So family and I went to see the The Green Knight last week; my immediate visceral response was mostly mild puzzlement, though some additional reading (I recommend https://screenrant.com/green-knight-end ... explained/, for one) made things much clearer for me.
As a young'un, I was a big fan of all things Arthurian, but I have since forgotten most of what I ever learned. We had to see the movie though because
in September 2019, DH and I went on a big Genealogy Expedition to the UK. We found the house his dad had lived in as a kid and some other sites. I had made arrangements to hit up a couple of other places, and then I made a connection. I'd inherited a scabby old Xerox of a family member's genealogy which showed that I was descended from a section of the family consistently identified as the Barn Hall branch.
And for like a decade, I scratched my head over this ID. Like, there must be 827 Barn Halls, right? I had no indication of town or even county location. So I just shrugged and thought that would be forever lost to me.
But then, at some point, I discovered that Barn Hall was the house attached to the Wonderful Barn.
I know, even worse, right? But check it out: there's only one Wonderful Barn, which is only and always referred to as just that. It has a Wikipedia page! It was built on the grounds of a Stately Home just outside Dublin in 1745, with its adjacent house (decidedly not stately) added later. The original (colonial) builders of the estate died without children, so things were kind of in limbo while they waited for the heir, a young nephew, to achieve his majority. In the meantime the Barn and adjoining land was sold to my family member, who built Barn Hall.
The Wonderful Barn still stands, but it's somewhat fragile. Its semi-isolated location made it a popular spot for raves and other shenanigans, which didn't improve things any. The local authority responded rather creatively by establishing public garden plots nearby, which both encouraged a sense of attachment among gardeners and meant that there were often people nearby.
I managed to navigate us to the Barn on a beautiful, sunny day. There wasn't any fence or staff or anything, just this crazy structure. But as it happened, we arrived while a small film crew was there to scope it out as a possible location. There weren't any cameras or anything, just some dudes stringing lights in the ground-floor chamber of the three-story Barn. I ran over to someone who looked sort of in charge and blathered hysterically at him; he was very friendly and low-key and didn't tell me to fuck away off. He said he wasn't responsible for the site so as long as I didn't damage anything he wouldn't prevent my peeking. I took a few quick snaps and then he was kind enough to go unlock this magical little trailer they'd dragged along so I could use the miniature toilet (not being an official tourist attraction, the Barn doesn't have any public loos).
He was pretty vague about the movie, and whether the Barn would even be used, but we figured out what title it was. Then the pandemic hit, and we feared that the movie would just... evaporate, that there'd be no promotion crew even remaining.
But we went to see it, and there it was! Both inside and out! The interior is the chamber that Morgan Le Fay is conjuring the Knight in, and the exterior appears for a moment just looking weird and creepy.
The movie's getting rave reviews, and to make it pertinent, Dev Patel, who plays the lead, Sir Gawain, is a Jason Isaacs costar.
