So I've been on this huge King Arthur kick lately.  I've mentioned it a few times.  I don't know what started it (aside from King Arthur and the Arthurian legend being just fantastic.) but I have amassed a large collection of Arthur and Camelot books that I am beginning to get through finally.  I started with Thomas Mallory Le Morte D'arthur, which I loved, but full disclosure, I picked through a lot and skipped a good portion of the exposition throughout.  After that I went all the way through T.H. White's The Once And Future King, which was excellent, but not as gritty as Le Morte D'Arthur (TOaFK would be the Adam West Batman, to Le Morte D'Arthur's Christopher Nolan Batman.) 

I'm reading through a few different translations of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight right now.  I'm enjoying the Armitage version, but I have yet to get to the Tolkien version (which is kind of a cool idea.)

I feel like I'm going to end up reading a lot ABOUT King Arthur stories rather than reading the stories themselves.  I'm itching for some good non fic.

I don't know why, but I was very surprised about how good this turned out to be.  The story is a poem set in the Arthurian world and written by an anonymous author in the 14th century.  The story is very tight and well developed.  The poetry is alliterative, which I thought might have sounded like a picture book, but works very well.

There are some very clever scenes and bits of description.  My favorite part is the third Fit (part) where scenes of attempted seduction of Gawain are intermingled with hunting scenes.  Gawain is an interesting very virtuous hero, which is very hard to do.  He has the typical virtues of a chivalric knight but manages to remain a person with foibles despite that.  Most noticeably he excoriates himself for what everyone else including the author see as an almost totally insignificant failing and which the modern reader is unlikely to see as anything other than good commonsense.

The most interesting figure of all is the Green Knight.  Its easy to see him as a demonic figure.  He appears to be theoretically an enchanted knight.  I think that he is clearly rooted in pagan figures and faerie lore.  There is a lot of the Green Man in the Green Knight.  Even though the morality of the poem is fundamentally chivalric, which is a form of Christian morality, one can't see any real Christian concepts at all in the Green Knight who is richly drawn and a fantastic character as also is the wife of the Lord who Sir Gawain stays with.

All in all it is very effective.  I had suspected that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight had been seized on by SCA types who wanted it to be good, but it is in fact really really good.  

A lovely surprise.

This was one of our books for Brit Lit and I'm so glad I was introduced to it.  Sir Gawain is an interesting character that really adds to the King Arthur universe.  It was originally written in Middle English so modern readers are reading it in translation but this is a particularly good one.  It's very understandable and easy to read.  The dialect it was written in originally did not become the standard English dialect so I imagine only scholars read it in the original language.

Sir Gawain is at King Arthur's Christmas festivities when the Green Knight enters the building and proposes a game.  He'll trade axe blow for axe blow with any knight in the room.  When none volunteer and it appears that King Arthur himself will have to take up the challenge, Sir Gawain, the most celebrated knight in the court, jumps in to do it.  If you don't know what happens when they play their little game, you've missed a fun story and I won't spoil it for you.  The rest of the book is Sir Gawain's quest to find the Green Knight again and all his adventures.  It's great stuff!

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has a lot to say about the chivalric code, heroism, bravery and integrity.  In the end, we find out who was behind the whole game (Arthur's evil half-sister Morgana la Faye) and Sir Gawain learns that he might not be everything he thinks he is.  We end up with a humbled and chastened Sir Gawain who is proving the author's point about thinking more highly of yourself than you ought.

Lovers of Arthurian legends probably shouldn't miss this.  You can also see the beginnings of all the sword-play type fantasies that are being written.  It's just a fun and clever piece of classic English writing.  Don't let the fact that it came from the 14th century scare you off.  You won't have any trouble with this translation.

Why should I remember this word? Because it's something I've been fascinated by since I was a child - stories where the character picks up his/her decapitated head, and then goes merrily on his/her way - or has a chat with bystanders.

Cephalophore: (from the Greek for "head-carrier") is a saint who is generally depicted carrying his or her own head; in art, this was usually meant to signify that the subject in question had been martyred by beheading. Handling the halo in this circumstance offers a unique challenge for the artist. Some put the halo where the head used to be; others have the saint carrying the halo along with the head. [all of that via wikipedia]

Which is why it was weird when I bumped into the word yesterday and couldn't immediately remember what it meant. Because it's been in a lot of books I've read - but wait, first, a photo...

I was particularly fascinated by this sculpture when I was on a trip to Paris as a teenager (not my photo btw, it's via wikipeida, info linked below):

Saint Denis and his head, at Notre Dame de Paris. See much larger version of this image on wikipedia here - it's currently what I'm using as my desktop background. Love the expressions on the angels' faces. Wikipedia captioned it (on this page): "St. Denis's [head] has angelic companions showing him polite concern."

This "head carrying" seemed to happen quite a bit with Christian saints, though it also seems to be a story that comes up in other cultures - and in non-saint situations like Gawain and the Green Knight.

On the topic of saints, if you're a fan of horror you should check out some of the various books on lives of the saints, because those stories have all sorts of gruesome bits, besides the walking headless - humans being skinned alive, being cooked on a griddle, carrying their eyeballs or breasts (removed under torture) on plates, etc. (You really have to wonder about the people who wrote all this stuff down because, yeek, serious torture porn in there.) Yes, I was the kid who was too squeamish to read Stephen King, but was fascinated by Foxe's Book of Martyrs (I skimmed a lot to get to the weird/gross bits) - not the first time that my reading choices aren't entirely logical.

[Yes, I should have a helpful book link here, but I can't seem to find the version of Foxe I read - here's the Gutenberg link to another one. However if you want to read a more humorous version of all the saint hooha, I did enjoy Saints Preserve Us! Everything You Need to Know About Every Saint You'll Ever Need - short summaries of all the saints, in alphabetical order, focusing on all the weirder bits of the legends. You can read the excerpt at that Amazon link to see if it's your kind of thing. It's not into the Heavy Christian Message thing, or proselytizing, but again, read the sample.]

[I could totally go off on a tangent here about how I do not get how gross-out stories of gory deaths and sadism was ever supposed to work as "rah rah, conversion time!" material - I've always thought of it as historical campfire stories or perhaps true crime type gossip - but since I haven't read any books on that aspect, and this is long enough already - tangent squelched!]

Randomly if anyone comes across a book of cephalophore ghost/horror stories let me know - doesn't it sound like there should already be an anthology like this?!

More links:

Wikipedia's Cephalophore Category page, 31 examples

Winner of the Best Multiple Cephalophore Example: Felix and Regula (and Exuperantus) (wikipedia), photo of nice stone carving and more info here (Felix and Regula are patron saints of Zurich)

Shrine o' Dreams blog post: Cephalophores has many photos of art  - paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and statuary

Humorous MetaFilter post on Cephalophores from 2012 which I feel fairly certain I read back then, and from which I snagged a few of the links here, such as...

They Might Be Giants song You Probably Get That A Lot, which I own, but did I remember the Cephalorephore part? Nooo! Lyrics (at TMBG wiki page):

Do you mind, excuse me

I saw you over there

Can I just tell you

Although there are millions of

Cephalophores that wander through this world

You've got something extra going on

I think you probably know

You probably get that a lot

I'll bet that people say that a lot to you, girl

And to end all this - here's a song I usually listen to around Halloween - about Anne Boleyn:

With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm (wikipedia)

YouTube: link! (3 min)

[Note: cheesy images in this video, but hey, it's a comedy/music hall song. Also this was the version that had the best audio.]