Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A 21st Century Modernization

A 21ST CENTURY MODERNIZATION

by Weston Ochse

Based on the Translation by Jessie L. Weston

Interior Illustrations by Yvonne Navarro

Afterword by Jason S. Ridler, PhD

DARK MOON BOOKS

Los Angeles, California

ALSO BY WESTON OCHSE

CYCLE OF THE AEGIS SERIES

Recalled to Life (Delirium Books, 2007)

The Golden Thread (Delirium Books, 2008)

PREACHER’S DAUGHTER SERIES

A Hole in the World (Solaris, 2021)

SEAL TEAM 666 SERIES

SEAL Team 666 (Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s Press, 2012)

Age of Blood (Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s Press, 2013)

Reign of Evil (Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s Press, 2014)

SKY SERIES

Burning Sky (Solaris, 2018)

Dead Sky (Solaris, 2019)

TASK FORCE OMBRA SERIES

Grunt Life (Solaris, 2014)

Grunt Traitor (Solaris, 2015)

Grunt Hero (Solaris, 2017)

OTHER NOVELS

Scarecrow Gods (Delirium Books, 2005)

Blaze of Glory (Morning Star, 2009)

Empire of Salt (part of the Tomes of the Dead universe) (Abaddon, 2010)

Velvet Dogma (Crossroad Press, 2011)

Blood Ocean (part of the Afterblight Chronicles universe) (Abaddon, 2012)

Babylon Smiles (Crossroad Press, 2013)

Ghost Heart (with Yvonne Navarro) (Dark Regions Press, 2014)

Halfway House (JournalStone, 2014)

Red Palm (part of the Apocalypse Weird universe) (Red Sky, 2015)

Bone Chase (Saga Press/ Simon & Schuster, 2020)

Aliens: Infiltrator (part of the Aliens universe) (Titan Books, 2021)

AVP: Rift War (with Yvonne Navarro) (part of the Alien vs. Predator universe) (Titan Books, 2022)

SHORT FICTION COLLECTIONS

Scary Rednecks and Other Inbred Horrors (with David Whitman) (Prime Books, 2000)

Appalachian Galapagos (with David Whitman) (Medium Rare Books, 2003)

Multiplex Fandango (Dark Regions Press, 2011)

FUBAR: A Collection of War Stories (Cohesion Press, 2015)

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: A 21ST CENTURY MODERNIZATION

Copyright © 2021 by Weston Ochse

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and dialogue are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.

Edited by Eric J. Guignard

Interior layout by Eric J. Guignard

Cover design by Eric J. Guignard

www.ericjguignard.com

Cover art by Moe Balinger: Bercilak: The Green Knight (2016)

www.moebalingerillustration.com

Interior illustrations copyright © 2021 by Yvonne Navarro

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvonne_Navarro

Sir Gawain and the Dark Knight: Why Heroes Must Be Reborn (An Afterword) copyright © 2021 by Jason S. Ridler

www.jasonridler.com

First edition published in July, 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sir Gawain and the green knight: a 21st century modernization /

by Weston Ochse.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940325

ISBN-13: 978-1-949491-44-9 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-949491-42-5 (trade paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-949491-43-2 (e-book)

DARK MOON BOOKS

Los Angeles, California

www.DarkMoonBooks.com

Made in the United States of America

DMB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

(V062721)

I dedicate this book to my father and mother, who both taught English and encouraged me to read anything and everything I wanted, except for the Playboys under my father’s bed, which they never really appreciated for the fiction.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

by Weston Ochse

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: A 21ST CENTURY MODERNIZATION

by Weston Ochse

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: A TRANSLATED VERSION FROM MIDDLE TO MODERN ENGLISH, 1898

by Jessie L. Weston

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: THE ORIGINAL POEM IN MIDDLE ENGLISH VERSE, CA. 1348

SIR GAWAIN AND THE DARK KNIGHT: WHY HEROES MUST BE REBORN (AN AFTERWORD)

by Jason S. Ridler, PhD

A SELECTED READING LIST FOR WORKS OF SIMILAR FICTION

THOUGHTS FROM THE EDITOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PUBLISHER’S REQUEST

ABOUT AUTHOR WESTON OCHSE

ABOUT AUTHOR JESSIE L. WESTON

ABOUT ILLUSTRATOR YVONNE NAVARRO

The romantic chivalric tradition can be very good since it takes fidelity and self-denial, service, courtesy, honor, and courage. Its weakness is, of course that it takes the eye off of women as they are, companions in a shipwreck, not guiding stars.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 43 (abridged)

sent to his son who was fighting in World War II

PREFACE

BY WESTON OCHSE

I THOUGHT ABOUT SEVERAL WAYS to write this preface, mostly wondering how scholarly I should make it, as an entrée to something spectacular and life-changing. Perhaps pontificate on all that I have learned and, like the post-grad in the bar who confronts Matt Damon’s character in the Academy Award-winning movie Good Will Hunting, say something that has been repeated over and over to make myself appear smart. Or should I be flat-out pop culture kaiju and challenge all those that came before me to a rubber glow-in-the-dark sword fight regarding beliefs about the version of my text vs. theirs. I’m talking a Texas Cage Match with The Rock, Rick Flair, Randy Savage, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Heinlein, Josh Homme, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Theodore Roethke, and myself, sitting on metal chairs instead of hitting each other with them and chatting late into the night about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with too much great wine. Because you can skip this and go right onto the text, or you can hang out for a few moments and let me give you some things to look for that might make the read a little more exiting and educational.

I’m not necessarily a scholar, although I strive to be. I have a Master of Fine Arts, or MFA, which is essentially a teaching degree. My goal is to provide information in such a way that you, the reader, can enjoy it on multiple levels. This is why we have three versions of the story included in this edition. One for initial reference, the next for first-translation reference, and lastly my own, for enjoyment and accessibility for those who prefer the prose and elegance of storytelling.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was believed to have been written in 1348 (Ingledew) by an unknown (i.e. yet-to-be identified) poet. The poem is 2,530 lines long and organized into 101 stanzas and chopped into four sections. The original document containing the poem is referred to as MS Cotton Nero A.X and is found in the British Library. It originated from the estate of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571–1631) who was not only a Member of Parliament, but also a well-known bibliophile and collector in his day. Had it not been for his efforts, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf would be lost to time because he held the only copies known to exist (Ingledew). He was much sought after by scholars and opened his library to them. For a complete inventory of what Cotton saved and made available, fellow bibliophiles will find this easy to research.

Much scholarship has been accomplished with regards to the epic poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. From Ackerman to Benson to Burrough to Englehart to Hills, Howard, Malarky, Silverstein, and Tolkien, the themes and motifs of the epic poem have been trammeled and excavated to a point where I don’t feel it necessary to add my own. So much has been accomplished, if every work was to be an edifice, an entire city has been built as an aspiration to the ideas of this unknown Middle English poet who will never know that his or her one-hundred-and-one-stanza poem fueled hundreds if not thousands of PhD theses on the various aspects of the narrative and its symbolism. If I were to attempt the same, my voice would be but a whisper to these scholars because I lack the credentials and acumen to realistically add something new to the canon.

Therefore I approach the poem for two other reasons and those two reasons only.

The first is the name.

Let’s talk about Weston.

Because at the end of the day it’s all about me, right?

Weston Ochse and Jesse Weston.

You can’t make this up.

Jessie L. Weston translated the poem into then-modern prose in 1898. Known for her translation abilities and lauded by luminaries such as T.S. Elliot, she translated many an Arthurian romance, making them accessible to the public, thus retelling stories that had been lost in a language no longer spoken.

Although my modernization of her modernization is a mere one hundred and twenty-three years hence, it stands as a retelling that is as accessible now, as hers was accessible at the height of the Victorian Era. That we share the name Weston seems no irony or mischance.

Weston is an Anglo-Saxon word for west enclosure, so it was commonly used by locals to refer to a town or fencing west of their location. My paterfamilias’s family can be traced to South Wales where many a town has Weston in its name, to include those towns along the very same literary path taken by Sir Gawain as he followed the almost invisible trail to find the Green Chapel and the Green Knight. They then traveled across the Atlantic and finally settled in Wyoming in the shadow of Devil’s Tower, where there’s a county named Weston and a town of the same name.

That Jessie and I share a name is a delight, since Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been a favorite of mine since I attended high school. I don’t know of anyone else in my high school class in Chattanooga, Tennessee who read it for enjoyment, but once I saw that Tolkien had done a translation back in the day, and freshly finished with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion, I was eager to experience more Tolkien. Little did I know that his introduction and scholarship for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight would open in me a doorway I would pass through again and again.

The other reason I wanted to approach this poem is as a creative writing professional and published author. I’ve written my share of horror fiction and dark fantasy, but even seven hundred years removed, the unnamed poet who created this epic poem created a darkness that can hardly be matched. But like all great authors, he or she also gave us a protagonist who, when faced with his hero’s journey, had as rough a time of it as anyone would.

One of the main reasons I’ve loved the poem is because it tells the timeless tale of Zero to Hero. I’ve told versions of this archetypical tale many times in my own fiction, not the least being the eponymous story that appeared in Aliens: Bug Hunt in 2018. The tale of a weak man rising to the challenge and overcoming obstacles is a tale of our society. Although she isn’t anymore, America saw herself as the underdog going against England, France, Spain, Germany, Japan, and Russia, in different parts of history. The idea of the underdog is prevalent in western fiction and promises that no matter where one came, they have the chance to become as powerful and as successful as they desire.

And not that Gawain was a weak man, but he certainly was the least of Knights of the Round Table at the moment of this poem. Yet he rose to the task. All of the other knights blanched at the idea of encountering the Green Knight, their deeds already stories to be told to the young and old alike. Sure, Gawain would become the icon of virtue, but he began as a mere mortal who strived to be able to sit as high at the Round Table as the others, earned by deed and not by kinship.

As any educator, I had choices in how I wanted to present the poem in all its modernity. The original format was in what was called the Bob and Wheel—a rhyming device created by the anonymous author.

"The Bob and Wheel is a short sequence of rhymed lines that concludes the larger unrhymed strophes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and some other Middle English romances. It consists of one short line (the bob) with a single stress, followed by four three-stress lines (the wheel) of which the second and fourth lines rhyme with the bob" (Baldick).

Perhaps William Marshal describes it best, when he demonstrates the Bob and Wheel from Tolkien’s work:

"While each stanza takes a different shape there is a distinct pattern that connects the last four lines of the poem, often called a ‘bob-and-wheel,’ a structural device used by the author (Baldick). The rhyme scheme found in the last lines of the poem actually begin with a single line consisting of one or two words followed by four lines offset by the rest of the stanza, making an ABABA rhyme scheme. Here is an example from the 38th stanza:

When blissful men at board for His birth sing blithe

at heart [A]

what manners high may mean [B]

this knight may now impart. [A]

Who hears him will, I ween, [B]

of love-speech learn some art. [A]

This structure continues at length in the poem, giving it structure where there appears to be none . . . This structured but seemingly random use of literary techniques sets the pace for the poem and the bob spins the wheels of a narrative that works both as poetry and as fiction" (Wheeler).

As intriguing as it seemed to reuse the Bob and Wheel, I felt that if I did, I wouldn’t add anything new to the canon. I’d just be redoing what has been done before by those with far more Arthurian intellectual acumen. As a creative writing professional and professor, I felt that a new approach would be more beneficial and might be a proper and excited juxtaposition to Jessie L. Weston’s translation. My goal was to make the work even more accessible, especially to those who had trepidation about the accessibility of such a work with a consistent rhyming construct in a language more than a hundred and twenty-five years old.

Poetic prejudice notwithstanding, and although I often prefer the original ingenious rhyming sequences, I needed to treat the epic more like prose than poem. I hearken back to some of the great works of the last part of the twentieth century that could be read aloud to both children and adults. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury is such a story that allows us to gather at imagined feet as we hear the tale of Jimmy Knightshade and Billy Holloway, as Mr. Dark and his carnival come to town. Or Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine which illuminated the awe of summer and the strength of wanting as a young Douglas Spalding would do anything for the Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot shoes in the window of the local store. Or even Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always where Harvey Swick encounters the Holiday House and realizes that what he wants is not what he wants, and he has to give much of himself to get there.

All of these, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are timeless tales with timeless ideas that remind us of what it means to be human. Perhaps turning Bradbury and Barker into Bob and Wheel rhyming conventions would make them even more amazing and thrill lovers of them all. If they’d offer me the chance, I’d give it a try.

The original poem has been lost to time, but rewritten versions by those who heard it have become the source documents. As an example of what the Middle English was to Victorian English, I’m providing the original as it stands, with what Jessie L. Weston provided. I’m gleeful in the comparison and find myself trying and failing to speak the Middle English that is my heritage.

Notice the Bob and Wheel at the end, wynne, then wonder, þerinne, then blunder, then finally synne. The Middle English is beautiful, and I’ve provided a link to an audio translation of the above text in the citations for those who care to listen (Weiskott). Likewise, Jessie L. Weston spent considerable time giving the text justice and providing as accurate a translation as she could.

That is not my goal.

As a creative writer, I feel my profession encourages me to push the limits of creativity. My technique in approaching an eight-hundred-year-old epic poem was simple: I put myself into the head of the unnamed author and asked him or her to speak through me using the vernacular of 2021. Did I take liberties? I don’t think so. I believe that what I’ve produced is as authentic as any other versions produced. Without the original poet to disagree, there’s nothing to challenge that opinion. Given the inclusion of so many more words into the English language since the 1400s, one has to wonder if such a renowned poet wouldn’t have used them if the vocabulary had been available.

In some places I used fewer words, and in other places I used more. The subtraction or addition was decided entirely to ensure that the narrative flowed more naturally than the seven-hundred-year-old translations. I often checked Jessie L. Weston’s translations, as well as comments from other scholars, to make sure I understood the meaning of a particular word, many of which don’t have direct descendants in Modern English.

I annotated many of these in my footnotes for anyone who cares to see my reasoning. The work can just as easily be read without referring to them, so if you see a stray number here or there, feel free to ignore it. Additionally, if you are a purist, then I can anticipate you probably not liking my free and unadulterated hand at modernizing this work for twenty-first century readers. You can either run away now, or give me a chance. After all, I might have something to add to the canon.

Now, a note on religious virtue signaling (or, moral viewpoints) in the text.

Much has also been made about the ideas of Christian virtue in the text. Regardless of one’s personal beliefs, knowing ahead of time some of the issues at play makes for a more interesting read, especially when we decide to read the poem less as a simple epic and more of a treatise on the rights and wrongs of the fourteenth century.

One could argue that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight could easily be an American story as well. Much of the plot of the anonymous author is virtue-scolding. From the opening scene of debauchery, pride, and immaturity displayed by Arthur and his retinue, we are shown how the wealthy live without consideration of their own virtues. The quality of their lives are represented by the material goods itemized in great detail, not the religious ideals that form an amorphous cloud around them. Is there any doubt that any other knight might have taken