In Our Time is a BBC podcast about history. I recently listened to an episode about the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and then, quite by chance, stumbled upon a used Penguin Classics edition at Pulp Fiction Books on Commercial Drive in Vancouver.
I enjoyed drawing the book’s front cover. Penguin Classics explains that “The cover shows a detail from a medieval illuminated manuscript (by kind permission of the Woldemar Klein Verlag, Baden-Baden)”. Medieval drawings of people’s faces are always a little unsettling in their lack of depth and the strange way they appear to teeter at the top of the puppet-like bodies they belong to. The horse in the original image is blue, covered in green cloth. I realized too late that I had forgotten to add a length of fabric – red in the original – emerging from the hat or helmet or head (the poem’s story centres on a decapitation) held by the woman seated on the far right.
Listen to the podcast episode and then discover the many other wonderful things the BBC has to offer its listeners. Maybe you’ll find a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight next time you visit a book shop. If you do, let me know on Instagram @blueberry_fig.