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PROFESSOR of ENGLISH and MEDIEVAL STUDIES

UNIVERSITY of NEW MEXICO

Anita Obermeier

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    • ENGL 449/549 Middle English Dialects
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    stefankoek
    Dec 12, 2018

    Jessie Weston and The Green Knight

    in Heroes, Saints, & Lovers

    It's hard to imagine a time when Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was not exceedingly popular, a time when it did not yet have innumerable articles written about nearly every aspect of it. It was an entertaining read in itself to see the history behind SGGK's rise from obscurity, but the most interesting to me, perhaps, was the segment about the many retellings, specifically re-imaginings of the tale as a children's story. The ways in which the story and all its complexities were condensed and in some cases sanitized, in one case "to focus on Gawain’s keeping his word as the point of his honor", shows more about what people at the time might have thought important than the poem's actual purpose.

    Something that I've often observed but never seen talked about in scholarship is the debasement of great medieval works such as SGGK by simplification "as creators of fiction, popular music, films, comics, and even computer games dispassionately dismantle the received material for their own purposes." (Nastali, 51).



    2 comments
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    Lukus Rattanapote-Malaney
    Dec 13, 2018

    It would also seem important to assess or analyze how certain aspects of the story changed based upon the genre that it is presented. As above you pointed out the children's story, I would wonder how the Winnings Motif is portrayed for a story meant for children might manifest. I would be interested in engaging with a video game portrayal of this story since it has many aspects of a RPG.

    stefankoek
    Dec 13, 2018

    Well, the wooing game is apparently ignored by some authors in trade of something like Gawain refusing to give up a ring to the Lady. Indeed, an RPG set in the world could be interesting, but how one would conform to the text (unless it were a linear RPG) I'm not sure. The mediums listed in the article are pretty funny though, such as "an album of folk music by a Canadian singer/songwriter;", "a pornographic comic book from

    Japan which casts Gawain and his host as homosexual lovers; and a porcelain figurine depicting Sir Gawain as a bunny with the head of the Green Knight." Amazing.

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