ARTHURIAN ROMANCES
Unrepresented in Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur”
No. I
Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight
A Middle-English Arthurian RomanceRetold in Modern Prose, with Introduction& Notes, by Jessie L. Weston,Translator of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s“Parzival” • With Designs byM. M. Crawford
London: David Nutt in the Strand
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Preface
The poem of which the following pagesoffer a prose rendering is contained in aMS., believed to be unique, of the CottonianCollection, Nero A. X., preservedin the British Museum. The MS. is ofthe end of the fourteenth century, but itis possible that the composition of thepoem is somewhat earlier; the subjectmatter is certainly of very old date.There has been a considerable divergenceof opinion among scholars on the questionof authorship, but the view nowgenerally accepted is that it is the workof the same hand as Pearl, another poemviof considerable merit contained in thesame 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, technicallyknown as a bob and a wheel,—thelines forming the body of the stave beingnot rhyming, but alliterative. The dialectin which it is written has been decided tobe West Midland, probably Lancashire,and is by no means easy to understand.Indeed, it is the real difficulty and obscurityof the language, which in spite of carefuland scholarly editing will always place thepoem in its original form outside the rangeof any but professed students of mediævalliterature, which has encouraged me to makean attempt to render it more accessible tothe general public, by giving it a form thatshall be easily intelligible, and at the sametime preserve as closely as possible the styleof the author.
For that style, in spite of a certain roughness,unavoidable at a period in which thelanguage was still in a partially developedand amorphous stage, is really charming.The author has a keen eye for effect; atalent for description, detailed without becomingwearisome; a genuine love ofNature and sympathy with her varyingmoods; and a real refinement and elevationof feeling which enable him to deal with arisqué situation with an absence of coarseness,not, unfortunately, to be always metwith in a mediæval writer. Standards oftaste vary with the age, but even judgedby that of our own day the author of SirGawain and the Green Knight comes notall too badly out of the ordeal!
The story with which the poem deals,too, has claims upon our interest. I haveshown elsewhere[a] that the beheadingchallenge is an incident of very earlyviiioccurrence in heroic legend, and that theparticular form given to it in the Englishpoem is especially interesting, correspondingas it does to the variations of the storyas preserved in the oldest known version,that of the old Irish Fled Bricrend.
But in no other version is the incidentcoupl