Gawain in Vain

It seems like people really hate Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, like so many people are falling over themselves just to kick this mediaeval poem in the groin. 1984's Sword of the Valiant, a film adaptation, is no exception, though it's a lot better than that obnoxious Dev Patel movie, The Green Knight, from a few years ago.

Watching this movie was the latest in an accumulation of abuse I'd perceived levelled at the poem. It got me so worked up I started bullying Google's AI about it, you know, asking it questions to overtax its obsequity, which is, of course, impossible. Questions like, "Why does the Norton Anthology use that terrible Simon Armitage translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?"

It seems what Google's AI actually does is close to what Google's always done, it finds a bunch of web sites in response to a search query. The only difference is that now it plagiarises each source in a manner mimicking human conversation.

This is an interesting breakdown:

The counterpoints are shown like the conversation is 50/50 but I'm confident that any of the young readers Norton was hoping to court with this translation would still feel like Armitage's work hits their ears like a brick.

The Simon Armitage translation has been included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which is the standard text book in American college literature classes, since 2012. Apparently inspired by Seamus Heaney's wonderful translation of Beowulf, Armitage fills his translation with anachronistic colloquialisms, supposedly in the effort to make the poem more readable and to respect the source material's alliterative verse. There are a lot of moments in the translation that just crash into a brick wall, like this bit:

. . . Gawain was embraced by his band of brothers,
who made eager enquiries, and he answered them all
with the tale of his trial and tribulations,
and the challenge at the chapel, and the great green chap,
and the love of the lady, which led to the belt.

"The great green chap"? Did he play racquetball with him? I know "chap" fits with "challenge" and "chapel" for alliteration but there's more to poetry than alliteration. The line in the original version of the poem is "Þe chaunce of þe chapel, þe chere of þe knyȝt." "knyȝt" is "knight" and not "chap" or any mediaeval version of "chap" so Armitage is adding alliteration that wasn't there in the first place and inserting a casual tone where there wasn't one. And "band of brothers" sticks out as a reference to Shakespeare's Henry V, written over two hundred years later.

Anyway, the questions I've put to Google's AI about the differences in quality between the 1984 film and the 2021 film don't seem to jive with my impression that the makers of both movies hate the original poem. The 2021 adaptation obviously aims to subvert the text at every step, which led to me being really pissed off when I spoke to a young woman who earnestly believed the film was a straightforward representation of mediaeval literature. But can you honestly tell me that the 1984 film's makers liked Sir Gawain when they put him in this wig?

They might argue this was a common style in the Middle Ages but no-one else in the movie looks like they scalped Debbie Harry.

That's Miles O'Keefe as Gawain and some would say he gets off easy compared to Sean Connery as the Green Knight whose costume has a belly window:

There was a lame pirate movie from the '40s I talked about not too long ago that also had a character wearing a top with a belly window. Every now and then, I guess a cracked costume designer gets it into his or her head that this is a good idea. I don't care how ripped your actor is, the belly window will make him look like he has a beer gut. I guess it's not the worst costume Connery ever wore, everyone's seen the infamous Zardoz costume at this point, but it's worth asking how Connery managed so often to end up in terrible costumes. Let's not forget the terrycloth romper from Dr. No.

That said, Connery's actually pretty good in the role. He gives it a mixture of majesty and mischief that's just right for the character. The film also has Peter Cushing, John Rhys-Davies, and Trevor Howard, who plays King Arthur, though, for some reason, the characters never refer to him by name. The cinematography's pretty bad indoors but the film actually has some good European locations that could make even the worst cinematographer look talented.

Miles O'Keefe, who got his start playing Tarzan, is maybe best known now for playing Ator, a Conan the Barbarian knock-off made infamous on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. He plays Gawain like a deer perpetually caught in the headlights but the worst part of the movie is by far its repetitive synthesiser score which hammers a trite, triumphal hero melody into your ears over and over and over.

I really loved Sir Gawain and the Green Knight when I first read it in around 2008. Doesn't anyone else feel the way I do?

Sword of the Valiant is available on Amazon Prime.