King Arthur's famously courteous nephew Sir Gawain just wants a little respect from the rough, tough, and coarse knights of the Round Table, so when the Green Knight barges in to Christmas celebrations at Camelot, Gawain sees his chance to make a name for himself as a fighter and champion, not just a courteous courtier.

The challenge is simple: Gawain is free to chop off the Green Knight's head if he promises to show up a year later at the Green Chapel to have his own head chopped off in his turn.

It seems like a safe enough proposition, but magic is loose in King Arthur's England, and it will take more than courtesy to get Gawain out of the predicament he puts himself in.

This isn't a translation or retelling of the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and it certainly isn't Dr Seuss. It's a new story--ribald and serious, sober and fun--that reconsiders one of the strangest Medieval romances and creates a tale that's more accessible to modern readers while doing homage to one of the great Arthurian tales.

A lot of people say they "don't know anything about poetry". This book is for them. Just read it like you would any other book, sentence by sentence, line by line. There are little four-line summaries at the end of each chapter, but otherwise it can be just read like any other book. Really!

For people who love poetry: there's more to this simplicity than meets the eye.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Ham has jealousy, honour, sex (well, very nearly), violence, a quest, adventures, wild men, seductive women, wise women, noble and not-so-noble knights, an outlaw and his maid, a band of wandering pilgrims who tell each other stories, a riddle contest that makes fun of J.R.R. Tolkien, and pigs!

What more could you ask for?

Here's how it begins:

After the fall of the city of Troy

a soldier named Brutus, he gathered his boys

and said, "Let us sail to far Albion's shores

where we'll camp out like kings and feast on s'mores

and build a great nation, make peace in our time,

so the poets will sing what we did our prime!"

And so it was done, 'til the legions of Rome

invaded and governed, and then they went home

though soon they were followed by Saxons and Angles

who built a new kingdom from many threads tangled:

Christian and pagan, Roman and Briton,

and Jutes out from Jutland, who never wore mittens.

Then Britain was ruled by good knights who all ate

fine venison, lark's tongues, plate after plate

of dainties and delicate medieval fare

while beautiful ladies beyond compare

kept up the high tenor of proper behaviour

reminding the knights of their Blessed Saviour.

Gathered at Camelot, brilliant and gay

the knights all paid homage to one who could sway

their anger to kindness, their lust to pure love:

King Arthur who ruled from his throne high above

but sat with his knights at the Table quite Round

so all could be equal, as sleepy great hounds

lay at their feet and gnawed on old bones

while the knights jostled and sinned and atoned,

unsparing.

They were errant knights,

who often spent nights erring,

their days in dreadful fights

over quince and herring.