Coming Soon: My New Book

Christmas With the Green Knight

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In this week’s post, I’m going to presume upon your attention by shamelessly plugging my new book, Christmas with Green Night: A Strange Pilgrimage, forthcoming from Trinity Books. Above, you can see a mock-up of the cover design by the very talented Pete Whitten (with a previous iteration of the subtitle).

Each year, my small Anglican church publishes a Christmas book that takes readers on a contemplative, devotional journey through the writings of a great author. Previous installments have highlighted John Donne and Irenaeus. This year, I prevailed upon the team at Trinity Books to indulge my interest in the medieval epic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The result is a book that invites you into a strange world of chivalry, blood, and temptation, ultimately arguing that Sir Gawain is a profoundly moral, profoundly theological, unexpectedly Christmassy book. The poem also features one of my favorite garden plants: the holly. Holly represented Christmas to medieval Christians because of its colors—the red berries stood for the blood of Christ, while the evergreen leaves represented the eternal life it won for us. Though holly still graces many of our tables at Christmas dinner, most of us have forgotten that richer symbolism.

I’ll notify you all when Christmas with the Green Knight is available on Amazon. It makes a great gift, and profits will benefit the Anglican Relief and Development Fund. In the meantime, here is an excerpt from the introduction to whet your appetite:

…A strange situation unfolds at the beginning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the fourteenth-century epic poem of blood and chivalry that concerns us in this book. Near the end of King Arthur’s annual Christmas feast, which lasted the full, twelve-day length of what was once widely called Christmastide, a man whose armor and skin are all a single shade of “glittering green”—and riding a green horse no less—strides into the court of Camelot with a holly sprig in his hand and issues a challenge to the Knights of the Round Table. This challenge, as we will see, though absurdly dangerous and, on the surface, apparently quite simple, is actually an intricate mechanism perfectly calibrated to test the souls of men. The guest has chosen the party, and the party is not prepared for him. 

Surviving only in a single manuscript, Sir Gawain is one of the jewels of Middle English literature, beloved and translated by the likes of  J.R.R. Tolkien, whose version I will be quoting here. Yet, for all its wonders, it’s also odd enough to have befuddled and even repelled generations of readers. What, after all, are we supposed to do with this intricate Arthurian fable that begins with a beheading, ends with a bashful knight in a green baldric, and contains not a single jousting match or sword fight?…

…If I have any argument to make at all about Sir Gawain, it is first that the poem is among the most devotionally useful books ever written in English and, second, that it is a Christmas poem through and through; one that deserves to sit on our shelves beside A Christmas Carol or A Child’s Christmas in Wales, pulled down year after year and read with relish, in the full red-cheeked spirit of the season.

Stay tuned! More to come.

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