i reread Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen the other day. It’s somewhat similar to Susan Cooper’s wondrous The Dark is Rising books, set in a still fairly rural Britain, drawing effortlessly from our myths and becoming, in turn, another working out of the old stories. It’s instructive to compare these books – and Ursula le Guin’s and Tolkien’s – with the rash of derivative American Fantasy that came out in the 80s. The American stuff – often overtly modelled on Dungeons & Dragons role playing games – is sometimes okay in parts, but usually the authors are non-writers and hacks; there is no mythic force, and no way you’d think they were written by anyone but a modern day American.
Here’s a very interesting article by Garner on a bad modern translation of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain & the Green Knight. It shows how much England has changed in the 4 decades between his schooling & mine; i had immense difficulty understanding the poem as an undergraduate, whereas Garner says:
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…as a native of Cheshire, I was puzzled at so many footnotes. I did not need them, apart from a few technical words that could not be inferred by context; neither did my father when I read extracts to him aloud. He could not have known that I was quoting Middle English. For him, we were doing no more than use our native speech…
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Garner’s own books have arisen from his habitation in Cheshire, and i feel it is his rooting in the traditions, language, and landscape of his home which gives his books their slightly aghlich force. This would be nonsense to an American, i guess, or even now to most city-dwelling Britons. Garner writes:
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Living language changes through time, and six centuries passed between Gawain’s journey and my own. Yet though vocabulary, grammar and syntax may need to be reappraised, there is no reason why any of the original force should be lost. Which means that whoever takes on that job should know the feel of the light of those hills and have the speech of millstone grit on the tongue. It is not a matter of words so much as of tonality and cadence. It can be done.
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Sir Gawain & the Green Knight is one of my favourite poems. It’s a paradoxical work, author unknown, not a Londoner but evidently a Northerner like myself & Garner (hence the now almost incomprehensible vocabulary); it satirizes the genre with a truly Modernist disenchantment, and yet presents a hero of enchanting courtesy, intelligence, humour, and honour. This unsettling mix of a Joycian satire – 500 years early – and a medieval ‘trawth’ (faith, truth, a knight’s good heart) – makes it a singular & truly weird poem. i found myself, writing my essay on it 8 years ago, making mental comparisons to Predator and Wallace Stevens both.
Perhaps it’s appropriate for such a unique poem, that the only work i think comparable is apparently totally different - J.A. Baker’s similarly uncanny The Peregrine, a book (non-fiction) about a man stalking a falcon pair. There is comparable wildness, and a sense of the darker nature of the land pulsing through, an insistent beating, a call.
