uncle Iorlas
Lorien
Aug 1 2021, 2:41pm
Views: 1244
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The professor's essay on Gawain, which I read a few years back in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, really kind of turned around my ubderstanding of the poem, though I'd read it several times and written a piece about it as an undergraduate. He sees it as an expose of sorts, of the layered rulesets for living that the elites of the day try to balance, by a poet wgo knew rhese rules intimately from within, the end messqge being not to forget that of all these codes and games, only divine law really matters.
(I still think there's a pronounced tension going on between Christianized Britain and some pagan matters that decline to fade from people's hearts and minds, none of which Tolkien addresses, but his take is incisive as always.)
As for the movie, I have no idea what to expect. The Green Knight's face is wonderful and shows an awareness of his suggestiveness of the Green Man. But otherwise it's hard to tell what's going on, and faithful presentation of a hot social topic from "the complex and didactic fourteenth century" is a lot to ask in 2021.
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