox. here he is evading capture.

and then slain and skinned at the last.

now...who is reynard the fox?

[illumination of reynard the fox as he appears in roman de renart]

in short, he's a popular literary character from the middle ages that represents mind over matter, cunning over brute strength. he has his own stories in which he stars, but appears in many others as a tongue in cheek reference to the clever, sly characterization of the fox as a scavenger and thief outwitting his stronger enemies. here he is in geoffrey chaucer's middle english the canterbury tales scaring the crap out of someone just existing, despite an attempt to canvass his innocence. sound familiar?

now...the significance of the fox in sgatgk poem is bigger than a reference to this character. on the third day, gawain accepts the green girdle from the wife of the household in the hopes it will keep him from dying to a beheading, and then lies to sir bertilak about having it/doesn't offer it in the exchange. that's consistent with the fox's sly character, not only on the part of the lady succeeding in wearing gawain's honor down so he accepts her favor, but in gawain's attempt to have his cake and eat it too, follow through on his word to the green knight but also not die through the supposed power of the magical girdle.

however...david lowery bungled all of this by cutting down the kissing/hunt exchange game from a full three days/nights. the success/failure cunning/caught aspect of the poem is entirely lost here, especially because lowery did absolutely nothing to create an honorable version of gawain, so this girdle doesn't indicate a breech of conduct. his mom gave it to him and he only got it back from the essel doppelgänger so we could have the ending sequence. it doesn't narratively work as intended. the fox/girdle motif falls apart because lowery had a different story in mind, so they sort of just....exist. unless someone is familiar with the stories of reynard the fox, they're not going to appreciate this inclusion, threadbare such as it is.

now, the giants!

giants have existed in folkloric history since way back, in greek and norse mythology and many others. in the latin text the history of the king's of britain by geoffrey of monmouth the entire "history" of albion (such as the greeks called great britain) is covered including brutus and corineus landing landing there, conquering the giants who live there, and dividing the land.

they go on to conquer the island, culminating in corineus fighting and killing the last remaining giant by pushing him off a cliff. corineus then names that region after himself, cornwall.

and here's an illumination from the french version of brut chronicle which shows brutus and corineus landing on the shore and confronting a couple giants. [british library royal 19 C IX, 1450–1475]

all of that established, and more specifically in arthurian legend, arthur has a quest in the history of the kings of britain in which he slays a giant. duke hoel's niece is kidnapped, raped, and killed. so arthur (along with kay and bedivere) track down the giant, and slay him for killing the girl at mt saint michael. just look at this. possibly the coolest arthur ever been tbh. hot.

there are many more giants in arthurian literature, such as chief ysbaddaden in the welsh mabinogion story culhwch and olwen or sir galehaut son of the fair giantess in the french vulgate cycle where he starts out an enemy of arthur and is converted to an ally through the power of gay love for lancelot. in chrétien de troyes's story of the grail, there's a reference to the lands original ownership via the giants. the examples are literally endless.

so. giants are everywhere. sometimes ambivalent, sometimes hostile, nearly always an interesting character doing stuff, for better or worse, in the narrative.

now. we come back around to sgatgk poem which was published after all of these examples. on gawain's journey to the green chapel, we get a brief literary montage so to speak of his trials as he went. mentioned here are ogres, or giants.

this journey is what makes up the majority of david lowery's the green knight. so it's poem-referential to include giants giving gawain the business. i would rather have had them play a larger role were they to be included or have some other character at least mention them, but alas. they appear immediately after gawain ate some mysterious mushrooms and hallucinated his hand turning to moss.

so it would appear lowery intended for this to be a figment of gawain's imagination and not real. literally coward move but alright it's your movie i guess.

except....i remember something a bit earlier...before gawain ate the mushrooms. rewind...what's this?? is that a gigantic ribcage in the hill?

well damn lowery!!! this is cool af!! would have been nice if this shot wasn't impossible to see without my editing it. god forbid anybody glean meaning from your film by, oh idk, being able to see it!!

anyway i'm carrying on. i hope that gives you food for thought and some things to read! :^)

Shout out to my lovely coworker who messaged me asking my opinion of The Green Knight (2021) and then apologized if it offended me, but they think Gawain sucks. Out here reducing people’s regard for me by doubling down, “Yeah, he really does!” and liking a movie with what I consider to be a mediocre manuscript, if shot well and with a nice score.

Meh opinions about director/writer David Lowery’s baffling writing choices below.

But for real my coworker was just so confused by it all and honestly Lowery could’ve stood to explain obscure historical nuances a little more. And by that I mean literally at all. The significance of beheadings, codes of honor, superstition about foxes, the legends of giants; these aren’t common knowledge to modern American viewers. My coworker had no idea why Gawain would stand up and behead the Green Knight or how Saint Winifred mattered, or why Gawain would throw a rock at the fox in the cave, or plead with the giants and then cower in fear. How would they? No cultural baseline is ever established. And of course, not every movie is for every viewer. But The Green Knight certainly didn’t resonate with medievalists and enthusiasts as much as it could have while confusing and alienating everyone else.

I dunno, having adapted the poem myself, there’s a balance to be found. Somewhere between insulting your audience’s intelligence with blatant narrative pauses to expound upon details and providing literally zero worldbuilding so that even people who read the poem have to sit back and question what they watched. Because it’s not a one to one adaptation, there’s an expectation the narrative will organically define the rules of the universe, and show us the confines of our hero’s skills, understanding, and limitations within that universe.

Shouldn’t Morgan have warned Gawain about dangers and counsel him on etiquette while giving him the girdle? Why didn’t Gawain converse with someone at the pub about the threats outside the kingdom? Couldn’t Arthur have given him an interesting anecdote that foreshadows what’s to come? Merlin is worse than a macguffin, just a wasted narrative tool that could’ve guided Gawain or even reminisced with Arthur about some history, but instead he has no dialogue at all. He just nods when the Green Knight enters and serves as a paternity test in the flash-forward. I wonder how Essel’s bell motif could’ve been extrapolated on. Maybe she gives it to Gawain with a warning about foxes or the threat of bandits or even doppelgängers! Why not give her a cutesy nursery rhyme to sing about the outside world while the year wheel rotates and rotates?

It would’ve been perfectly in character for Gawain to ignore all of this only to meet his comeuppance while providing the audience with necessary context. There was so much time spent on wide shots of Ireland that could’ve been used more effectively or even in conjunction with voice over flashbacks. The creators went through the trouble to cast children to play Gawain’s future offspring, why not use them in flashbacks as a representation of his past self as he reconsiders his rash skeptic’s stance? Even continue the doppelgänger motif? But alas! I’m critical because I liked it and wanted to like it more and because it’s a recent and accessible Gawain-related media several people have watched and come to me about. They thought we could bond over it. Except so far, nobody has liked it…haha!