On Boxing Day 1899, Cecil Sharp was doing the dishes at his mother-in-law’s house when out the window he spotted eight men ‘dressed in white, decorated with ribbons, with pads of small latten-bells strapped to their shins, carrying coloured sticks and white handkerchiefs,’ plus one Fool and a concertina-player. They were performing what he soon learned was the Morris Dance ‘Laudnum Bunches’, and a new chapter in the very young modern history of the great medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight began to be written. The connections between Gawain’s beheading of the Green Knight (vegetation god?) in a Christmas game and the rituals of England’s folk dances generated a remarkable coming together of the popular and the critical imagination. No image better encapsulates this than that of a young Maureen Duffy, fresh out of her English degree at King’s College London, sword-dancing at Cecil Sharp House, and channelling the spirit of Gawain, as she recalled to me decades later. This lecture will trace this lively and overlooked history of the reimagining of Sir Gawain, from the Strand to South Africa, with visits along the way from the likes of the popular band Pentangle and future Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, among other mysterious figures.

Image: Birmingham Museums Trust, licensed under CC0, Quest for the Holy Grail Tapestries - Panel 3 - The Failure of Sir Gawaine.