Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Shown as part of the BBC's poetry season, I watched a very interesting programme the other week about the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The story begins in Camelot as King Arthur's court is feasting and exchanging gifts. A large Green Knight armed with an axe enters the hall and proposes a game. He asks for someone in the court to strike him once with his axe, on the understanding that the Green Knight will return the blow one year and one day later.

Sir Gawain, the youngest of Arthur's knights and nephew to the king, accepts the challenge. He severs the giant's head in one stroke, expecting him to die. The Green Knight, however, then proceeds to pick up his own head, and having reminded Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year and a day (New Year's Day the next year) rides away.


The reason I make mention of this legend here is because the events related in the poem are framed by Christmas festivities.

If you don't know the story of the Green Knight's infamous challenge yourself, you can find out more about the poem here and here. Alternatively, you could watch this rather unnerving animation that I first saw shown on schools' TV! (It features a Latin version of the Boar's Head Carol, which you can learn more about in What is Myrrh Anyway? published in the States this November as A Christmas Miscellany.)

9 December - The Merry Medieval Month of December

For out Medieval forebears, December was the month of slaughter. Animals that would cost to much to feed throughout the cold winter season would be butchered at the beginning of December, with only some animals left for breeding stock for the next year. With so much fresh meat around, and with the autumn harvest still filling the storehouses, is it any wonder that the Feast of Christmas was exactly that.

A highlight of the feast was the bringing in of the boar's head, and which is where our own traditional Christmas ham originates from (in part). And of course before that the boar had to be caught, and so the Christmas hunt was also a popular part of the Medieval Christmas for those among the upper echelons of society.

Today, 9 December, also happens to be Saint Budock's feast day. Budock (aka Budoc, Budo, Budeux and Beuzec) was supposedly the son of a king of Brittany and of Azenor, the daughter of the ruler of Brest, in France. Azenor is said to have been exiled in a cask, and Budock was born at sea, attended by Saint Brigid. He was raised in a monastery near Waterford, in Ireland, and became first the abbot of the house and then bishop of Dol, in Brittany. Budock ruled there for twenty-six years. However, another tradition claims that Budock was an Irish hermit who settled in Budock, near Falmouth, England.