Great post over on the wonderful Elegant Variation blog, offering a compare and contrast of various versions of the Arthur legend, which got me to thinking which version of the story is my favourite.
There was a period during my childhood when the characters of Greek mythology and knights of Camelot vied for my affections. The first were delivered primarily via the peerless Usborne Book of Greek Myths and Legends, over which I'd pore minutely (paying particular attention, for reasons perhaps best left unexplored, over the page devoted to the escapades of "wicked women"). I was introduced to the second at a slightly younger age by Ladybird's King Arthur series, my favourite of which, Mysteries of Merlin, opened with the line "In the hall of his palace old King Uther Pendragon of Britain lay dying", which exerted a powerful grip over my childish mind: on a mawkish day I could squeeze out a tear or two over it.
Once I grew out of the Usborne book, however, I pretty much gave up on Greek mythology – entirely my parents' fault, as they failed to furnish me with a second round of books on the subject. When it came to King Arthur, though, the books just kept on coming, and the flame of obsession, consequently, burned bright. From the Ladybird versions I moved on to Rosemary Sutcliff's King Arthur trilogy, TH White's glorious The Once and Future King and, more tangentially, The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper. At university, I got back to the source material with Malory, and indulged myself with Tennyson. I have been known to kick back on a Saturday afternoon with a cup of tea and episode of Merlin.
But of all the versions I've read – and by God, there's been a few – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is still the one I love best. Again, I first encountered it at university, in the midst of a module on medieval literature: it swam up from a sea of sticky Piers Plowman piety and Chaucerian slapstick and grabbed me by the throat. The Gawain poet's rendering of the court of Camelot as a coop of self-satisfied layabouts, presided over by an arrogant, capricious King, the "somquat childgered" Arthur, offers a delicious shattering of illusions; Gawain's journey through the monster-haunted forest is chillingly evocative; and the seemingly light interlude at Castle Hautdesert sets up what is surely one of neatest bait-and-switch plotlines in history. I come back to it once a year or so, and every time it seems to me to be richer than the last. Who's with me?
