Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

notes

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century alliterative romance in Middle English, composed by an anonymous author (referred to by scholars as the Pearl Poet or Gawain Poet, since the same manuscript preserves three other poems attributed to the same hand — Pearl, Patience, Cleanness). The poem survives in a single manuscript, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, which lay unread until the 19th century. It is now recognised as the greatest English poem of its century after the works of Chaucer, and one of the supreme achievements of medieval Arthurian literature. Written in a difficult dialect of the West Midlands, using the ancient Germanic alliterative long line that Chaucer's contemporaries in the south had abandoned for rhyme, the poem tells the story of Sir Gawain's beheading-game with the mysterious Green Knight, and the moral testing that follows at Bertilak's castle. The three-day exchange of winnings pattern is a folktale motif of great antiquity, but the psychological and theological weight the poet gives it — turning a folktale into a meditation on human imperfection, honesty, and the acceptance of one's own failure — is his own achievement. The pentangle Gawain wears on his shield, described at length in a passage of the poem not excerpted here, is one of the great medieval descriptions of chivalric virtue: five points for the five wounds of Christ, the five joys of the Virgin, the five wits of man, the five fingers of his fighting hand, and the five virtues (freedom, brotherhood, cleanness, courtesy, and pity). Tolkien produced a scholarly edition of the poem in 1925 and later a modern verse translation; his own fiction bears its influence deeply. Translation: Jessie L. Weston, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose," London: David Nutt, 1898. Public domain.

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