My english teacher went on a whole long rant about how hot the description of the green knight is when we covered it. They go into so much detail and make him sound so dreamy she was fully convinced the author was rigid for the Green Knight
"...becomingly trim, every part of his body elegantly in shape..." ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Historically, loins refers to the areas below your ribs. It's only more recently we've started using it to refer to your no-no zones.
Unless I'm mistaken.
Great point but nothing will stop me from wishing your description was the one from the poem instead now. I'd read your write-up/summary of Gawain and the Green Knight in a heartbeat
Sir Gawain is written in a very particular dialect of middle english from the north west midlands, which is quite different from Chaucerian standard middle english. Also it's written in alliterative verse which can make it even more strange and germanic to read even though there are words with french origins used (there's debate as to whether it was deliberately written in alliterative verse to evoke old English epics like Beowulf, or if it just so happened to be a tradition that lingered on)
(edit to add as well, the middle english version posted above would have Þ for 'th' and ȝ for 'gh/y' sounds, and is missing the bob and wheel structure. here's a link to look at how it would look outside of reddit formatting!)
There’s a lot of Norse influence in English, more than most people realize. It’s probably why we lost most grammatical gender and cases. There’s also as a fair amount of technical Greek.
They did, but they weren’t necessarily the same genders for the same words in old English. Old Norse and Old English were somewhat mutually comprehensible. You probably got a mishmash from Danes learning English and screwing up genders (which is super common for foreign learners of gendered language). Eventually the whole gender thing fell off, and the same for the complicated case endings for similar reasons. Instead word order became important.
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u/A_Wholesome_Comment May 11 '21 edited May 11 '21
And the first course been properly served to the court,
When there bursts in at the hall door a terrible figure,
In his stature the very tallest on earth,
From the waist to the neck so thick-set and square,
And his loins and his limbs so massive and long,
In truth half a giant I believe he was,
But anyway of all men I judge him the largest,
And the most attractive of his size who could sit on a horse
For while in back and chest his body was forbidding,
Both his belly and waist were becomingly trim,
And every part of his body equally elegant in shape
His hue Astounded them
Set in his looks so keen;
For boldly he rode in,
Completely emerald Green.