The Green Knight

A.O. Scott has written a most positive review of the film The Green Knight, a movie based on a fourteenth-century story of a knight called Sir Gawain who is gulled by a mysterious green knight into playing a Christmastide holiday game with very high stakes, stakes in which one could lose one's head. The original story is written in a dialect of English far more difficult than Chaucer's. Indeed, if one can read, and understand Chaucer, then one can try reading the Green Knight aloud and feel that the text is almost, tantalizingly nearly understandable as an English dialect. Scott says that the film itself is worth two viewings. The story is worth several readings, which I have done, and from which I was inspired enough to publish two articles.