As Valentine’s Day comes around, spare a passing thought for that ubiquitous red heart that has come to symbolize the event. Historically speaking, there is a lot more than is at the surface for that emblem of love.
In Arthurian legend and romance, Queen Guinevere was famous as the wife of King Arthur and the lover of her husband’s best knight, Sir Lancelot du Lac.
Sending mean cards? Eating mashed earthworms? Using jack o’lanterns to light medieval love banquets? They’re all surprising yet vaguely sinister ways to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
Wife selling is often claimed to be an ancient practice, carried out by brutish men to free themselves of unwanted wives, but the truth is far more varied and fascinating.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is a fourteenth century poetic masterpiece. No mere Arthurian romance, it is a work of huge religious, spiritual and mystical power. In subjecting its hero to the hardest of temptations, it reveals the hollowness of the chivalric ideal, the weakness of men and the loneliness of the human condition.
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