![]() ![]() Sir Garwain and the Green Knight is an Arthurian poem which begins with a beautiful Christmas feast. (For a contemporary picture book example of personified seasons see The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg.) This poem may have come from a pop-culture idea of the time: belief in a Green Man who represents the seasonal cycle. There’s a famous medieval poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.Many landscapes remain green over summer (not here in Australia, where we should be using Aboriginal concepts of seasonality) but anyway, green can symbolise summer as well as spring. ![]() The common Latin idea with this family of ‘v’ words is ‘juicy’ or ‘sappy’. Green symbolises spring, hence the adjective ‘vernal’.Since green can mean virtue and naivety, it follows that green can also symbolise virginity, a bullshit concept made up to control people, mainly women. ![]() I bet he tells everyone, “You look a little peaky today.” From The Australian Women’s Weekly, March 19, 1975. This may have meant youthful and vigorous as well as naïve, but thanks to that age-old gender hierarchy, ‘virile’ and ‘manliness’ are overlapping ideas. Young things tend to be moist (sorry) whereas old things tend to be dry (also sorry, blame those Ancient Greeks).
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