The thing that modern Arthurian stories are missing is the pure weirdness and fanfiction vibes.
If you don’t have a random giant green man who carries his own head around or a guy who’s soul burns so hot that rain evaporates before it touched him or a lion that tries to commit suicide on a sword don’t even talk to me
That’s why Monty Python and the holy grail is a good adaptation of King Arthur. It’s got a deadly rabbit and a three headed dude in it looking for a shrubbery. Now that’s an Arthurian story.
The fact that 1/2 of Python studied English/history in uni has me convinced that this was very deliberate beyond just being a silly comedy film.
Oooo yeah, they 100% knew what they were doing.
As odd as it sounds, the rabbit is historically correct, showing up in the border art of several medieval texts, killing knights and other creatures. Even the Knights who say Ni is a reference to the English vowel shift.
"We are the keepers of the sacred words ni and peng and neee-wom!"
People have been trying to keep the English language "pure" for centuries. Of course, it never works, so this is a jab at them, just as most of Monty Python's works are.
(I think "peng" is a reference to the thorn symbol [þ], making the word "thing", and how a lot of people misinterpret/mistranslate old English, but that's what I think)
There are other references in the film as well. And of course Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a great adaptation, but I much prefer the Green Knight with Dev Patel.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is my favorite medieval poem (I love it so much that when I found out they were making a movie, I screamed until I was crying lol) and is also accurate to both history and original text.
One of the noticeable hate this movie got, other than the fact a lot of the people who didn't like it didn't read the original poem (which I'm not saying you need to read to enjoy it), was the fact that Dev Patel was "too dark" to play Sir Gawain.
Wrong!
Race back then was still something people where putting a name too, resulting in different communities having different names for each group of people. In the case of being white, you were only white if you were Christian, not by the color of your skin.
So you have medieval texts of Muslims converting to Christianity and literally joining King Arthur's round table being described as white, which is obviously not true. They have brown skin, but because they're now Christian, they technically became white, because again, the modern definition of white and the definition back then were completely different.
Also Gawain kissing that lord was literally in the text. Like that straight up happened dude. Imagine what would have happened if Gawain had caved in completely to the lord's wife lol
