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    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose
    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose
    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose
    Ebook72 pages2 hours

    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose

    By Jessie L. Weston

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    About this ebook

    The fourteenth-century legend of Sir Gawain and his battle with the Green Knight continues to seize the imagination of readers today. Jessie L. Weston’s translation of this famous poem into modern prose recaptures the heroic adventures of Sir Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew, and perfectly characterizes the knight’s bravery, chivalry, and honor.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarnes & Noble
    Release dateApr 19, 2011
    ISBN9781411446823
    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose

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      Book preview

      Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) - Jessie L. Weston

      SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

      A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose

      JESSIE L. WESTON

      This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

      Barnes & Noble, Inc.

      122 Fifth Avenue

      New York, NY 10011

      ISBN: 978-1-4114-4682-3

      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 the 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 elsewhere¹ 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 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 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 stands before us in this poem. We take up Malory or Tennyson, and in spite of their charm of style, in spite of the halo of religious mysticism in which they have striven to enwrap their characters, we lay them down with a feeling of dissatisfaction. How did the Gawain of their imagination, this empty-headed, empty-hearted worldling, cruel murderer, and a treacherous friend, ever come to be the typical English hero? For such Gawain certainly was, even more than Arthur himself. Then we turn back to these faded pages, and read the quaintly earnest words in which the old writer reveals the hidden meaning of that

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