Geek fun with The Green Knight

Putting out a big "thank you" to Cameron, who came down from Toronto for a visit and let me rope him into working on the first section of my Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight.

One of the real challenges of Sir Gawaine, for me, was getting the meter somewhere close to right. I can't scan other people's meter well, and I'm pretty much hopeless at scanning mine. So naturally I attempted an 800-line poem in tetrameter. (Well, hey, it's how you learn.)

Influenced by the original Sir Gawaine, and still under the spell of Heaney's Beowulf, I had originally intended an Anglo-Saxon (accentual) approach to meter, where I counted stresses, not syllables. I wanted lines one and three to end with a soft beat, usually a fall or broken fall, and lines two and four to end with a strong beat, usually a rise or a clashing.
The idea was to approximate the sound of half-lines. But I must be too modern, 'cause the whole thing came out roughly iambic despite my pretty Old English ideas.

And since it was roughly iambic, it started to sound wrong where it wasn't iambic. But now I'm in a jamb, because, as mentioned, I can't scan. Cameron can. So we had an afternoon of taking the stresses off articles and the extra beats out of lines, and the silly "ands" and "thens" off the beginnings of lines. Oh, Cameron, you're wasted on prose.

And James -- bless him -- killed all my darling dull bits, all those sleeping bears.

Between the two of them, section one now reads as a great forward rush, and I feel much better. Before we worked on it, I was feeling like a complete fraud, sure that once the interested publisher saw the whole manuscript, they would expose me to the world. Okay, I still feel like that. But not as much.

Cameron and James also jollied me into perfecting some of my slant rhymes, mostly by making me laugh at their ideas for good perfect rhymes to use instead. Take this one, which corrects the slant rhyme "seat/wait"

But as the great knight rose and readied
Gawaine lept from his low seat
Staggered on the slippery rushes
Threw out a hand and shouted: wheat!

The three of us had a great day, having the sort of fun only geeky reader/writer/theatre types get to have. Oh, popular kids, you don't know what you're missing. (Though it would have been nice to have a place to sit on the bus.)

But as the great knight rose and readied
Gawaine lept from his low seat
Staggered on the slippery rushes
Threw out a hand and shouted: sweet!

I've never liked that Lancelot
He thinks he's so high and proud
I hope he meets a grisly fate
... Wait, did I say that out loud?