The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to this very special episode of Chronicles, where today we're going to

00:00:18.460 be talking all about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And I'm here joined by a great passionate

00:00:26.060 medievalist and chairman of the Pendragon Foundation, Nathan Hood. Nathan, thank you

00:00:31.060 for coming in. Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. I mean, I've been a long time watcher and viewer of

00:00:35.840 yours, Luca. And I love what you're doing in terms of celebrating culture and then to talk about Sir

00:00:41.540 Gawain and the Green Knight. I mean, that's just a dream come true. So yeah, well, likewise, you know,

00:00:46.560 I've, you know, long been interested in your takes on Tolkien and the Arthurian legends. And so no,

00:00:52.180 it's wonderful to have you in to talk about such a classic piece of literature, one that I think

00:00:57.800 really has a special place in the canon of Arthurian legends, but also obviously in the story of England

00:01:07.200 itself, right? It's a very prominent work. And we'll obviously talk all about the actual story as we go

00:01:14.380 further down. But why don't we begin by just setting the scene and the historical background and the

00:01:19.600 time that this sort of this text was coming from. So obviously, we're dealing with a story that

00:01:26.560 seems to have, well, first thing to say, we only have one manuscript, right, right, of Segwayne. We only have

00:01:32.400 this now, because one manuscript managed to survive down the ages. I remember the first chronicle I covered on

00:01:39.120 Beowulf, where I recounted the fact that we only have that because it was saved from a fire, right, in, in the

00:01:46.120 1700s. And it seems that Segwayne was just as tightly worn over, you know, against the, you know, the sort of

00:01:54.200 like dust of history. So we're glad to have it.

00:01:57.620 Absolutely. And I mean, on one hand, it makes you think, how many wonderful works have we not got, or maybe

00:02:03.820 are waiting to be discovered, actually, like Segwayne, because that was in the 19th century, I believe that it was

00:02:09.760 recovered and or rediscovered for the first time. So for several hundred years, it hadn't been known

00:02:15.400 about. And so that there's some optimism there, maybe some pessimism. But also, I think it speaks

00:02:23.000 to the time that it's written in, which is, you know, we are on this back wall, we've got all these

00:02:28.440 lovely printed books, and they're mass produced. And you could buy a book on Amazon really easily or

00:02:34.140 on another publisher, right? Whereas in that time, it's all manuscript writing. And if it is written

00:02:41.360 down, and it would be circulated through copies. So these are precious items that whoever owns it,

00:02:47.240 it's a it's almost a status symbol that I have a manuscript, I have the written version of the

00:02:52.260 story, it'd probably be lovely illumination on it, and various figures drawn on it. Or it would be

00:02:59.780 orally performed. And that's probably how most people would encounter many of the stories, such

00:03:04.540 as Beowulf, such as Segwayne, both of them poems. And in those days, poems weren't just recited,

00:03:12.080 sometimes they were sung. So that gives us a bit of a flavor of how the people who, who would have

00:03:18.300 first experienced this work, would have encountered it. And in contrast to us who get it in a lovely

00:03:24.400 printed book, right? Yes. As individuals, probably would have been performed in a communal setting

00:03:31.600 as well. Maybe think of the court of a castle, where around a nice fire, around a nice fire on

00:03:37.500 a cold, dark night, the winds battering, and the rains coming in. And you're all huddled around and

00:03:43.060 you hear Segwayne and the Green Knight. And I think I think a further aspect of this is, as we'll get into

00:03:50.580 the story, it's all set in courts, and courtly life is a big part of it. And so for these people,

00:03:58.300 it's not necessarily like a long lost age that's being presented here. It's actually their own lives

00:04:06.460 can be seen in the story. Yes. And so the magic of the story, or the supernatural, or the challenging

00:04:13.060 aspects of it, speak directly to their own experience. And I often say castles are a place where history

00:04:20.380 and myth meet in a very strong way, not just for us, but for them, they encountered it as,

00:04:27.240 you know, I'm sitting in a castle just as King Arthur sat in a castle. Right. So I think when

00:04:31.980 they're hearing the story, they're not hearing some ancient myth, it would feel very alive to them.

00:04:38.060 Definitely. And also as well, at this point, everyone would have been, certainly at the time

00:04:43.120 when this was written in the 14th century, people would have been very familiar with these characters

00:04:49.620 by now, of course, you know, going back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, you know, history of Kings of Britain,

00:04:55.160 and then going through and Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian romances, and obviously, we're actually

00:04:59.800 before Mallory's, obviously, very famous death of Arthur, at this point, but people would have known

00:05:06.420 these characters. And obviously, as you say, many of those medieval stories, there would have been

00:05:11.660 far more than we have now. It's just that many of them have simply not survived down to our present

00:05:17.760 time. And you have, as well, there is no official Arthurian canon, of course, as well, there is no

00:05:25.540 this happened, then this happened. And this knight always does this deed in every story. Because

00:05:31.340 obviously, different people are writing up and down the country. And that's just in England,

00:05:36.100 of course, France is, you know, Chrétien de Troyes are doing their own thing. Of course,

00:05:41.020 the Germans have got the Niebuhr-Lungenlied and many of their, which is not strictly Arthurian. But,

00:05:46.340 you know, it speaks to that kind of, it's, it's still looking at the same themes that Arthur tackles,

00:05:52.700 chivalry, and honour, and courtliness, and revenge, and all these temptations of sin. You know,

00:05:59.340 obviously, it was a popular topic around Europe at the time. And so when people see Sir Gawain

00:06:07.020 being the main character of this story, there would have been a tremendous amount of excitement

00:06:12.580 in there, because Gawain was one of the greats. He was one of, he's the cousin of the king, you know,

00:06:17.940 of Arthur. He has a long storied history. And it would have, you can see laced throughout the text,

00:06:25.140 many references to previous adventures that Gawain has been on or little, you know, nods to previous

00:06:31.780 literature on the character that would have been very obvious to people in that contemporary 14th

00:06:39.140 century setting. Absolutely. I think it's hard to, for us to see how prevalent the Arthurian stories were

00:06:48.000 in that time, and how widespread knowledge of Arthur would have been, and of Gawain and Lancelot,

00:06:54.280 and so on. So much so that I think, you know, you mentioned Geoffrey of Monmouth there. We only have

00:07:00.880 one manuscript for the Gawain's text. I think there's over 100 manuscripts of that circulated around the

00:07:06.860 courts of Europe. So it's all over from Britain to France, Germany, Italy. And I think there's even

00:07:15.060 evidence of some references in the Holy Land, right, with the Crusaders. So it spreads all across

00:07:20.900 Christendom. So it's not just in Britain. But what's really interesting about Gawain is he gets

00:07:27.860 treated quite differently in the literatures of the different countries. Let's just focus on England

00:07:33.500 and France. Yeah, please.

00:07:34.900 So in Geoffrey of Monmouth's The History of the Kings of Britain, Gawain, as you say, is a prominent

00:07:40.960 character. He's a cousin of the king. He's a heroic and mobile individual. He's kind of the

00:07:46.660 greatest of the knights at that point. And that seems to be the trajectory in the English kind of

00:07:52.300 canon, if there is such a thing. Tradition, in the English tradition. Whereas in France, with

00:07:58.320 Cretien, you start to get the introduction of new characters. Now, they are based on Celtic

00:08:04.800 names or characters, but they're not fully worked out until Cretien comes along. And then you start

00:08:10.960 getting Lancelot of the lake. Right. And he becomes the greatest of the knights. And one of the things

00:08:16.980 that comes in at the same time is this whole courtly love angle, where a knight has to wrestle

00:08:24.300 with his loyalty to his lord, and serving his lord, but also serving the lady. And maybe that has an

00:08:31.140 amorous aspect. And this is kind of based on the courts, which Cretien's writing in, actually, at that

00:08:37.280 time. He's reflecting the behavior back at the court. And so what happens is you get Lancelot and

00:08:45.240 Percival and so on. And these are elevated, but Gawain gets put down as a consequence in the French 0.86

00:08:52.280 literature. Shafted. Very much so. He's contrasted. So take the quest for the Holy Grail, the Lancelot

00:08:59.380 Grail cycle, one of the great Arthurian stories. Even though Lancelot has committed an affair with

00:09:07.320 Guinevere, he is still able to get to the castle of the Grail, but he cannot get in. Or he can get in

00:09:15.140 after confession or so on, in certain versions. Gawain is so consumed by earthly glory and lust that he

00:09:25.420 just gives up on the quest almost immediately. He can't stick it. And so we're seeing like a

00:09:30.660 condemnation of this character now. That doesn't happen in the English tradition. He's always held

00:09:36.460 up as the great hero. And Lancelot is not really on that level. So I think it's this story, at the very

00:09:45.480 outset, it's by having Gawain as the main character. Yes. And as we'll see, he's presented in a positive and

00:09:52.240 affirming light. It's a robustly English tale. And I think the people would have resonated with that

00:09:59.520 as a consequence. I think if memory serves, because it's a while since I've read it, but in

00:10:04.440 Maori's The Death of Arthur as well, I seem to remember in that final climactic battle with Mordred

00:10:10.120 that it's Gawain's death that is most mourned by Arthur, right? It's not Lancelot. It's Gawain.

00:10:18.140 That's the one that leaves him in the greatest amount of sorrow and anguish. So yeah, definitely

00:10:24.680 one of the most important nights, the most important one, as you say, in the English tradition.

00:10:30.420 There's also something to be said, isn't there, about the era that this was written in and the

00:10:36.100 alliterative revival, right? We're looking at a time where there is an active effort by poets and

00:10:44.100 scholars to revive the alliterative form of poetry, you know, that old Germanic form of poetry that

00:10:53.960 Beowulf was based on and a lot of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of, you know, creating poetry against

00:11:03.960 the more rhythmic rhyming verse of the Normans. And so you can see there's a really interesting

00:11:11.160 aspect to it where you can see the old Anglo-Saxon spirit trying to reassert itself after the Norman

00:11:19.480 conquest still, that it's still, you can tell it's there and very much in the memory of people,

00:11:25.460 but it's not getting the breathing space to thrive as it once did.

00:11:31.260 I think it's, it's even more specific than that in some ways, because the author seems to have

00:11:39.580 come, we don't know the author, like who it was exactly. There's no biographical information.

00:11:45.520 Yes, yes, it was, it was Baz. Yeah. Well, in some ways, maybe. Baz the Barb.

00:11:50.860 Because it seems like he, he was based in Chester. There's some of the wording seems to have the

00:12:01.320 dialect of the Northwest in that time or the Western areas. And a lot of it's the journeys or

00:12:08.300 the places that are mentioned are on the West coast, like the Wirral, for example, the mountains

00:12:13.180 of Wales and so on. So this seems like somebody who knows the geography quite well is steeped in that

00:12:18.700 sort of location. And we know that in the late 14th century in the court of Richard II, there was a

00:12:25.880 number of Cheshire men or men from Chester. So maybe this was one of them or somebody connected to

00:12:33.640 that kind of courtly scene. So he seems to not just be kind of exemplifying or celebrating England and

00:12:42.520 English traditions, but very much regional as well. And I think that's actually strengthens the

00:12:48.180 patriotism then, because it's a love of England, but a love of it as it is concretely in a certain

00:12:54.460 place and time which he belongs to. And I think many of us resonate with that. It's a love of home.

00:12:59.860 Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Actually, on that exact point, I wanted to read an extended passage from

00:13:05.560 Tolkien's lecture on Sir Gwain and the Green Knight. It will not surprise you, ladies and gentlemen,

00:13:11.120 to know that I'm using the Tolkien translation, of course, for this particular episode. But from his

00:13:16.940 lecture on the actual poet himself, he says, he was a man of serious and devout mind, though not

00:13:22.880 without humour. He had an interest in theology and some knowledge of it, though an amateur knowledge,

00:13:28.780 perhaps, rather than a professional. He had Latin and French and was well enough read in French books,

00:13:34.940 both romantic and instructive. But his home was in the West Midlands of England. So much his language

00:13:40.360 shows and his metre and his scenery. His active life must have lain in the latter half of the 14th

00:13:46.820 century, and he was thus a contemporary of Chaucer's. But whereas Chaucer has never become a closed book,

00:13:53.340 and has continued to be read with pleasure since the 15th century, Sir Gwain and the Green Knight and

00:13:58.740 Pearl are practically unintelligible to modern readers. Indeed, in their own time, the adjectives dark

00:14:05.800 and hard would probably have been applied to these poems by most to enjoy the works of Chaucer.

00:14:12.140 For Chaucer was a native of London, and the populous south-east of England, and the language which he

00:14:17.720 naturally used has proved to be the foundation of standard English and literary English of later

00:14:22.880 times. The kind of verse which he composed was the kind English poets mostly used for the next 500

00:14:29.580 years. But the language of this unknown author from the far less populous, far more conservative West

00:14:36.020 Midlands, his grammar, his style, his vocabulary, were in many respects remote from those of London.

00:14:41.880 Sir Gwain and the Green Knight, he used the ancient English meter, which descended from antiquity,

00:14:48.380 that kind of verse which is now called alliterative. And so, yeah, you can see Tolkien there,

00:14:53.680 just very much seconding all of the points that you just made. And it's remarkable as well, isn't it,

00:15:02.000 how you are just from the character of someone's writing from that time, able to pinpoint something

00:15:08.480 about their life with otherwise very little to go on. Absolutely. And again, I think that's actually

00:15:14.120 a good point that we just take English as standard, and it really becomes standardised in the 19th century

00:15:21.700 with grammar books and so on, trying to codify the English language in spelling and how it's said.

00:15:30.560 But prior to the modern age or the industrial age, wherever you went in England, things would be

00:15:37.380 spelt differently, they would be said differently, and it was a much more fluid and dynamic language

00:15:42.360 as a consequence of that. And so that's how you're able to pinpoint in a way that today it's very hard

00:15:48.180 to, you couldn't tell from most people's writing where they come from, because even if they speak

00:15:52.680 with a heavy dialect, it doesn't translate into their actual, actual words.

00:15:56.860 And most people just can't write.

00:15:58.560 Well, that's true.

00:16:00.660 Yes.

00:16:01.240 Some things don't change too much.

00:16:02.660 No, not at all. All right, then. Shall we begin by talking about the actual story itself, then?

00:16:08.720 Let's start going through the actual tale.

00:16:10.940 So, I think it would serve as well to just read the opening passage from Sir Gawain and

00:16:18.520 the Green Knight, because it begins with a great deal of world-building and just setting

00:16:23.700 of the scene, and it says,

00:16:24.940 When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy, and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands

00:16:31.240 and ashes, the traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned was tried for his

00:16:37.000 treachery, the most true upon earth. It was Aeneas the noble and his renowned kindred, who

00:16:43.860 then laid under them lands, and lords became of well nigh all the wealth in the western isles.

00:16:50.420 When royal Romulus to Rome his road had taken, in great pomp and pride he peopled it first

00:16:57.340 and named it with his own name, that yet now it bears.

00:17:01.920 Tyreus went to Tuscany in towns, founded Longbeard in Lombardy, uplifted halls, and far over the

00:17:09.540 French flood, Felix Brutus, on many a broad bank in Bray Britain, established full fair, 0.76

00:17:16.620 where strange things, strife and sadness, at wiles in the land did fair, and each other

00:17:23.100 grief and gladness oft fast have followed there.

00:17:27.780 And so we immediately just get, as you say, the sense of immediate time and place, right?

00:17:33.580 It takes the mythological approach to Britain and its origin is laid out by Geoffrey of Monmouth

00:17:39.860 and Brutus of Troy establishing Britain, and then it zooms in on the time of Arthur and

00:17:47.600 his knights, so it immediately sets them in that continuity of the great heroes.

00:17:53.220 Yeah, and I think it's important that we understand that for many people they would have thought

00:18:00.780 this was history, right? That when Geoffrey of Monmouth writes the history of the kings

00:18:05.740 of Britain, it's not presented as a romance, which maybe could exist in a time outside of

00:18:11.800 time, as it were. It's not a fable. It's not something which is purely made up. It's actually

00:18:19.860 many people thought, yes, there was a Brutus from Troy who founded Britain, and there was a King

00:18:26.360 Arthur, and actually, especially in the time of Edward I, the first different factions were

00:18:32.740 competing over who was going to fulfil the Arthurian prophecies, who was Arthur going

00:18:37.780 to return and restore, or was Edward the new Arthur, etc., etc.

00:18:42.400 And you see that in tension with the kings of England, all the way, of course, up to Hengwar

00:18:47.420 VII, naming his own eldest son Arthur, before that all went calamitously wrong. But that mission

00:18:54.760 endured for a long time throughout the English monarchy.

00:18:58.140 I think the other thing to add to it is, so with that story, there's a kind of cycle that

00:19:05.960 repeats through these different characters. So we have the medieval idea of the Wheel of

00:19:12.720 Fortune, where...

00:19:14.520 From Boethius.

00:19:15.560 From Boethius and so on, and it gets kind of brought into a lot of their literature, where

00:19:20.620 you have this idea that individuals such as a king might rise and fall, but this is in

00:19:28.340 their own life, so we can see that with Arthur, right? That he rises to kinghood, but eventually

00:19:33.780 his whole kingdom is brought low and through civil war and is destroyed. But then nations 0.98

00:19:39.120 have that too. And so with Brutus and Arthur, you see a repeated pattern, and this is true of

00:19:45.460 the kings more broadly. So I think this is also being kind of brought through to us again

00:19:51.480 in this passage. It's saying that this story that you're about to hear fits in with that

00:19:56.840 kind of cyclical world. That kind of world where, yeah, we haven't a great court at Camelot,

00:20:03.740 but maybe it's on the way down, or something bad's going to happen to it. It's maybe signposting

00:20:09.040 for us. Yes. So then we're introduced to Arthur and his knights, and obviously, though this

00:20:15.320 isn't Arthur's story, I will just say that it is... I can't help but smile whenever Arthur

00:20:21.780 is on the page at any time in any story. He's just such a magnificent character, and he's

00:20:28.480 always dealt with in such a... He's given such gravitas and reverence wherever he appears.

00:20:35.460 You know, he really is the most legendary king, you know, the platonic ideal of a good knight

00:20:42.020 and a good king. And you see that very much here as well. You know, the depiction of Camelot

00:20:47.320 at the beginning and the grand feast as they're at Christmas, aren't they? And it's New Year's

00:20:52.940 Eve after celebrating, obviously, because we celebrate Christmas for many, many days, of course,

00:20:58.260 not just the one and all of the... The 12 days of Christmas. Right, yes. I have heard of that,

00:21:04.060 you know. Oh, yes. Yeah, the 12 days of Christmas, of course, and all of the religious ceremonies

00:21:11.580 that, of course, take place with that. And so we're here on New Year's Eve, and it's all

00:21:17.320 very jovial, of course. There's a great amount of feasting. Queen Guinevere is there, all of

00:21:23.240 the great knights, and Guine, importantly, is sat at the high table with Arthur and with the

00:21:30.540 Queen as well. So you immediately see his prominence of place in Arthur's court. And Guine is a terrific

00:21:38.480 character because you see his... He's kind of excessively chivalrous in many ways, but we'll

00:21:48.540 come to that as we go through. So they're all there, and obviously what we see is the doors

00:21:57.540 fling open, and upon this horse comes in this man into the hall. And obviously I'll have to

00:22:07.980 read the extended passage because this is obviously the introduction of our main character, really,

00:22:13.600 other than Guine, which is the Green Knight himself.

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PREVIEW： Chronicles #33 ｜ Sir Gawain and The Green Knight with Nathan Hood： Part I

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