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    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
    Ebook69 pages1 hour

    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

    By Charles River Editors

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    Chios Classics brings literature's greatest works back to life for new generations.  All our books contain a linked table of contents.


    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the most famous Arthurian stories.The story describes how Sir Gawain, a knight of the Round Table, accepts a challenge from a mysterious Green Knight.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCharles River Editors
    Release dateMar 22, 2018
    ISBN9781508017486
    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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      Book preview

      Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Charles River Editors

      SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

      Anonymous

      Translated by Jessie L. Weston

      CHIOS CLASSICS

      Thank you for reading. In the event that you appreciate this book, please consider sharing the good word(s) by leaving a review or contacting the author.

      This book is a work of fiction; its contents are wholly imagined.

      All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

      Copyright © 2015 by Anonymous

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

      Preface to First Edition

      Preface to Second Edition

      Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

      By

      Anonymous

      Translated by Jessie L. Weston

      SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

      ~

      PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

      ~

      THE POEM OF WHICH the following pages offer a prose rendering is contained in a MS., believed to be unique, of the Cottonian Collection, Nero A.X., preserved in the British Museum. The MS. is of the end of the fourteenth century, but it is possible that the composition of the poem is somewhat earlier; the subject-matter is certainly of very old date. There has been a considerable divergence of opinion among scholars on the question of authorship, but the view now generally accepted is that it is the work of the same hand as Pearl, another poem of considerable merit contained in the same MS.

      Our poem, or, to speak more correctly, metrical romance, contains over 2500 lines, and is composed in staves of varying length, ending in five short rhyming lines, technically known as a bob and a wheel,—the lines forming the body of the stave being not rhyming, but alliterative. The dialect in which it is written has been decided to be West Midland, probably Lancashire, and is by no means easy to understand. Indeed, it is the real difficulty and obscurity of the language, which, in spite of careful and scholarly editing, will always place the poem in its original form outside the range of any but professed students of mediæval literature, which has encouraged me to make an attempt to render it more accessible to the general public, by giving it a form that shall be easily intelligible, and at the same time preserve as closely as possible the style of the author.

      For that style, in spite of a certain roughness, unavoidable at a period in which the language was still in a partially developed and amorphous stage, is really charming. The author has a keen eye for effect; a talent for description, detailed without becoming wearisome; a genuine love of Nature and sympathy with her varying moods; and a real refinement and elevation of feeling which enable him to deal with a risqué: situation with an absence of coarseness, not, unfortunately, to be always met with in a mediæval writer. Standards of taste vary with the age, but even judged by that of our own day the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight comes not all too badly out of the ordeal!

      The story with which the poem deals, too, has claims upon our interest. I have shown elsewhere that the beheading challenge is an incident of very early occurrence in heroic legend, and that the particular form given to it in the English poem is especially interesting, corresponding as it does to the variations of the story as preserved in the oldest known version, that of the old Irish Fled Bricrend.

      But in no other version is the incident coupled with that of a temptation and testing of the hero’s honour and chastity, such as meets us here. At first sight one is inclined to assign the episode of the lady of the castle to the class of stories of which the oldest version is preserved in Biblical record—the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife; a motif not unseldom employed by mediæval writers, and which notably occurs in what we may call the Launfal group of stories. But there are certain points which may make us hesitate as to whether in its first conception the tale was really one of this class.

      It must be noted that here the lady is acting throughout with the knowledge and consent of the husband, an important point of difference. In the second place, it is very doubtful whether her entire attitude was not a ruse. From the Green Knight’s words to Gawain when he finally reveals himself, I wot we shall soon make peace with my wife, who was thy bitter enemy, her conduct hardly seems to have been prompted by real passion.

      In my Studies on the Legend of Sir Gawain, already referred to, I have suggested that the character of the lady here is, perhaps, a reminiscence of that of the Queen of the Magic Castle or Isle, daughter or niece of an enchanter, who at an early stage of Gawain’s story was undoubtedly his love. I think it not impossible that she was an integral part of the tale as first told, and her rôle here was determined by that which she originally played. In most versions of the story she has dropped out altogether. It is, of course, possible that, there being but a confused reminiscence of the original tale, her share may have been modified by the influence of the Launfal group; but I should prefer to explain the episode on the whole as a somewhat distorted survival of an original feature.

      But in any case we may be thankful for this, that the author of the most important English metrical romance dealing with Arthurian legend faithfully adheres to the original conception of Gawain’s character, as drawn before the monkish lovers of edification laid their ruthless hands on his legend, and turned the model of knightly virtues and courtesy into a mere vulgar libertine.

      Brave, chivalrous, loyally faithful to his plighted word, scrupulously heedful of his own and others’ honour, Gawain

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