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A modern re-telling of a fourteenth-century poem, which starts with Christmas at King Arthur’s court. Apart from simply telling the tale, I’ll give you some extra background so we can make sense of it, assuming zero knowledge of the setting and characters, never mind the Middle English it’s written in. Who is Gawain, anyway? What does King Arthur have to do with it? Who is the Green Knight, and why does he pose that particular challenge? What is Bertilak’s wife up to? That’s very odd behaviour for a hostess. A lot of this means looking at other versions of the story, and other stories featuring that Knight, plus ideas on what associations the author might have expected his audience to make – no, the Jolly Green Giant wasn’t one of them! I’ll also look at some of the wilder ideas about symbolism, simply because they’re fun.

Anyone who enjoyed my full course about “King Arthur, the history and the myth” will also enjoy this.