Thus did the great Hilda religious wars begin.
Sweet, but I want Hilda personifying rather than suffering October, merrily blowing leaves off trees and frosting meadows, plump and rosy as a Fall apple.
Put boys' and girls' clubs in high-crime neighborhoods, to give kids from chaotic families somewhere to go besides the streets, and role models other than other street kids. Offer sports, crafts, study space, and tutoring. Provide an orderly, peaceful environment where courtesy and consistency work.
Fuckin' Gawaine. Got a picture of the Virgin Mary painted on the inside of his shield. Knows he can't be trusted unwatched, so he put her eye on him all the time. He was a monster back in the day. When he got wode he'd get bigger.
In related news, it is necessary to think of Gawaine as continually followed by four women singing "Gawaine, Gawaine, Gawaine, Gawaine/He's so fine, wish he were mine," to the tune of the Chiffons' "He's So Fine." Not useful or textually warranted alas. Just necessary.
Gawaine is less than Lancelot in every way, but when Gawaine does wrong, he repents and reforms. He cuts a woman's head off, accidentally but carelessly, and thereafter is the servant of all women. He gives his word carelessly and then cheats to save his life, but only once. Lancelot just keeps on.
At the end of the series, mellowed by age and shoulder bursitis, she settles down with Mr. Rochester, after first stabbing him in either eye and cutting off his hand.
"Tut. Deplorable catering to the grossest, basest, most common people's vile passions! Catered decadence! Deliberate spreading of degeneracy! You go underhand to the liver, not hack downward with the point! What is wrong with people nowadays?"
Most romance novels are free-floating, fragmented permutations of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. There needs to be a genre based on Tess of the d'Urbervilles, in which the Tess character starts stabbing people somewhere in the second chapter instead of waiting 600 pages.
At the Met medieval art wing, an archway patched together of old classical and later Christian stonework and then infilled with carved animals and grotesques. An angel sticking his head and shoulders in sideways reminding one that this is religious art. A palimpsest without eradication. Like us.