Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Michael Morpurgo's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a retelling of a very old poem for 11 year olds, about a promise that takes a year and a day to fall due.

What happens

It's New Year's Eve at Camelot and the king won't let anybody eat until somebody brings him a story or a marvel. So the doors bang open and in rides the largest man anybody there has ever seen, on a horse to match, and both of them are green. Green face, green hands, green hair down to his shoulders. Only his eyes are red.

He carries a sprig of holly in one hand to show he comes in peace. In the other he's got an axe.

His game is simple enough. One of the knights may take that axe and strike his head clean off, and in a year and a day that same knight must come and find him at the Green Chapel, kneel down and take the blow back.

Gawain takes the axe rather than let his uncle do it. What happens next is not what anybody in that hall is expecting, and it's what sends Gawain riding north a year later with no real idea where he's going, following a flock of geese, sleeping in the open and living on whatever nuts the squirrels have left him.

It reads like being told a story out loud. Morpurgo speaks straight to you, stops to let a whole year turn over in one long breathless paragraph of snowdrops and hayfields and buzzards, then gets on with it.

The middle is the surprise. Gawain is taken in at a castle, fed, given the finest room he has ever slept in, and the lord of the house proposes a cheerful little bargain about swapping whatever each of them comes by that day. Then the lady of the castle walks into Gawain's room while her husband is out hunting. It never goes further than a kiss, but the whole thing turns on how long a perfectly polite man can go on being polite before he has to say no.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

A man's head comes off on the page in the first chapter, the blood is described, the head rolls across the floor towards the ladies at their table, and then it speaks. Later the hunts are told at length, with hounds pulling down stags. It isn't gratuitous and it isn't softened either.

What to read next

If they'd like more of the old stories, The Story of King Arthur is on the shelves as well. Fair warning that it's a much older telling, thick with gold-hilted swords and greyhounds in ruby collars, and it's one to read together rather than hand over.