I don’t know what it is about films based on Arthurian mythology that makes them so bloody awful, nor why so many of them star Sean Connery; and yes, I may have just answered my own question.
While First Knight (1995) wins hands down the “what-source-material?!” prize with its ridiculous plot, costume design and infamous “Fight for Camelot!” scene, I expected David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021) to raise the bar, even if just for the affordance of Wikipedia during the writing of the screenplay. Blind casting actor Dev Patel as Sir Gawain ―the poster-boy of Celtic virility― turned out to be the least of my apprehensions as the plot deviated steadily from the source material, adding prostitutes, a haunted house murder mystery, a talking fox and stampeding giants, eventually transforming into an unironic medieval parody of The Last Temptation of Christ. SPOILER ALERT. If you’ve watched this Scorsese film and know the plot of the 14th century poem on Sir Gawain, you can safely guess what 95% of The Green Knight will be about.
Believing that this rendition of the story could not be more disrespectful to its origins, I took the trouble of watching an earlier version from 1984 called The Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Lo and behold, Sean Connery reappears as the glittery Green Knight and takes the bullshit plot to a whole new level: Gawain needs to solve four riddles and rescue his true love from the evil baron’s son, all while being assisted by his faithful squire, called Humphrey. And yet, the low-tech, Monty Python-meets-Mel Brooks nature of this film made it a little more enjoyable than its pretentious contemporary counterpart.
Both cinematic versions of the story start with the wrong foot by presenting Sir Gawain as a tyro in King Arthur’s court, and his quest to confront the Green Knight, as an initiation into the virtues of knighthood. This completely misses the point of the source material, where Gawain is called to the adventure at the peak of his prowess, precisely because he was already the very best of the Knights of the Round Table. The challenge of the Green Knight seeks to disrupt and undermine the very foundations of King Arthur’s holy gathering, not to give the court’s underdog a chance to prove his worth.
This brings me to the relevance of genealogy as a means of understanding myth.
At the core of the willful ignorance both films display around the character of Sir Gawain, lies the misconception that our protagonist is far younger than King Arthur, when they are coeval. Gawain may be Arthur’s nephew, but both belong to the same generation of teenage princes who rebelled against their fathers and fought together to restore political order after the death of King Uther Pendragon. The loyalty that Gawain shows Arthur after pulling the sword from the stone ―preferring to side with him rather than with his own father, King Lot of Orkney― is what makes these two inseparable beyond consanguinity.
To visualize this ―and in preparation for my next and final entry on Sir Gawain―, I’ve put together the genealogy excerpt below, where you can see Arthur, Guinevere and Gawain as part of the same generation. I’ve complemented it by adding the family line of Sir Yvain, Gawain’s cousin, another young knight who sides with Arthur in the succession wars against his father, King Uriens, and who is the protagonist of the 12th century romance, Yvain, the Knight of the Lion. Since this is also a story about one of King Arthur’s nephews needing to defeat an otherworldly color-themed knight (Sir Escaldos the Red), it seemed like a good addition to this family tree.
Luckily, Arthurian family trees are simpler than their Greek mythology counterparts as there are only four clear-cut generations. In order: that of King Uther, his son King Arthur, his wife’s lover, Sir Lancelot and his son Sir Galahad. Unless, of course, we turn to the Lancelot-Grail Vulgate which takes us all the way back to the crucifixion of Christ and Joseph of Arimathea. That’s a more ambitious genealogy that I’ll get to, eventually.
Coming up next. I’ll take a deep dive into the story of Gawain and the Green Knight, and how it relates to current affairs. Stay tuned for the second entry to my Parallel Lives series: Sir Gawain and Lindsey Graham.
And a fun fact. Gawain and Arthur are family, but a dysfunctional one at best. Gawain and his brothers are the sons of King Arthur’s estranged older half-sister, Morgause, whom Arthur sleeps with (presumably, after finding her one day stuck in a washing machine in the castle laundry room). They beget Mordred, who would grow up to kill and be killed by Arthur, marking the downfall of Camelot. Morgause’s husband, King Lot of Orkney, would be killed by King Pellinor, whose son, Sir Lamorak, became Morgause’s lover. Morgause’s own son and Gawain’s brother, Sir Gaheris, would find them in bed together and behead his mother, before ganging up with his brothers to murder Sir Lamorak.