A VeRy BrItIsH
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Simon Armitage
Originally written around 1400 and translated dozens of times, Green Night is a medieval poem set in Arthurian Britain at Christmastime. Armitage is a modern British poet who published a recent translation of it in 2008. The Knights of the Round Table are celebrating their holiday meal when a giant green figure on a green horse enters the hall and challenges one of the men to strike him with an axe, then suffer the same blow in return a year-and-a-day later. Arthur’s nephew, Gawain, takes up the challenge and from there a tale of survival, chivalry and honour unfolds. Will the blows be fatal, and which one of them will dare to survive?
ChRiStMaS In BoOkS
A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas
A prose work by the Welsh poet, A Child’s Christmas in Wales began as a series of recorded stories for the BBC and was published as a written story only in 1950 when Thomas sold it to the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar. It recounts his memories of childhood Christmases in his native Swansea and is full of Thomas’s signature poetic rhythms and emotive nostalgia for everything connected with the holiday, even the snow. Thomas made an audio recording of the story in 1952, which the United States National Recording Registry largely credits with launching the audiobook market in the US.
Apart from the pulp beach novel, no other season in the year has inspired the writing of stories like Christmas has. Some of the most beloved tales in Western literature are set within the misty, short days in which we find ourselves at the end of every year. Here is a stocking full of Britain’s classic Christmas tales, not to miss this season. Whether you fancy mystery or the medieval, your British Christmas will be all the more memorable with a read of one of these quintessential tales.
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie
What is Christmas without a bit of Hercule Poirot intrigue? The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding is part of a short story collection published in the UK in 1960. In it, Poirot retreats with a family to the country estate of Kings Lacey to experience a traditional British Christmas. Little does he know that his life will be threatened, he will attempt to solve a murder that may never have happened, and will have to recover the lost jewel of a desperate prince on the eve of the prince’s wedding.
16 FOCUS The Magazine November/December 2017
The Twelve Clues of Christmas by Rhys Bowen
This modern read is a delightful follow on from Christie’s story. Celebrated British mystery writer Bowen satirises the typical English country house mystery with a fumbling but lovable main character named Lady Georgiana Rannoch. Rannoch is merely thirty- fifth in line to the throne and subsequently finds herself in need of gainful employment to keep her place in polite society. She takes a job supervising Christmas festivities at a country house in the tiny English village of Tiddleton-under-Lovey, but when villagers turn up dead one by one, Lady Rannoch must shift gears into whodunit mistress.
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