Didn't Read It
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Didn't Read It
Mud, Chivalry, and A24: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on Page & Screen
We're BACK in the swing of things with resident Medievalist gal-about-town, Toni, to take a ride through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight--and to discuss the, ah, somewhat polarizing A24 adaptation.
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Have you considered a. About it?
>> Speaker B:I, You're not recording right now, are you?
>> Speaker A:I am recording, but Tally will edit this out, won't you, Tally? Because you would never keep evidence of us saying things that are horrible.
>> Speaker B:I consider it every day. Books, books, books, books, books, books.
>> Speaker A:Hello, and welcome to Didn't Read it, the podcast that would definitely be seduced by your wife. I am your host, Grace Todd, writer, editor, book gremlin. And joining me again today is our beloved medievalist correspondent and gal about town, Toni. Hi, baby.
>> Speaker B:Hi.
>> Speaker A:How are you today?
>> Speaker B:I'm doing good. I have been really looking forward to doing this episode because, like, Gowan is one of the very few pieces of medieval literature that I actually deeply love in spite of myself.
>> Speaker A:Gawain, as we get in the. In the movie.
>> Speaker B:Oh, you got to it first. I wanted to talk about Gawain. What is going on with Gawain?
>> Speaker A:Was that an attempt at doing, like, a Welsh accent? Did they give King Arthur a Welsh accent? For reasons it's.
>> Speaker B:I don't know. It's not even quite Welsh. It's this, like, weird, like, pan Celtic, like, but, like, Gawain has a Welsh equivalent, which is. And I'm probably going to butcher this, but it's gwachmi. So, like, Gawain is like. I don't know what's going on there. I got together on Sunday with all my, like, medievalist girlies and we rewatched the film, and I realized, like, how insufferable we must be. Like, how horrible it must be to watch a movie with us because we just, like, did not stop talking the entire time. But every time that would happen, there was just this chorus of Garwin.
>> Speaker A:Now, I'm not gonna lie, I liked. And we'll talk about this after we talk about the poem itself, but I like the movie very much, actually. Although I am willing to concede that it is not an unerringly faithful adaptation of the poem, I think it could be so much worse.
>> Speaker B:A of all for context, dear listener, Grace and I were, like, chatting and having drinks a couple weeks back when, she proposed this to me. And she's like, yeah, I was hoping we could talk about the Green Knight film. You've seen that, right? And I'm like, yeah, I fucking hate it. And she's like, oh, no. She's like, right on the defense.
>> Speaker A:I mean, in. In fairness, I know people who like the Persuasion adaptation they did recently, which I think is one of the worst films that has ever existed. So, you know, it's it's all a matter of taste and how much you love the source material.
>> Speaker B:See, I. I haven't seen that. And I also, like, I, I am not like someone who really has any right to talk about taste. I don't know if you've seen that one meme that's like, I love, like, watching a movie and being like, yeah, man, that was pretty good. I really enjoyed that movie. And then I go home and find out that it has a two star rating on, or 2% rating on rotten Tomatoes and is widely agreed to be the worst film of all time. Like, I, I genuinely like the 1992 Super Mario Brothers movie. So that should, like, that should be the benchmark for whether y'all take me seriously in my taste in films.
>> Speaker A:Yeah, well, but, you know, you're qualified on this one, which does change some things.
>> Speaker B:I mean, I think y'all think I'm more qualified than I do. But, like, yes, dear listener, I am. I am qualified medievalist. I'm an expert. Going to explain to Grace why she's wrong.
>> Speaker A:Well, you know, what better thing to do at 10am on a Tuesday than to be told in excruciating detail why my opinions are fundamentally incorrect? So. The Green Knight.
>> Speaker B:Yeah. so, like, I. I've been thinking about how we want to get into this, and I realized I'm like, I. I don't even know. Because the thing about the Green Knight is this is probably, I mean, one. It is one of the longest Middle English poems. There are ones that are a good bit longer, but, like, it is one of the longest surviving Middle English poems. And it's probably also one of the most talked about poems. There is, like, so much scholarship on it. Like, every famous, like, British fantasy guy you can think of, CS Lewis, Tolkien, they all talked about it. Like, every medievalist scholar has cut their teeth on Gawain and the Green Knight. And like, I don't even know where to start because I was realizing we could do a podcast just on Gowan. Like, there are so many angles that have been taken. There is so much to be said about it. I'm like, should we start with the poem? Should we start with the context? Do we want to start with the movie? But, yeah, where do you want to start?
>> Speaker A:Let's start with the poem. Let's just. In good, didn't read it fashion. Let's start with the text and then we'll spin out from there.
>> Speaker B:All right, so Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th century Middle English poem. It's, probably somewhere like 1370, 1380. But, like, there is wiggle room there. We don't know. But it's actually. It's roughly contemporary with Chaucer. And that's one of those things that I think if you've read Chaucer and then you've read the Green Knight is a little surprising because it feels so much more archaic. And some of that is, like, the linguistic character of the poem. It's, It's in this, like, very northern dialect of Middle English. There's, like, argument over exactly where people argued between Cheshire and Shropshire for years. And now, like, there's an increasing group of people who think it's Yorkshire, but, like, it's. It's very northern. There are features that are distinctly northern. Like, they say they. Them and they're instead of, hey, hem and hair.
>> Speaker A:Okay.
>> Speaker B:There's this thing, like, I don't know if you read. I know I sent you the, like, broad view, side by side. I don't know if you read the Middle English or the Modern English, but.
>> Speaker A:I did not read the Middle English. I did. I did not read the Middle English.
>> Speaker B:That's fair. Because, like, Chaucer's Middle English is very recognizable to us, at least. Like, on the page, you hear it spoken aloud, and it's very, like, difficult to read. But, like, on the page, it's pretty legible. Whereas, like, the Middle English of Gowen is not.
>> Speaker A:Yeah. And I. I would check every once in a while, if I, you know, looking at the translation, I would hit a word where I'd be like, what was the original here? Like, what did this come from? And sometimes it would be a pretty clean one to one. And sometimes it would be a, completely. I was like, that is a foreign language. I do not know this word.
>> Speaker B:Yeah. I'll be honest. Sometimes in that one, they even have ones where I'm like, there are closer sense for sense and, like, word for word, like, translations that you could have used. Like, at one point, they, like, translate proud in one line as arrogant. And it's like, why not just keep it as proud? Like that. That is a word that exists. There's also. There's this fun thing where, if you look at the text, they will use, like, Q, U instead of the more, like, familiar Southern English. Wh. So you get things like quen instead of when.
>> Speaker A:Ah, yeah.
>> Speaker B:And this is, like, if you hear it, it actually. It sounds very, like, Scottish almost. And this is actually like, closely related to the dialects in Middle English that give us modern Scots.
>> Speaker A:Oh, that makes sense.
>> Speaker B:And so the. The poem, we don't know who wrote it. It's one of those Middle English poems that just. We don't have any idea who wrote. Exists in one manuscript. It's Cotton Nero AX2, which is part of the, like, big cotton collection in the British Library. It's in a manuscript that contains three other poems, Pearl, Patience and Cleanness, which are generally considered to all be written by the same author. There's also. There's a hagiographic poem in another manuscript called Saint Erkenwald that also sometimes is thought to the same author. And we just call that person probably a guy. I mean, like you said, it's very dadlit. Like, we typically just call that person either the Pearl poet or the Gowan poet. Pearl poet's a little more archaic because, like, for a long time we thought Pearl, which was this, like, very dry, allegorical, very religious poem. M was the more important poem. And then Gowan started. People got really interested in Gowan. And now a lot of, like, younger scholars will say the Gowan poet. But, like, it also just depends who you learn from. All my professors in undergrad said Pearl Poet. So I think of them as the Pearl Poet fair.
>> Speaker A:Ah.
>> Speaker B:And it is, the poem is part of what's called the alliterative revival. So we have this period, if we go back to like, Old English poetry and just like, older Germanic poetry in general. So like Beowulf, the Exeter book elegies, but also, like, if we go to like, Old Norse, the poetic Elia or the old Saxon Heliad, this is the verse that like Germanic poetry is written in. And it's a type of verse in which instead of having rhymes across lines, you have repetition of sounds within lines. And that's like, structural thing. So we look at, like Beowulf, for instance. We have like, oft shield, chafing, Schevener, threatum, monagem magthum, Mjorde, settler ofte that like S M M. It's this like, very drum like beat.
>> Speaker A:Yeah.
>> Speaker B:By about a century after the Battle of Hastings, that has kind of died out and been replaced with more like Latin, more Francophone rhyme structures that are brought in by the Norman aristocracy. And then around the latter half of the 14th century, we see this resurgence mostly in the north of England, which is an area that is linguistically and culturally much more dramatic in character. So we see this resurgence of alliterative verse. And Gowan and the Green Knight in particular has this Interesting structure where it's mostly alliterative verse. Each stanza starts with this, like, variable number of lines that are alliterative. And then each stanza wraps up with what's called a bob and wheel. And this is where, like, the last line of alliterative verse starts off a series of five lines. It's that last line of alliterative verse. And then, like, four short lines with a rhyme structure of A, B, A, B, A. And I want to. I want to read out a passage so that people can hear, like, what this sounds like. This is fairly early in the poem. This is the, like, first description we get of the titular. One of the titular characters. The green Knight. There halys in at the hall adore an aglich maister on the most on the mould on measure heegh fro the swear to the swang so swear and so thick on his lindes and his limb is so long and so great hath etten in AED I hope that he ware but maun maist I a got min hymn to bane and that the merriest in his mihal did micht read for of his back and his breast a were his body Both his womb and his wast were worthily sma and a his faithrs fallen informed that he had folk for wonder of his hue menhard set in his somblant seine he fared as frek were fahd and over all encker gren. So we have that clan hard sen fahr gren. And there's this fun little thing. you may have noticed a couple times in the poem there's a motif of drums and pipes that comes up.
>> Speaker A:Yeah.
>> Speaker B:Years back, Stephen Fry of Fry and Laurie and V for Vendetta and, you know, general just Stephen Fry fame. wrote a book. I can't think of the name of it, but a book about poetry. and about writing poetry. And he argues that the, like, the way that this verse goes actually kind of like mediates this drum and pipe thing. Because the alliterative verse does this. Da da da da da da da da da da da da.
>> Speaker A:Right.
>> Speaker B:And then at the end, the bob and wheel is this, like, whirl and scurl of the pipe punctuating.
>> Speaker A:You know, I wish when they had taught us about, alliterative poetry in. What is it, second grade when you make the poem, that's like, for your parents, that's like, moms must. I immediately lost track of what I was going to do. But it doesn't matter. I wish that they had instead of being like, it's just a cute thing you do, they'd been like, this is how you write medieval dadlit poetry. And I would have been significantly more interested.
>> Speaker B:Yeah, that's the problem is I think they had to set you up for the fact that they're never gonna teach a literative verse. Well. So, you know, if they teach you well in second grade, how are they gonna teach you badly in your, like, freshman seminar? they gotta lower the expectations.
>> Speaker A:I mean, that's fair. But I feel like at a minimum, you know, we've got all this trouble with like, little, boys not understanding why books are important. At a minimum, if you're like, hey, alliterative poetry is for writing about slaying things, maybe you would get more 7 year olds who'd be like, you know what, I'm on board with this. Let's give it a shot.
>> Speaker B:That's fair. Yeah. So the actual. So the narrative of Gawain and the Green Knight. Gawain and the Green Knight is part of this, like, broader thing. Obviously, that is the matter of Britain or Arthuriana or whatever you want to call it. It's all the stuff about King Arthur and his knights and Camelot. We're, we're like, at the point that this is being written, we are like very solidly into Arthuriana. It's been going on for centuries and it will continue going on until. What day is it now? Like, Arthuriana hasn't stopped. I'm like, I don't know if I, I'm very much like a firm believer that like, Neo Arthuriana isn't a thing. There's just Arthuriana. there's not like it just never stops. Right. There's not some point in history that I think we can look at and be like, this is when, like, real, elemental, like pure Arthuriana stops. And now it's fake Arthuriana. it's all just Arthuriana. It's all just like stories that we tell ourselves and have told ourselves for over, you know, 900, a thousand years at least.
>> Speaker A:Yeah.
>> Speaker B:Longer if we go like Celtic roots.
>> Speaker A:We've never stopped. Like, there's never been a point at which we're not like, hey, you know what would be fun? Another Arthuriana adaptation. Yeah, let's get on it.
>> Speaker B:Right? It's just, it is this consistently popular vessel for, like, national identity construction, moralizing everything. You can stick it into a King Arthur story. And it's great. We're also in a period where, like, Gowan in particular, the, the other titular character Sir Gawain is, like, a particularly popular character at the time that this is being written. There are, like, a whole, like, series of Middle English romances revolving around Sir Gawain, if anyone ever wants to check them out. The University of Rochester maintains a, collection as part of their, like, Middle English text series that's freely accessible, that has like, 10 or so, like, Gowan romances from, like, roughly the, like, century around when Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is written. You have, like, the Turk in Sir Gawain. There's, there's, there's at least a dozen other Gawain tales. It's also part of this, like, broader thing. It's, it revolves around what's called a beheading game, which is something that has its roots in, like, Celtic literature. It shows up in the Red Branch cycle, the stories of, like, Cuchulainn. I think it shows up in the Mabinogion. But, like, don't quote me on that. I say, as I speak into a microphone where I'm being recorded. I'm not an expert on Celtic literature. So we've got a beheading game which is just basically, ah, an exchange in which a character is beheaded in a tit for tat, exchange of blows, only for that character to miraculously survive and their opponent should then have to stand an equal blow in turn.
>> Speaker A:I have some questions about the beheading game.
>> Speaker B:Yeah.
>> Speaker A:Because it feels like maybe it is one of those things that, is the origin of so many riffs on it that it feels kind of dumbly obvious when you're. Because it's like every time I see a beheading game. And granted, I don't read as much medieval literature as you do, but it's like, it feels pretty obvious that you should not cut the man's head off because that's gonna lead, to unintended consequences. And my question for you is, like, is that contemporarily obvious too? And it's like, well, just Gawain got carried away. He's a young man. He's trying to sort of prove himself. Like, would. Would the contemporary reader when Gowan's like, great, I'm gonna cut this dude's head off. Would the contemporary reader be like, this seems like a bad idea, or would they be like, yeah, off with his head?
>> Speaker B:You know, Like, I don't know for sure. unlike, C.S. lewis, I try not to fancy that. I understand the, like, medieval thought process, but I do think that, like, there is a degree to which at least the text maybe suggests that, like, someone's got an inkling of this. Because, like, on the one hand, Gowan has this idea in mind that it's like, you know, I don't have to stand a blow if I just kill him. Like, he. What's he gonna do? Stand up and pick his head back up. But at the same time, he like, jumps in to stop Arthur from doing it. So, like, is there this like, moment of fear that like, Arthur's getting himself into something that he oughtn't.
>> Speaker A:Right. Well. And is the subtext that the truly chivalric thing to have done would have been to just give him a small blow politely and then been like, teehee, Merry Christmas.
>> Speaker B:Yeah, this is actually, this is something that, that, you know, my friends and I were talking about the other night. as my friend Jillian was putting it, like, there is nothing in the text that says that he couldn't have just kind of booped him, that he couldn't have just given him like a light blow, taken his in turn. I mean, just like you, you know, like, like dudes punching each other like, as a game in high school. And instead he opts to just can behead this guy.
>> Speaker A:Well, and that's. It feels very much like a young men being incapable of putting down their masculinity long enough to just do the game part of the game. And it just getting too, too violent and too serious too quick.
>> Speaker B:I think there's that and then I think there's also a degree of taking the game too far in an attempt to avoid the consequences of the game. Right. Because if the other guy's got his head cut off, you're not gonna have to get hit.
>> Speaker A:Right. If you flip over the chessboard, you can't lose the game.
>> Speaker B:Exactly.
>> Speaker A:We've, gotten a little bit ahead of ourselves, though.
>> Speaker B:We have, yeah. So our story opens during the Christmas season in the year. There is. There's this really weirdly conflated temporality to go. And one of the things we were talking about the other night when we were watching the movies, that like, that's one of the things where the movie's like, hold my beer. We're gonna. With the temporality even more. But like, on the one hand, like, it's like in some ways, like early medieval in setting, but then also like a lot of the signifiers and the way like Gowan's knightly garb is described in all of this is very like high medieval. so it's like somehow the early Middle Ages but also the Pearl poets own time. We're in the Christmas season, which, like, in the Middle Ages of the Christmas season is like a two week party. You have feasts that run from Christmas Eve through to the Feast of the epiphany, which is January 6th. It's like when. It's when you celebrate the visit of the angry Republicans to the Capitol. Sorry, yes, the visit of the Magi to the newborn Jesus.
>> Speaker A:Did they bring frankincense and myrrh to the Capitol? Because if so, maybe, they didn't.
>> Speaker B:But I, The thing that the fake news media won't tell you is that the Magi actually came to Bethlehem to contest Jesus election as Messiah.
>> Speaker A:The sad thing is for the Christian nationalist right, half of them, more than half of them, almost all of them probably don't know what epiphany.
>> Speaker B:Yeah. And the funny thing with that is that I think that is, despite this, like, very masturbatory, like, return to like, traditional Catholicism and also like Eastern Orthodoxy, like, it's all the like, signifiers of like, we're hardcore Christians without any of the actual, like, theological or liturgical knowledge.
>> Speaker A:I've been really enjoying the memes in response to like the trad caths getting upset at the Pope that are just like, you know, welcome to Catholicism. We believe the Pope is infallible up in this bitch.
>> Speaker B:But like, I do think even like non converts have always been like that. Like, like my parents. This is one of the things that drove me away from Catholicism because I watched my parents and I'm like, y'all think that the, the Pope is infallible, but you never listen to him. Like, you never listen to him.
>> Speaker A:Isn't that the central charm of Catholicism though, is believing the Pope is infallible and then ignoring everything he says?
>> Speaker B:Because I think they're very like, well, you know, but like, but we have our own bishop and he's just like first among equals. And it's like, congratulations on your conversion to Orthodoxy. Like, so we're. Yeah, so we've got this whole like two weeks. there's other stuff in there. There's like St. Stephen's Day in there. There's New Year's. And it is a time when like, you get together and you drink and you eat and you celebrate and you give gifts and like, very importantly to Christmas in the Middle Ages, you play games, you take wagers, you engage in like, contests of skill and chance. this shows up a lot through the poem. They talk about like, you know, and many of these games like the, the references are so oblique that we don't even know what the game's being referenced are, Are. But like, they're talked about in ways where like, clearly the readers of the poem would have been familiar with this game, would have been familiar with this, like, whatever game of forfeit the like, ladies are playing during Christmas dinner that involves like, giving kisses to the men when they lose a bet or whatnot. Like the games that just have not survived but were clearly well known in their time.
>> Speaker A:It is such a bummer that. And it's only in the last, I don't know, 200 years that we have, phased out the games at Christmas thing. Like, it's just nowhere near as common as it used to be. Up, up through even the Victorian era, which I guess partly maps onto Christmas becoming more and more about the nuclear family and not about hanging out with a bunch of people. But yeah, more games, more silly games, more swords.
>> Speaker B:I make my family sit down and play long board games that they hate with me because I care about tradition return. So, so we're there. We're in Camelot at Christmas. It is a, ah, festival of merriment. It is. So this is like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start slagging off the film now. This is like one of the first places where I take exception with the film as like an adaptation of the poem because the film is doing this thing. when I, you know, I was, I was teaching my students earlier this semester about like, medievalism in popular culture. And I was talking about how like, when you want to create a sense of like, real medievalism, a sense of authenticity, you just have to add three things. Mud, blood and shit. And they're all like, laughing because like, hahaha, Ms. DiNardo said, but like, it's. This is the, this like horrible, like actually a historical way in which we signify historical authenticity when we're talking about the Middle Ages, we make it dark and grim and muddy and bloody. And like, I was even like, I was counting off as we're watching the film the other day, I'm like, yep, there's the mud, there's the blood. I was so happy. Like in the last like 10 minutes, someone hurls a piece of shit at Gowen. I'm like, there we go, we've got all three.
>> Speaker A:Bingo.
>> Speaker B:So like you, you open in the movie and it's this like really grim. Everyone's like, it's. You can like see that it's cold, it's bitter. Everyone's like, Very quiet. It's very dark. There's, like, no light coming in anywhere. And, like, the poem is not that. The poem is, like, cheerful, happy. Everyone's drunk. Everyone's yelling, everyone's laughing. The girls are kissing the boys. The boys might be kissing the bo. A lot of boy kissing in the poem. There's food, there's drink. You don't have this, like, old, rotting Arthur and Guinevere that you have in the A24 film. You have young, vibrant Arthur. You have beautiful, fair Guinevere.
>> Speaker A:And, yeah, I agree with you. One of, the things that I think is a fundamental flaw in the film is how fucking dark it is, which I think is also partly just a byproduct of what's fashionable right now. Yeah, it's like, movies are just too goddamn dark.
>> Speaker B:It's the A24 vacation of, the thing. I mean, I just. I. I can't stand a 24. This is my, like, hot take.
>> Speaker A:I understand that they did not have electric light, but also they could probably see each other physically when they were indoors. Like, it's not like torches are pretty bright, man.
>> Speaker B:Well, I mean, even beyond that, like, there's a moment early in the film when they're in this space that, like, on the one hand, it appears Arthur's hall, but, like, on the other hand, it has a cruciform structure that is, like, very clearly cathedral architecture, but there's, like, no light. And it's like you've got this, like, high Gothic architecture, except you're missing one of the biggest things that characterized high Gothic architecture, which is just a ton of light. Like, that's how you create the, like, aura of the holy in, like, churches. You fill them with light. But A24 loves their darkness. That's why I was so surprised. The, like, only a 24 film I've ever enjoyed, which is everything everywhere all at once. I'm like, how is this a 24? This is actually good. Unlike, all the other garbage they produce.
>> Speaker A:Thank you for alienating everyone.
>> Speaker B:It's fine. I'm not the podcast host now. You can get it's rage made. It's engagement. People would be like, I hate that bitch you have on the podcast. Stop bringing her on.
>> Speaker A:I will say to jump ahead a little bit. I did like how bright and luxurious the house that he stays in later was. I was like, yeah, here we go. This is what this is meant to look like, more or less like, warm, rich, bright colors, big windows.
>> Speaker B:Weirdly rococo we were talking about, though. Like, that's One of the places where the temporality is just like, why, why is this house now like the 1820s?
>> Speaker A:Yes, we do jump. And. And also like photography for some reason.
>> Speaker B:Yeah. I have no. Like there are things in this film that I'm like, I think I can kind of see what they're going for. Maybe it's this. I don't know what they were going for with the photograph. Like, I think, I think some dorky ass little screenwriter was like, hey, did you know there's this thing called a camera obscura? Like can we, can we shoehorn that into this film? But yeah, so we have, we have this happy Christmas feast and we have Arthur kind of like young, listless energy pacing around. And the poem is like Arthur, you know, in his youth had this sort of thing where he just, he could not settle down and enjoy his meat, enjoy his feast until he had heard some rousing tale of adventure or seen some wonder, or witnessed a good fight. Like he needs to get his blood boiling before he can sit down and like enjoy the feast. And basically in response to this, the door bursts open. And in rides the green knight. And this is another thing that I hate about the film because in the film he is this like one. He's so dark. Like he is not in any way overall anchor grain. Like he. We're talking wizard of Oz. Like this motherf cker is green.
>> Speaker A:Yeah, they, in the film, they chose to make him the green man. Which I actually think is kind of an interesting riff on the sort of overall mythology, especially where like the Celtic mythology and early Christian stuff is kind of braiding together. And the green man, I think was an interesting, an interesting sort of character signifier to pull into the film. But yes, no, in the, in the poem he is just green. The is green, but he's also importantly hot.
>> Speaker B:Yes. This is the, this is why I have a problem with it. Like there are so many things in the film I could criticize. Like the way in which like they've made him the green man, but they've also made him less green. The way they made it all dark. The way in which, like there's the weird thing with the like letter that makes Guinevere like read the challenge instead of them just talking. But the biggest thing that they have lost is that the green knight is hot. In the poem, he is so hot. I mean, we. I read this, I read this little passage earlier to show what like the meter sounds like. There's this line for. Of his back and his breast all where his body stand. Both his womb and his wasp were worthily small. They're saying big shoulder snatched waist. Like this guy is like built like a in linebacker but he's got an itty bitty waist. Like he is muscular in the right places, he's thin in the right places. His hair is curly, his beard is nice. Like this is a hot hot man in gorgeous clothes with a gorgeous horse who just also happens to be like 10ft tall and green and his horse is green and all of his clothes are green. He is on the one hand the like pinnacle of the chivalric ideal and on the other hand he is this thing that is like monstrous and other.
>> Speaker A:Now in fairness to the filmmakers, do you think anyone would have taken a bright green hottie at all seriously if they had thrown him on the screen? Because I think that that would have been a bridge too far for a 2023 or whatever irony poisoned audience.
>> Speaker B:I don't know. there was in the like second to last season of Star Discovery there was like the hot like Orion girl that everyone was thirsting over. And I didn't think anyone could ever take Orion seriously again. So like I think we could have done it if we did it exactly right.
>> Speaker A:I would like to propose that the audience of Star Trek and the audience of theatrical release A24 films are not the same.
>> Speaker B:I mean as a like hardcore Trekkie who hates a 24. I don't know that I can actually disagree with that statement.
>> Speaker A:Like I'm not asking if you personally my m. Beautiful Love would have taken an accurate green man seriously. I am asking if you think the movie going public would have not.
>> Speaker B:Not the people going to CA24 films now. But it would have been funny. Honestly though, I'm like, I just, I feel like there are still better things they could have done like put a Muppet in there like that still would have like that is not, that is.
>> Speaker A:Not the movie they were making.
>> Speaker B:So the Green Knight rides in Arthur like greets him quite warmly. It's this very like old school medieval hospitality. He's like come in, sit at my table, eat my food. Like you're green. And that's and weird. But I am like a man of manners if nothing else. Come, sit, eat. And the Green Knight's like no, no, no. I've just come here to propose a game. I've heard this is Arthur's court and it's full of the bravest man and who will engage in a game with me. I have this big Ass green axe. It's. And it's like brought up that like, the only sort of martial thing he has with him is this axe. He's not an armor. He's very clear to point out, like, if I came to fight, I have mail and plate and a hauberk and all of these like things at home. But, you know, I have not come to fight, I have my axe. And he like rides in holding a holly branch as like a mark of peace. So this is something that like one is serving kind of the same function as like a olive branch. But it's also an image that has like, distinctly Christian and like Christological imagery to it. holly in the Middle Ages is like associated with the thorn of crown, the crown of thorns. Oh my God.
>> Speaker A:Okay.
>> Speaker B:Because it's like sharp and pointy, but then it has these bright red berries that are like the blood of Christ. So he's like, I'm not here to fight, I'm just here to propose a game. Anyone? Whoever wants to take up the challenge, take my ax, it's yours. This well wrought, beautiful, like massive acts. It's described in terms that are like very like fantasy acts. Not like the actually much more like practical, like Danish axes that would have been actually used in combat in the time. Strike me a, ah, blow and agree that one year and one day hence you will come find me and let me strike you an equal blow in turn.
>> Speaker A:Mm
>> Speaker B:Everyone's kind of like, no one, no one like, goes right for it. And so he kind of mocks them. He's like, is this not Arthur's court? Surely it's not, because, you know, I've heard of the knights of Camelot, that they're the bravest men and none of you are rising to my challenge. And Arthur leaps up and is like, you motherf cker, I'll do it. And this is where Gowan intervenes and is like, even though I am, the smallest and the least and the worst of the like, roundtable. And this is very like, this is a very deliberate, like, form of artificial humility. Like, anyone reading this poem in the time is going to know Gawain as like one of the greatest knights of the Round Table. Let me have the honor of taking this contest in your place. And so the, the, he tells the Green knight, he's like, you know, just tell me like, you know, where you live and where to find you and we'll get going. And the Green Knight basically sort of is like, strike your blow first. And then if I still have life in me to tell you. I'll tell you where to come find me. And if not, then there's no wager left to fulfill. So Gatwyn does what any reasonable person would do in a, Christmas game, and he cuts this guy's head off, like, just full on, beheads him and that.
>> Speaker A:And that's the part, like, we touched on earlier, that is debatably, like, either he's overstepping or he's doing the clever thing. Unclear, but definitely open for interpretation on that front.
>> Speaker B:Yeah, My thought is. And, I think there's a few markers in the text of this is that he's trying to do the clever thing. And I think. I think the Green Knight is even suggesting this in the way in which he's like, well, I'll tell you where to come finish the wager if I have life left in me to do it. Like, maybe you'll kill me and you won't have to come find me.
>> Speaker A:But it's also, like, it is not good manners to murder somebody that you invited to eat dinner with you, like, 10 minutes ago.
>> Speaker B:It is not, though. Again, this is where, like, I'm not, like, particularly an expert on medieval hospitality, but I think arguably the fact that the Green Knight turns down a place at Arthur's table means that he's not necessarily protected by the laws of hospitality. But again, don't quote me on that.
>> Speaker A:Fair. Anyway, so the head is just gone.
>> Speaker B:Yes. And he does what every reasonable beheaded person would do. He picks his head up and his head speaks to Gawain and is like, all right, one year and a day from now, come find me at the Green Chapel, my home. And he walks out. So we then have. There's a couple, like, sort of periods of interlude in the poem, and we go into one where, like, the Christmas season finishes up and, like, everyone just kind of, like, laughs off this occasion. Like, they finish feasting, they finish drinking, and, like, nothing for a time is really made of this challenge. The, like, wheel of the year passes. One of the few things I do like about the film is the little, like, puppet show with the, like, wheel of the seasons that, like, spins as time is passing until they get to, I want to say Michaelmas, which is, Michaelmas is in September, and it's like the sort of traditional start of fall. It's actually. It's a couple days after. Sorry, the traditional start of winter. It's a couple days after the autumnal,
>> Speaker A:Equinox.
>> Speaker B:Equinox, yeah. After, I think, yeah. Because I want to say it's September 26th, so they get to Michaelmas, and this is where like, everyone in Camelot starts to kind of be like, okay, I guess this is now actually happening.
>> Speaker A:Oh, I guess we have to deal with this whole consequences for our actions thing.
>> Speaker B:Right. So Gowan makes his preparations. There's this, like, scene of him being put into his armor. You know, his clothes, are described very finely, very richly. he has this shield. They get part of it right in the film, sort of in that, like, on the inside of the shield there's an image of the Virgin Mary. So the. He can take courage whenever he looks at it. Though we were laughing at the way in which, like, I think because Western European religious art, like, isn't as, like, familiar to people, at least Western European, like medieval religious art. It's this weird, like, Eastern Orthodox icon that is on the inside of the shield. Like, so now we've got, like, temporality and like, locality weirdly conflated. The thing I don't think they have in the film is that on the front it's described as having a pentangle. It's actually the first recorded use of the word pentangle in English. And this is described as being the Shield of Solomon, which is like the like, sometimes five pointed, sometimes six pointed star. The Star of David is ultimately derived from the Seal of Solomon. And it's a, sort of like protective talismanic device. It's tied in the poem into like, the five virtues of knighthood and the five wounds of Christ and all things.
>> Speaker A:They have Arthur wearing it as like, a necklace, basically. Like, they have Arthur wearing one around his neck, but not on Gawain's shield.
>> Speaker B:Okay, I missed that. this is another thing we were talking about is like. So one of my biggest problems with the Green Knight as a film is that, like, it is, I think at the end of the day, like we were talking about, it's like simultaneously very heavy handed at times, but then also at times incoherent in what its actual, like, purpose is. But then there are also these ways in which, like, there are phenomenal aspects of attention to detail at times. Like, one of the, like, songs a friend was pointing out is in the, like, fake language that Hildegard of, Bingham, created. There's the whole thing where, like, the girlfriend who has made up for the movie is seen, like, wearing like, a belt of bells and she gives a bell to Gawain. And the thing is, this is probably marking her out as being a Prostitute, Yes. Who in the Middle Ages had to wear various things that, like, readily marked them out. Bells were actually not a super common one outside of Italy, but, like, I think are, like, visually recognizable for the film. There's Guinevere, you know, who's depicted as, like, very barren in the film. Her, like, breast is covered in pilgrimage badges.
>> Speaker A:Yeah, I thought that was cool.
>> Speaker B:Yeah. And, like, you know, my friend Gillian pointing out that it's like, these are probably pilgrimages to the, like, shrines of saints who are associated with fertility.
>> Speaker A:Right.
>> Speaker B:I don't know that for sure. Like, I'd have to do more research. But I also know Gillian tends to be right on these things.
>> Speaker A:I think Gillian has come up before. We trust in Gillian in this house.
>> Speaker B:We do, yeah. So there's at times a lot of attention to detail and then at times things that are just weird. Like why. Why is it like an Eastern European icon on the shield, he rides out, with much, like, crying and wringing of hands, and pretty much clearly thinks they're never going to see Gawain again. Like, he is going off to die, which is, I think, a reasonable assumption to make given that he is going off to get an equal blow for being beheaded.
>> Speaker A:Goodbye forever, loser.
>> Speaker B:Yeah. Oh, he also. He, You know, his horse is named. That's one of my, like, favorite things, is that, like, his horse is actually named several times in the poem. He rides off on Gringolet, who is big, strong horse. And then there's this thing. This is actually one of the more interesting things in the film is something that in the poem is actually, like, alighted over and like, passes in this moment of occupatio. For those who haven't listened to some of the Canterbury Tales episodes, occupatio is that, like, medieval poetic device where you make reference to something that you're not talking about while saying that you're not talking about it. So they're very like. It's like a couple lines of his voyage where they're basically like, sometimes he fought bandits and sometimes he fought dragons. And his adventures are too much to tell of here.
>> Speaker A:Right.
>> Speaker B:The movie kind of, The movie kind of explodes this more where there's like this scene on, like, a battlefield where he interacts with Barry Keegan back, you know, when Barry Keegan was like the weird guy in a 24 films instead of the hot guy before, like Sabrina Carpenter, whoever managed to somehow convince America that Barry Keegan was hot. There's this, like, in the poem, they reference him riding by Holy Head, which is a town in the Middle Ages. Holyhead, or Holy well in the modern day of the town is Holy well, which is a site associated with the Welsh saint Gwynfry or Winifred.
>> Speaker A:Yeah.
>> Speaker B:And this is a character that Winifred doesn't appear in the, poem. There's just the, like, passing reference to him riding past Holyhead. But then the movie makes this whole exchange with, like, the spirit of Winifred. But, yeah, so the poem really just, like, skips past all his adventures in.
>> Speaker A:A way that, like, he gets no exploits.
>> Speaker B:Yeah. And I think the funny thing is that the movie uses this, like, extended, like, image, this extended, like, sequence of his adventures to, like, drill in this, like, line of the, like, film version of Gawain being, like, on a deep level, a coward. Like, he shrinks from almost everything. Whereas, like, in the poem, it's implied that he was this, like, doughty adventurer throughout all of this. But in this way that is, I think, compared to what will happen in the next fit of the poem, meaningless. He's like a dowdy adventurer in this very commonplace, chivalric way of, like. Yeah, he fought dragons and all of this. There's no real peril to it.
>> Speaker A:Yeah. I think the movie. What I will say in defense of the film is that it gives a m. More realistic and I think slightly more nuanced character building. Like, this is character development. He is learning as he goes. He. He is slung between his aspirations and the actual sort of metal of his character because he's never had to do anything hard. He's never had to deny any. He's never had to deny himself anything and he's never had to do anything difficult. He's been having sex with his girlfriend and getting wasted and he's King Arthur's nephew, which has gotten him a certain amount of access to privilege. But, like, you know, he's just a young man who has never had to do anything of consequence. And he's figuring out that that's hard, actually.
>> Speaker B:Yeah. And as he goes, I tend to agree that. I think it is one of the things that the film does a little better because, You know, it's funny, when I think of that, like, opening scene in Camelot, I think of, you know, an author who I have been spending an unfortunate amount of time with, his writing because I'm working on a dissertation chapter. I think of, in the middle of Game of Thrones, in the third book, I want to say, A Feast for Crows. Maybe it's the second maybe it's a clash of kings. There's this bit when Catelyn, Stark goes to Renly Baratheon's his like war camp and they're having a tourney and they're drinking and they're praising each other and jerking each other off and telling each other how great they are. And Catelyn Stark refers to them as Knights of Summer. And it's basically like you are inexperienced boys playing a game of a thing that you've never had to experience. You think war is a game and war is going to chew you the up and spit you out. And I think there is a little bit of an element of that in that like Camelot feast where it's like a bunch of dowdy soldiers supposedly. But are they like, they're just sitting around drinking and laughing and telling each other stories of bravery?
>> Speaker A:Right.
>> Speaker B:And I think this is like, this gets into some stuff. I've done scholarship on like Gowen and the Squire's Tale in the Canterbury Tales and like maybe a little bit of a critique that's happening in the 14th century of knighthood, like turning into a thing that is increasingly vapid and like divorced from its martial roots. But that's I think again, getting a little ahead of ourselves. So we kind of just skip over the voyage and we get to Gawain, arriving at a castle. And this castle, it's described in very grand terms. It's described in terms that does even in the text make you wonder if it is grander than Camelot. And I think that's maybe some of what the movie is getting at with this way in which it's like more modern, more rococo.
>> Speaker A:Yeah. And full of books in the movie, not in the poem. I don't think they talk much about books in the poem.
>> Speaker B:I don't think they do at all. No. So it's like it's this massive castle. Everything about it. Much like the Green Knight is exaggerated in stature. Like the palisade is huge, the moat is huge, the gates are huge, his.
>> Speaker A:Wife'S tits are huge. Sorry, what?
>> Speaker B:Yeah, we're getting there actually.
>> Speaker A:They were into small breasted women back then, weren't they? Would have been the inverse.
>> Speaker B:I don't know. especially because, I mean, I don't know. As always, the Middle Ages is that thing of like, why do we even talk about this period of like a thousand years as if it's coherent? So I can't like always keep track of like what's in and out in every like part of the Middle Ages.
>> Speaker A:Yeah, that's fair. I saw like a tick tock or something the other day that was a bunch of nerds being like, our friend threw like a Victorian themed Christmas party and we all showed up as different chunks of the Victorian era because, it was a long one.
>> Speaker B:Yeah. And like that's like, that's even. That's so much smaller scale than like the Middle Ages, I want to say. Actually, maybe. No, because I feel like. I feel like the Canterbury Tales, which is again, roughly contemporary, has some fairly risque jokes about like, I think the Miller's daughter in the Reeves tale having like large breasts and whatnot. All right. Yeah, I think at least like to a more popular reader, big, big breasts might have been more popular then. But I'm not positive you heard it here, folks. So, Gawain rides up to the castle, he asks for and is immediately granted the hospitality of the house, which like, contrary to again to the movie where like, it's just Bertilak and his wife and Morgan le Fay in the castle. Or I mean, there's the like old blindfolded woman who we were like, presumably is Morgan le Fay, because that's who the old woman is in the poem. But then at the same time, Gawain's mother, who in the poem is more gauze, is also conflated with Morgan le Fay.
>> Speaker A:Yeah, the movie had two witchy ladies in it instead of just one witchy lady. We were throwing in bonus witchy ladies. Cause why not?
>> Speaker B:Exactly. And the fact that in the movie it's Gawain's mother Morgos that casts the spell that leads to the whole thing would situate her in the place of Morgan le Fay in the poem. But then there is still an old lady.
>> Speaker A:Well, it. One of the things I find really interesting about that swap is it turns it from something that was being done to F with him. Well, and more importantly, to f with King Arthur. It turns from something that makes it a sort of sabotage attempt into something that is done like for his own good, basically. Something that is arranged in order to like, push him into being the adult that all of these people want him to be.
>> Speaker B:Yes. Yeah. And I think that. I think that does a lot to change the character of the film. And that is, I think, where in the same way that I'm like, there's no Arthuriana and Neo Arthuriana, like for all that I don't like the Green Knight film as an adaptation of the poem, I think there is also a way in which, like the Green Knight film, is doing its own thing and has its own stakes and it's making changes in order to tell its own story. And that's fine.
>> Speaker A:Yeah. And that. And that's why people like you and I get together to discuss texts and also film as texts. Because we are nerds.
>> Speaker B:Exactly. Now, of course, my, like, m mean point is that I think the Green Knight as a film does the things that it's doing in its own terms, badly. But that's a different story.
>> Speaker A:I like it, and I am going to stand proudly on liking it. And you cannot stop me.
>> Speaker B:I would never. I would never try to stop someone from liking something bad. One, I like so many bad things. And two, as a woman married to someone that I deeply love who is way out of my league, I have, like, a personal stake in people liking things that are bad.
>> Speaker A:I disagree with you that it's bad. I like plenty of bad things. I don't think it's a bad movie. I think it's actually quite clever and doing some really interesting things. And by God, I wish they would make movies like that more because I am so tired of f. Cking drek.
>> Speaker B:I'm just gonna point out audience. no, no disagreement on my characterization of myself as bad. That's. That. That's 20 years of friendship for you. So, But. But so unlike the film, when he shows up to the castle, initially, it's, like, full of people because it is, by this point, almost Christmas. Again. It's Christmas Eve, so, like, the. The Lord of the castle has all these people there feasting and making merry. And Gowan is invited to join the feast. He's treated as an honored guest. He's given the best of everything. It's. It's very. That, like, have. Have whatever you want. Have a drink, have something to eat. Have my wife.
>> Speaker A:Huge tracts of land.
>> Speaker B:I. There's a. There's another discussion to be had in another episode maybe about the ways in which, like, Monty Python is simultaneously, like, yes, a mockery of medieval literature, but it is also, like, a deeply loving homage to medieval literature that at times medieval literature better than, like, far more serious adaptations do.
>> Speaker A:That's always the way.
>> Speaker B:You find out that, like, half the guys in Monty Python took degrees from Oxford in medieval literature. And you're like, this makes so much sense.
>> Speaker A:Yep, it tracks.
>> Speaker B:So, Gawain stays, I think, for Christmas Eve and for Christmas and, like, feasts with them. And then he tries to take his leave. He tells Bertilak, like, thank you for Hosting me. But like, I. I've gotta go. I have a commitment that I have to honor to be at the Green Chapel, you know, three days or whatever. Hence, I think that there's like a note in the like Broadview thing. I think it's actually, it's not, it's not the day after Christmas, but like, there's, there's a day missing. Like the number of days that he says doesn't make sense based on the day that they say it is, because I think it's St. Stephen's Day, which is the 26th of December. But he says like three days, which is not correct. And he's like, you know, but if you would be so kind as to tell me if you know of or have ever seen a Green Chapel. And Bertilak is like, this is great. Go. You're going to stay here, you're going to hang out with me. I'm going to treat you to all the finery. And in a few days time, I will set you on the road at 9 in the morning and you will make your meeting at the Green Chapel. Because as it turns out, it is only two miles from here. And Gowan is thrilled. He's like, awesome. I get to stay here with all the like, food and nice wine and whatnot and wonderful company. And the lord of the castle, Bertilak is like. To make our passage of time even more enjoyable. I'll tell you what one, I want you to just stay a bed, relax, enjoy yourself, spend time with my wife and the old lady. I'm gonna go out with my men. I'm gonna go out hunting and I'm going to propose a game. And like, games have again shown up several times. They play Christmas games. There's a wonderful scene where they're describing Bertilak with his fine mantle on the tip of a spear, playing what appears to be some sort of jumping game where people are claim it as a prize. It's that one like insurance commercial with the fishing pole with a dollar with like, he almost got it. He's like, we're going to play a game. Everything that I hunt I will give to you. And anything that you should happen to win. Any prize you should obtain while I'm out hunting, you will give to me. And it sets off. This is. At the end of the day, this is my real problem with the film. There's like one little like chaste kiss in like a scene where it makes no sense and it just, it ruins it because this poem is so gay and there's so much kissing that we're about to see. So what happens is over the course of. Of the next three days, we have a series of like, interchanging scenes of Bertilak out hunting and Gawain interacting with Bertilak's wife. So, like, on the first day, the lady of the house, she comes into Gawain's room where, like, he's like, I don't know what to do about this. He like, pretends to sleep for like, way too long and then finally wakes up with very dislike, eh, there's a girl in my room. What do I do? And he spends some time, like, chatting and talking and entertaining Bertilak's wife. And again, like, he is in his room, like, he even like, he's like, please, like, let me rise and dress and then I'll entertain you. And she's like, no, I'm going to tuck you into your bed so that you can't get up and you're going to entertain me here. It's very.
>> Speaker A:I'm going to trap you here.
>> Speaker B:Yeah, it's very like, flirtatious on the face of it. And like, at, one point in this interaction, she's like, you know, I've heard that you are Ser Gawain of such great renown, but surely you can't be, because, you know, no knight as renowned as Gawain would have treated me in such an unchivalrous manner as you have. And he's very like, what the do you mean? And she's like, well, should a knight not kiss a lady? Is that not the chivalrous thing to do? And he's very like, of course I will kiss you if that's what you want. In fact, because I am so obligated to give you what you want, ask no more than a kiss. There's very much this, like, girl, I'll you if you ask. So, like, let's keep it at a kiss. He kisses her at the same time the. You know, the lord is out hunting. There's this like, massive hunting. The. The first day he's hunting deer and it's like a slaughter.
>> Speaker A:Yeah. This is where it turns into Dadlit. Is that like. This whole sequence is interspersed with the longest, most detailed hunting scenes imaginable, where they are describing how they cut every. They are describing how they butcher the game. They are describing whether or not the dogs get pieces of it and it just.
>> Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, there's like the description of, like, mixing like, the blood and offal with bread for the Dogs. It's like Ye Olde Kibble.
>> Speaker A:Yeah. Like, just this whole thing that happens in contemporary dadlit, where mid, plot, they'll be like, hey, do you want to hear in intimate detail about this, like, expensive car? And you're like, not really. And they're like, too bad.
>> Speaker B:Yeah. And so the thing that's interesting, I think, is that there's kind of two things going on. One is that, like, yeah, this is dadlit. Like, this is again, where I'm like, I say the person who wrote Gowan and the Green Knight. But, like, it's definitely a guy, right? Because, like, I mean, I don't know. I guess, like, in the modern day, this is not necessarily perfectly legible. I m. Mean, I'm here. I was, you know, I'm a girl, and I was talking to a friend about getting hunting licenses and going squirrel hunting next month. But, like, sure, in the Middle Ages, this is, like. This is a masculine pastime time. noble women might, like, come along on hunts. They might even occasionally, like, with the advent of, like, crossbows. Elizabeth, I like by, you know what, like, two centuries later, like, Elizabeth, I loved to hunt. But what her loving to hunt. Y'all can't see the air quotes I'm doing? What her loving to hunt looked like was she would sit there in a nice chair with a crossbow, which she had dozens of, as well as three guns, and she would just shoot deer as, like, Crane's huntsmen just, like, drove them in front of her. Her. So we have, like, a deer drive. Like, we have dogs baying, like, driving dozens of deer into the slaughter. And then, yeah, we have this, like, explicit scene of, like, deer being butchered in terms that, like, clearly, whoever wrote this hunts. Yeah, clearly whoever wrote this knows how to butcher a deer. But there's also the, like, subtext where, like, these scenes are kind of making explicit what is flirty and implicit in the scenes with Gowan and Bertilak's wife, which is this hunt scene. It is this thing that is actually very visceral and very, like, carnal.
>> Speaker A:Right?
>> Speaker B:And we see that in the hunt, scenes. And we don't see that in the, like, flirtation between Gowan and Bertilak's wife. Bertilak comes home, he lays all this meat out for Gowan, all the choicest cuts. He's like, all of this is yours. What do you have for me? And Gowan comes up, and he, like. He's like, of course. Here's your recompense. And he kisses Bertilak in terms of like, described as, like, quite passionately, like, with all the vigor he can muster. And he even is, like, be. Is very, like, be glad that I didn't earn more for surely I would give the very dislike. You know, good thing I'm not having to, you know, like, reporting for back shots. Every time we talk about medieval literature, we take this podcast a little bit further away from, A friend of mine was telling me that she just, like, died listening to the bit where we were talking about Pasolini's Canterbury tale showing up on a porn site and the, like, 32nd long bleep. But, yeah, so he, like. And this is. I think this is another thing that's really interesting. There's so, so many, like, thematic things to talk about in this. But, like, there's like, a way in which, like, Gowan is kind of, like, feminized in a way that's, like, maybe even a little, like, misogynistic in its, like, commentary in the way in which, like, Bertilak does all this work for him and all Gowan, who has been, like, laying around at home in bed eating bonbons, does is give him a kiss. So there's a way in which, like, Gowan has been feminized. There's a way in which, like, the whole game provides a context or a pretext within a, like, homosocial order that is meant to, like, keep relationships between men from becoming sexual, in which it's, like, actually created the pretext for it to be sexual.
>> Speaker A:Right.
>> Speaker B:But the big point is that there's so much more gayness going on here than we ever get in the film, and that's a crime.
>> Speaker A:It is a bummer. I feel like they did not have the time. It would have. It would have veered things off in another direction entirely, at least from the perception of people watching it. They. They got right up to the edge. I also. Okay, you're gonna make so much fun of me for this. This. I had apparently hallucinated a whole scene in that movie that I was, like, waiting for the whole time. I watched it again recently, but I could have sworn to God that there actually was a scene where Dev Patel gave the host a hand job.
>> Speaker B:Oh, no, it's the. Yeah. no, I think you definitely hallucinated that.
>> Speaker A:I clearly did, but I was so sure it was in the film. I was so sure that there was, like, a third beat where after. After the wife gave him a hand job, he, like, awkwardly, gives the host a hand job. And now I'm trying to figure out where the hell I got this from.
>> Speaker B:I think you read that on AO3.
>> Speaker A:Grace, I don't read fanfiction. I have it so vividly in my head and now I'm like, what awkward medieval ish hand job scene Am m I transposing? And from what movie?
>> Speaker B:Yeah, I don't know. I mean, obviously I have seen a lot of like medieval adaptations and I cannot think of a single hand job scene.
>> Speaker A:I don't know where this came from. Yeah. So I'm just out here inventing handjob scenes apparently. No idea where that came from.
>> Speaker B:Yeah, no, that is, not in the movie. Maybe it was the version you were watching on the same website that I found, the pad siny Canterbury Tales song.
>> Speaker A:There we go. Hello everyone. Toni and I were having such a great time that we completely missed our cutoff for episode two. And so we missed the chance to have our usual wrap up chat. There will be more on the Green Knight chivalric romance and its impact on our current cultural climate next week. In the meantime, thank you to Toni for joining me again. She is always a delight to have on the show. And thank all of you for being with us here in the new year. And as always, if you can this week, this month, this pay period, consider supporting a living author because they could really use the love. Bye. Didn't read. It was created, written, researched and recorded by me, Grace Todd. Maddie Wood is our co producer and social media maven. Editing by Tali, a true podcasting professional. And Grace Todd, our theme song is books 2.0. Written, performed and recorded by William Albritton. Special thanks to Black Iris Social Club in Richmond, Virginia. Reach out to us with questions, concerns or academic scrutiny at. didn't readititpodmail.com ra ra.