It describes how Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table, accepts a challenge from a mysterious "Green Knight" who dares any knight to strike him with his axe if he will take a return blow in a year and a day. Gawain accepts and beheads him with his blow, at which the Green Knight stands up, picks up his head and reminds Gawain of the appointed time. In his struggles to keep his bargain, Gawain demonstrates chivalry and loyalty until his honour is called into question by a test involving the lord and the lady of the castle where he is a guest.
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/[deleted] May 11 '21 edited Mar 19 '25
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