This creepy dragon on the north nave hides within his own fishy body. If you approach him, he’ll sing prophetic nonsense.

AUTUMN SONG

Clerks wrap swords in newsprint gray;
Voices of Avalon pine and pray.

Spine-cracked quartos brace the wall;
Voices of Avalon flake and fall.

Cursors burn a wanton field;
Voices of Avalon yawn and yield.

Spiders fast in pyx and grail;
Voices of Avalon fade and fail.

Glowing points rouse brush-bent hair;
Voices of Avalon strain and swear.

Roof-beams warp like corset bone;
Voices of Avalon mince and moan.

Unplucked medlar rots to wine;
Voices of Avalon pout and pine.

Marshes drown the back-toll’d bell;
Voices of Avalon swoon and swell.

Mice in moat-muck bloat face-down;
Voices of Avalon fuss and frown.

Grave-masks grin, but none deceive;
Voices of Avalon groan and grieve.

No knights rise, though one did try;
Voices of Avalon drift and die.

Furze-pigs rove in disarray;
Voices of Avalon seethe and say:

“Run, and raise the rust-white gate.”
Voices of Avalon wait.

(For all the entries in this series, hit the “looking up” tab.)

Medieval romances aren’t sacred texts, but translators often treat them with a reverence that overshadows their sheer entertainment value—so thank goodness for Adam Golaski, who’s grappling with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in an effort to make the poem his own. Playing Tom Lehrer to Cotton Nero A.x’s “Clementine,” Golaski began posting pieces of Green to the Open Letters Monthly web site in 2008, and OLM recently published the entire first fitt.

Here’s the opening stanza of Green:

Since ceased th’siege + assault upon Troye,

bones brok’nd brittled t’bronz’nd ashes,

that soldier who trod treason o’er th’plots’v

his enemies was tried f’r treachery tho

agile Ennias, of th’truest on Earth, of high kind,

haunted by shade Dido, was worth th’wonder

wealth’v all th’west isles——

From rich milk’v wolf-mother Romulus

rose Rome’nd’n its captured riches Romulus was

swath’d. W/ arrogance he built his name

upon a hill + took Palatine t’Romulus t’Rome——

Tirius traveled t’Tuscany he built beginnings,

Langaberde’n Lombardy left us houses,

+ far o’er th’French floods Felix Brutus

on many full banks built Bretayn + sits

w/ one

where war’nd wreck’nd wonder

by surprise has went therein,

+ oft both bliss’nd blunder

fool hope shifted t’sin.

And here’s a bit of the Green Knight’s appearance at Camelot:

Arthur’nd Arthur’s court
look’d long’nd in wonder, + wondered what kind’v man be-held them,
wondered what this magical spectacle must mean,
f’r’a knight’nd’is horse to’ve accrued such’a hue that is

green

green as th’grass’nd growing greener it seemed
green glow’n’nd bright’nd brighter than enameled gold.

Translating medieval poems, whether long works or short, is a cage-match between meaning, meter, and form. Tricky passages drive the disheartened translator to other people’s versions, all of which have their own iffy relationships with the original. Preserving the sound of favorite lines clashes with the need to sacrifice fine medieval details—someone else’s favorite lines—for storytelling, while the manuscript context of the poem gets all the respect of a Carolingian hunchback.

That’s why Green is a hoot. Having developed his own idiom, Adam Golaski doesn’t try to spackle over its seams. He makes deliberately insensible decisions, jamming words together for the sake of sound and using typographic gimmicks to bemuse anyone who tries to read this thing aloud. Every conundrum a translator faces becomes, in Green, a source of amusement; some lines he barely translates at all. Golaksi gleefully defenestrates the needs of teachers, scholars, and students, but his Green makes a point that won’t be lost on medievalists: the original poem is really, wonderfully weird.

(Related “Quid Plura?” posts: a defense of the Gawain-based film Sword of the Valiant and a look at Christopher Logue’s rewriting of the Iliad.)

Despite the presence of noble-minded buffoons sitting around tables making futile plans, Washington is not an Arthurian town. Sure, there’s that suburb with corny Arthurian names, but Washington culture may be better suited for mocking fabliaux than the charming fictions of medieval romance.

Still, this city never stops sprouting quasi-medieval surprises. Trudge through the snow three days after a blizzard, and you do so alone; no one’s out taking pictures anymore, not even at the perpetually lovely Bishop’s Garden. Climb over a wall or two, send a few squirrels bounding away from the racket you make, and you’ll stumble onto this, in the driveway of a neighborhood school: a tree which the gardening guild claims was grown from the Glastonbury Thorn.

Of course, the “real” Glastonbury Thorn, dubiously rooted in history, has died several times over the centuries, and there’s reason to believe that my neighbors occasionally replace the local offshoot. Interest in the Washington thorn peaked in the 1950s, which partly explains why I’ve spent many a summer afternoon dozing on the Bishop’s Lawn unaware that this trace of Arthuriana prospered a few yards away, the quiet center of its own Tennysonian scene:

“The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord
Drank at the last sad supper with his own.
This, from the blessed land of Aromat–
After the day of darkness, when the dead
Went wandering o’er Moriah–the good saint
Arimathaean Joseph, journeying brought
To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.
And there awhile it bode; and if a man
Could touch or see it, he was healed at once,
By faith, of all his ills. But then the times
Grew to such evil that the holy cup
Was caught away to Heaven, and disappeared.”

It’s a silly thing, really, but after a week of Washingtonians grousing about winter, I’ll be glad when they’re back to chasing political grails. In a city that imports its legends, we could do worse than remember stories that teasingly promise perpetual spring.

After fifteen weeks of teaching about King Arthur, reading about King Arthur, gabbing about King Arthur, and drumming into my students that King Arthur is omnipresent in modern culture, I shouldn’t find it weird when the creaky old king makes a cameo—but honestly, I hadn’t expected that a wrong turn in suburban Virginia would land me in the Camelot subdivision of Annandale, where the streets are named after Arthurian characters and motifs.

Unlike the occasional cul-de-sac dubbed “King Arthur’s Ct.” by some card of a developer, the Camelot neighborhood along the Beltway appears to have been mapped out around 1966 by someone whose knowledge of Arthurian legend wasn’t entirely facile. Lancelot, Merlin, Guenevere, and Arthur are all here, but characters who rarely surface in popular Arthuriana are also represented by such stately addresses as Balin Court, Bedivere Court, and (my favorite) Pellinore Place. Charmingly, Lancelot Way meets Guenevere Drive while King Arthur Road does not—although King Arthur Road does cross Saxony Drive before turning into something else.

There’s no Mordred Avenue, but the residents of this particular Camelot probably hope their neighborhood leans toward Lerner and Loewe rather than Tennyson. Mortgages and foreclosure are mundane subjects for Arthurian legend, but nowadays “my house hath been my doom” might hit too close to home.

When the sun is shining and the world is all a-green, it takes a tendency toward Tennysonian drear and a special leap of faith to study—and to teach—the Idylls of the King, especially Arthur’s “last weird battle in the West,” which falls on “that day when the great light of heaven / Burn’d at his lowest in the rolling year, / On the waste sand by the waste sea.” You’d think a week of rain would set the tone, but the present gloom is undeniably springlike. A sad tale’s best for winter; even in the stormiest May, students want to see suntans and beach umbrellas, not a despondent Bedivere sobbing on the bleak December seacoast.

Fortunately, Tennyson is a poet for all seasons. Arthur’s climactic rush-and-push against Mordred offers hardy perennial advice about facing a final exam:

Then spake the King: “My house hath been my doom.
But call not thou this traitor of my house
Who hath but dwelt beneath one roof with me.
My house are rather they who sware my vows,
Yea, even while they brake them, own’d me King.
And well for thee, saying in my dark hour,
When all the purport of my throne hath fail’d,
That quick or dead thou holdest me for King.
King am I, whatsoever be their cry;
And one last act of kinghood shalt thou see
Yet, ere I pass.” And uttering this the King
Made at the man…

My students, sharp and studious, will know whether Arthur is exhorting them to end on a note of defiant triumph or advising them to fail with dignity. This week, they’ll free themselves from my Vortigern-like tyranny, and they can remember the Mabinogion and William Morris however they like. I’ll remember them as the first group in ten years to find notes of perseverance and hope amid Guenevere’s severity. Generous and unexpected, that sort of personal response refreshes a tired-out teacher.

In Arthurian legend, when the old order passes, the world doesn’t end; instead, it gives way to something new. If Bedivere can watch the sunrise on the coast after the winter solstice, then melancholy at the end of the semester makes sense even when, as Tennyson puts it, “the world is white with May.” My students can tell you that there’s no more conventional month to revel in medieval romance; maybe there’s nothing inherently un-Arthurian, also, about going to the beach.

Every few years, I’m asked to teach Arthurian literature, a gig that’s led to a curious custom here at “Quid Plura?” headquarters: In the week before we talk about The Mabinogion, I fly the Welsh flag above my television. When the week is over, the flag gets folded and stowed, but not before I’ve caught up on several years of Welsh news, reread the relevant scholarship, and startled myself daily with the sight of a huge red dragon by the bathroom door.

What more can I say? Y Ddraig Goch ddyry gychwyn! Let the red dragon show the way to this dubious assortment of Welsh-themed links.

Amazon user G.R. Grove has kindly compiled a list of novels set in medieval Wales.

Watch the first part of an eight-part BBC documentary about Owain Glendywr.

Need a fix of Welsh? Listen to BBC Cymru, partake of their “Learn Welsh” Web site, or dabble in the language with the Cardiff School of Computer Science.

The Digital Medievalist has a FAQ on learning Middle Welsh.

Last year, locals officials made a wonderful mistake on a Welsh-language road sign.

What’s more Welsh than a male voice choir singing the national anthem? Possibly a male voice choir singing “Myfanwy.” (You’ll find the lyrics here.)

If you ever need accommodations in Snowdonia, pop over to the Plas Gwyn Guest House. The proprietor cooks a fine breakfast and stocks a nice library of maps for the overzealous hiker.

While you’re there, gawk from the highway at Dinas Emrys, where Vortigern supposedly tried to build his tower on the shakiest of foundations.

If you want to follow in Patrick McGoohan’s footsteps and be chased by a giant inflatable white ball creature thingie, Plas Gwyn isn’t far from Portmeirion.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a “Welsh language hip hop 80s style badminton video.”

To my knowledge, there’s only one song about a wheelchair-bound savant who takes a break from starting World War III on his cell phone to wax nostalgic about his Welsh upbringing. Here it is.

Iceland and Camelot rarely collide—which is why I was pleased to find, via Adrian Murdoch, this perplexing headline:

Quest for Holy Grail in Iceland Unsuccessful

As Murdoch points out, this story is “Dan Brown in 200 words”:

In Botticelli’s “Primavera” a series of numeric symbols form the date March 14, 1319, which somehow supports Gianazza’s theory, and in da Vinci’s “Last Supper” Gianazza believes to have found outlines matching the landscape at Kjölur.

Further clues were found in Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” and an ancient Icelandic script states that poet and politician Snorri Sturluson was accompanied by “eighty armored Eastmen” at the Althingi parliament in 1217, who could have been the Knights Templars.

To assuage the disappointment of these ardent questers, I offer an alternate headline:

Quest for Holy Grail in Jeff’s Apartment Unsuccessful

However, a quest through the kitchen here at “Quid Plura?” headquarters did turn up a Serbian Coke bottle, a possibly stolen coffee cup from the University of Iceland, a can of Edward G. Robinson pipe tobacco, a Pac-Man tumbler, and a Newfoundland “Viking Millennium” souvenir mug.

Two Iceland-themed drinking vessels? That’s no coincidence, especially not when “Pac-Man” so closely resembles Old Norse *pakki-maðr, “man carrying a bundle.” And what is a pipe but a small, skinny, smokable grail? I confess, I don’t see how the Coke bottle completes the message, but one anagram of “Serbian” is “i b n arse.” Whatever can it mean?

Miles O’Keeffe, his helmet of hair, and so many wasted thespians—that, in brief, is Sword of the Valiant. I wrote about this cinematic disaster back in February, when I revisited the movie and found it almost endearing: bad, yes, but usefully inscrutable.

But did you know that Sword of the Valiant was actually a remake? Yes: the 1984 travesty was a remake of a 1973 film written and directed by the same deluded people; it even starred some of the same unfortunate actors. For 35 years, the original movie roiled in the purifying fires of cinematic limbo—until something, probably the recent bestselling success of Simon Armitage’s translation of the original poem, prompted an ill-advised DVD reissue.

So the DVD came out two weeks ago, and Fortune did as Fortune does. For one thing, the Amazon product description mistakenly draws on the listing for a Gawain-related documentary. Worse, though, is the fact that—well, I’ll let the fresh list of one-star reviews tell you the rest of it:

I received this DVD from Amazon, the packaging and DVD label say Sir Gawain but the DVD itself is called “Pike Fishing in Winter” and features two guys pike fishing somewhere in England. At first I thought it was a joke, but pike fishing is all you get.

Firstly, having ordered this DVD I discover it isn’t the film advertised, but a 70 minute documentary. Secondly, when I put the documentary in to play, I get ‘Winter Pike Fishing with Mick Brown and Des Taylor’ …

I didn’t open it to play it, so I don’t know about the fishing others have mentioned, but the CD packaging itself indicates it is a documentary…

Not the 1973 Robert Hardy film. Mislabeled and mismarketed prior to release. I haven’t played it yet, so I don’t know if I got the pike fishing too.

In the words of Sir Gawain himself: “Oops.”

On the off chance any of those disappointed reviewers are still eager for a Gawain video fix, they should check out YouTube. They’ll find numerous versions of the romance, including: an award-winning Irish cartoon with a remarkable stained-glass sensibility (part one; part two; part three); a 1994 live-action mangling with a Green Knight right out of the original Star Trek (part one; part two; part three; part four); and—mirabile visu—an adaptation for paper-bag puppets.

All of the above are better than Sword of the Valiant—although mind you, I can’t promise that they’re any more satisfying than “Pike Fishing in Winter.”

O tacky Arthuriana, where would be without thee? Someone needs to tell NBC to return the sword to its stone and back away slowly. Rue this news from Variety:

NBC has acquired a series take on the Camelot legend called “Merlin” that will anchor the net’s winter Sunday sked at 8 p.m. FremantleMedia is distributing the series, which was produced by Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine Group for the BBC. Shine recently acquired the Silverman-founded Reveille production outfit.

Cast of “Merlin” includes Anthony Head (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”). Skein just began production for the BBC, which plans to air it in the fall.

I may not be able to recall all of my Latin paradigms, or the year of the Battle of Lepanto, or what I had for breakfast this morning, but I do remember that American network TV has already limped down this benighted road.

Behold: “Mr. Merlin,” the 1981 series in which the famous wizard runs a garage under a false identity in San Francisco while taking an awkward teenage boy under his wing. (This same concept would be updated and relaunched two decades later under a new title: “To Catch a Predator” with Chris Hansen.)

You can see the pain-inducing promo for “Mr. Merlin” here and the opening credits here; fast-forward to the 8:19 mark.

Every few years, you can count on American television to dabble in this sort of half-hearted, quasi-medieval schlock. While you’re over at YouTube, don’t miss the opening credits for “Wizards and Warriors,” the 1983 series starring Jeff “Celebrity Rehab” Conaway and co-starring his hair, which is feathered like the plume of a mighty falcon. Or, if you can stand it, take another look at “Covington Cross,” the show you adored in 1992 if the Skye in your world was always the color of Ione. Then ponder “Merlin,” and despair…

When the Zemeckis Beowulf movie came out last year, several commentators insisted that a “fresh reading” often gives new life to an ancient work. Blogging medievalists weren’t necessarily hostile to that notion, accustomed as they are to studying stories that change over time, but most didn’t think the reworking of the epic succeeded on its own merits. Recently I wondered: Which film adaptations of medieval stories, if any, have succeeded without being true to their sources?

Expecting the answer to be “none of them,” I revisited what may be the most famously awful “medieval” movie: the 1984 film Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I hadn’t seen this turkey in 20 years, but I expected to find a wonderful piece of evidence against the “fresh reading” argument. In fact, I envisioned a world in which simply declaring “Sword of the Valiant! Sword of the Valiant!” would shut down any response from reckless modernizers who can’t be bothered to contend with a work of medieval literature on its own terms. Instead, what I found in Sword of the Valiant surprised me: a laughably bad movie, to be sure, but a most intriguing mess. The film fails not because its creators gave the story a “fresh read”; it fails because they loved its medieval sources just a bit too much.

If you’ve seen Sword of the Valiant, you know that the first ten minutes are somewhat faithful to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and there’s a five-minute section near the end that reminds you what this movie purported to be. The rest is a disaster. (Bafflingly, Sword of the Valiant is a remake of a film made more than a decade earlier by the same writer and director; that long-lost original is being reissued on DVD next month, I suppose to capitalize on the success of the Armitage translation.) The faces of familiar actors pass in and out of the frame—Trevor Howard, John Rhys-Davies, David Rappaport, even a weary Peter Cushing—but their presence fails to comfort, because Miles O’Keeffe, playing Gawain, is omnipresent.

How much Keeffe is in this movie? Miles O’Keeffe. Star of way too many awful, awful 1980s sword-and-sorcery flicks, O’Keeffe dons a Prince Valiant/Peter Frampton wig and takes up the challenge of the Green Knight, played by Sean Connery, whose pranceworthy outfit, spray-on tan, facial glitter, and exposed fuzzy midriff go a long way toward explaining why his wife from the original poem is nowhere to be seen.

En route to the Green Chapel, Gawain inexplicably wanders out of his original story and into another romance: the Yvain of Chretien de Troyes. Like Yvain, he’s trapped between two gates and then rescued by a maiden named Lunette, who brings him an invisibility ring. Three or four plot twists later, he falls into another lousy movie entirely and gets caught in a war between two barons, Bertilak and Fortinbras. Along the way, Gawain slays Morgan le Fay, whom the Green Knight turns into a talking orange toad. He acquires a squire, befriends a friar, interrogates a dwarf, and often earns praise and love for no apparent reason. We even see our hero chasing a unicorn through the woods with a crossbow because he hopes to kill and eat it. At that point, I don’t know why the filmmakers didn’t just show Miles O’Keeffe enjoying a Bavarian hang-gliding adventure over Neuschwanstein. That’s what he did as Ator in the equally terrible fantasy movie Cave Dwellers, and it couldn’t have made this movie worse.

Actually, I know why Sword of the Valiant never gets quite that random. Sure, the movie chokes on its own haphazard storytelling, but its randomness is of a particular type, resembling the immature but effusive novelty of the Squire’s story in The Canterbury Tales. When a pavilion full of food appears out of nowhere or a rainbow gleams in the sky after Gawain blows a horn by the seashore, the movie still stinks, but these strange moments at least make Sword of the Valiant a unique curiosity, ensuring that the film harks directly back to medieval literature in ways that most bad fantasy movies do not.

Consider the medieval storytelling motifs that don’t need to be in Sword of the Valiant but somehow get thrown in anyway. The unnamed, Arthur-like king declares that none shall partake of the Yule-feast until someone in the court proves he’s worthy of his spurs. The king is mouthing a cliche, of course, but the knight literally earning his spurs is a common folklore motif. (In fact, it pops up in the final reel, so to speak, of Ralph the Collier.) Unlike the hero of the original romance, who needs only to fulfill his promise after a year, our big, stupid O’Keeffe is also charged with solving a murky riddle, not unlike certain knights in Gower, Chaucer, and at least one other medieval Gawain romance. There’s even a stock encounter between our hero and an irascible porter, a scene with roots in countless medieval romances, even though it serves no purpose here. The inclusion of these and similar details suggests an interesting ambition on the part of the filmmakers: that they’re playing not to popular expectations regarding medieval adventure stories, but to the specific expectations of people who’ve actually read medieval literature.

Sword of the Valiant is random, episodic, unsatisfying, and incoherent. But when its actors deliver such interesting lines as “A sword is three feet of tempered steel, with death dancing on every inch and hanging like a dark star on the very point” or “The old year limps to its grave, ashamed,” they try to sound like they mean it, because it’s clear that the filmmakers want them to mean it. The movie bristles with this sort of unfocused ambition, much of it hinting that its creators resisted cinematic competence for the greater glory of half-assed medievalism.

Maybe that’s why I find Sword of the Valiant worthy of affection, if not an ounce of respect. Despite their desperate visual references to Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian and The Empire Strikes Back, the filmmakers aspire to rise above the usual fantasy cliches, even when they so obviously don’t know how. You can almost imagine them puzzling over dim memories of undergraduate lectures, as fascinated by Middle English as the haze of a hangover will allow, trying to rework the material not out of a need to freshen up their sources for modern audiences but because they loved the sheer medieval strangeness of it all. That’s why it’s fascinating, and a little sad, to see their apparent affection for medieval literature mated with sheer pretentiousness to spawn what is, in effect, a terrible work of medieval-lit fan-fiction.

Sword of the Valiant closely approximates a student’s first reading of the strangest medieval romances: you’re confused by an alien mindset, you’re served up a dog’s breakfast of medieval motifs, and you start to suspect that the storyteller has inherited an ancient pile of symbols that he doesn’t fully understand. It took centuries for medieval romances about grail-seekers and courtly love to seem outlandish and weird, and no actual romance is as blatantly strange as this movie, so let’s give Sword of the Valiant some credit: to accomplish that in less than 25 years—heck, to accomplish that just by releasing the film—sure must be some kind of art.