When I was in college during medieval times, about 1982, Dr. Laura Crouch required my English literature class to read a poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was the most wonderful story I had ever encountered. I loved its brave and courteous hero, and I was fascinated by the otherworldly scene at the Green Chapel. I loved the poem so much that I wrote a long and very complicated research paper on it, and like many of those who write about literature, I managed to footnote away all the poem's charm and to make Sir Gawain and the Green Knight seem as dull and pretentious as I was.
Well, I did no irreparable damage. My paper is long forgotten, but the poem is still around. All the same, some of the things I learned while researching that paper are still interesting to me and may be to others. So, at the risk of being boring twice on the same subject (an unforgivable sin), here is some background to the original work on which this book is based.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written by an anonymous poet in the fourteenth century, at about the same time that the great English poet Geoffrey Chaucer was writing The Canterbury Tales. The Gawain poet, however, wrote in a completely different dialect of English than Chaucer.
Although Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the oldest known Arthurian works, the story of the tit-for-tat beheading game is older still. Similar stories are told of other heroes. For instance, an old Irish story called Bricriu's Feast relates the tale of an Irish hero, Cucholinn (or Cuchulainn, or Cuchulain), who faced a test like Gawain's. Evidently, the Gawain poet adapted an old story to fit a new hero.
That's how things go with heroes, it seems, because a hundred years after Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written, Gawain was no longer considered the greatest knight of all. King Arthur's tales were being told by French poets, and in their stories the greatest knight in the English court was an imported French chap named Lancelot du Lac. Gawain was still around in the French stories, but he was portrayed as a rude and blustering fellow with few morals and even fewer manners.
This is all nonsense, of course. To those of us who have met the courageous, courteous, and humble hero of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain will always be the perfect knight. Still, when I retold the story of Gawain's greatest quest, I purposely set it during a transitional time, when Lancelot's star was on the rise. By writing about different eras of Arthurian legend, I was able to adopt details and characters from other Arthurian stories. For example, I took the battle with the Emperor of Rome from Le Morte D'Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory, and I've borrowed some of my minor characters from Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach. And some of the people and events of this book are my own inventions—most notably the characters of my hero and heroine, Terence and Eileen.
After all, one can't have too many heroes.