Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Original and Translated Version

By Gawain Poet

Featuring both the original text and a modern, translated version, this fourteenth-century Arthurian poem tells the legendary tale of the mysterious Green Knight and Sir Gawain, a great knight of the Round Table.

The knights of the Round Table are celebrating Yuletide when their festivities are interrupted by the mystifying Green Knight riding on his green horse. The Green Knight challenges King Arthur’s legendary men to a wager. He who takes a blow at the Green Knight must be prepared to accept a return attack one year and one day later. It is the gallant Sir Gawain who takes this challenge on. He raises his axe and strikes off the head of the Green Knight. Yet, the intruder is undefeated. Still alive, he picks up his head, and promises he will see Sir Gawain in a year and a day.

In stanzas of alliterative verse ending in a rhyming bob and wheel, the poem chronicles Sir Gawain’s heroic quest. This high-quality edition features both William Allan Neilson’s 1917 translated text and the original version by the anonymous writer, known as the ‘Pearl Poet’ or the ‘Gawain Poet’.

Ragged Hand has proudly republished this classic poem in a beautiful new edition, complete with an introduction by K. G. T. Webster. This volume is not to be missed by fans of the famous legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528792660

Book preview

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SIR GAWAIN AND

THE GREEN KNIGHT

THE ORIGINAL AND

TRANSLATED VERSION

By

GAWAIN POET

Translated by

WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON

First published in

the 14th Century

Copyright © 2021 Ragged Hand

This edition is published by Ragged Hand,

an imprint of Read & Co.

This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any

way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

For more information visit

www.readandcobooks.co.uk

Contents

GAWAIN

INTRODUCTION

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

Translated by William Allan Neilson

FYTTE THE FIRST

FYTTE THE SECOND

FYTTE THE THIRD

FYTTE THE FOURTH

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

By Gawain Poet

FIT I

FIT II

FIT III

FIT IV

GAWAIN

Fr. Walwain (Brut), Gauvain, Gaugain;

Lat. Walganus, Walwanus;

Dutch, Walwein, Welsh, Gwalchmei

Son of King Loth of Orkney, and nephew to Arthur on his mother's side, the most famous hero of Arthurian romance, The first mention of his name is in a passage of William of Malmesbury, recording the discovery of his tomb in the province of Ros in Wales. He is there described as "Walwen qui fuit haud degener Arturis ex sorore nepos." Here he is said to have reigned over Galloway; and there is certainly some connexion, the character of which is now not easy to determine, between the two. In the later Historia of Goeffrey of Monmouth, and its French translation by Wace, Gawain plays an important and pseudo-historic rô1e. On the receipt by Arthur of the insulting message of the Roman emperor, demanding tribute, it is he who is despatched as ambassador to the enemy's camp, where his arrogant and insulting behaviour brings about the outbreak of hostilities. On receipt of the tidings of Mordred's treachery, Gawain accompanies Arthur to England, and is slain in the battle which ensues on their landing. Wace, however, evidently knew more of Gawain than he has included in his translation.

The English Arthurian poems regard him as the type and model of chivalrous courtesy, the fine father of nurture, and as Professor Maynadier has well remarked, previous to the appearance of Malory's compilation it was Gawain rather than Arthur, who was the typical English hero. It is thus rather surprising to find that in the earliest preserved MSS. of Arthurian romance, i.e. in the poems of Chrétien de Troyes, Gawain, though generally placed first in the list of knights, is by no means the hero par excellence. The latter part of the Perceval is indeed devoted to the recital of his adventures at the Chastel Merveilleus, but of none of Chrétien's poems is he the protagonist. The anonymous author of the Chevalier à l'epée indeed makes this apparent neglect of Gawain a ground of reproach against Chrétien. At the same time the majority of the short episodic poems connected with the cycle have Gawain for their hero. In the earlier form of the prose romances, e.g. in the Merlin proper, Gawain is a dominant personality, his feats rivalling in importance those ascribed to Arthur, but in the later forms such as the Merlin continuations, the Tristan, and the final Lancelot compilation, his character and position have undergone a complete change, he is represented as cruel, cowardly and treacherous, and of indifferent moral character. Most unfortunately our English version of the romances, Malory's Morte Arthur, being derived from these later forms (though his treatment of Gawain is by no means uniformly consistent), this unfavourable aspect is that under which the hero has become known to the modern reader. Tennyson, who only knew the Arthurian story through the medium of Malory, has, by exaggeration, largely contributed to this misunderstanding. Morris, in The Defence of Guinevere, speaks of gloomy Gawain; perhaps the most absurdly misleading epithet which could possibly have been applied to the gay, gratious, and gude knight of early English tradition.

The truth appears to be that Gawain, the Celtic and mythic origin of whose character was frankly admitted by the late M. Gaston Paris, belongs to the very earliest stage of Arthurian tradition, long antedating the crystallization of such tradition into literary form. He was certainly known in Italy at a very early date; Professor Rains has found the names of Arthur and Gawain in charters of the early 12th century, the bearers of those names being then grown to manhood; and Gawain is figured in the architrave of the north doorway of Modena cathedral, a 12th-century building. Recent discoveries have made it practically certain that there existed, prior to the extant romances, a collection of short episodic poems, devoted to the glorification of Arthur's famous nephew and his immediate kin (his brother Ghaeris, or Gareth, and his son Guinglain), the authorship of which was attributed to a Welshman, Bleheris; fragments of this collection have been preserved to us alike in the first continuation of Chrétien de Troyes Perceval, due to Wauchier de Densin, and in our vernacular Gawain poems. Among these Bleheris poems was one dealing with Gawain’s adventures at the Grail castle, where the Grail is represented as non-Christian, and presents features strongly reminiscent of the ancient Nature mysteries. There is good ground for believing that as Grail quester and winner, Gawain preceded alike Perceval and Galahad, and that the solution of the mysterious Grail problem is to be sought rather in the tales connected with the older hero than in those devoted to the glorification of the younger knights. The explanation of the very perplexing changes which the character of Gawain has undergone appears to lie in a misunderstanding of the original sources of that character. Whether or no Gawain was a sun-hero, and he certainly possessed some of the features—we are constantly told how his strength waxed with the waxing of the sun till noontide, and then gradually decreased; he owned a steed known by a definite name le Gringalet; and a light-giving sword, Escalibur (which, as a rule, is represented as belonging to Gawain, not to Arthur)—all traits of a sun-hero—he certainly has much in common with the primitive Irish hero Cuchullin. The famous head-cutting challenge, so admirably told in Syr Gawayne and the Grene Knighte, was originally connected with the Irish champion. Nor was the lady of Gawain's love a mortal maiden, but the queen of the other-world. In Irish tradition the other-world is often represented as an island, inhabited by women only; and it is this Isle of Maidens that Gawain visits in Diu Crone; returning therefrom dowered with the gift of eternal youth. The Chastel Merveilleus adventure, related at length by Chrétien and Wolfram is undoubtedly such an other-world story. It seems probable that it was this connexion which won for Gawain the title of the Maidens' Knight, a title for which no satisfactory explanation is ever given. When the source of the name was forgotten its meaning was not unnaturally misinterpreted, and gained for Gawain the reputation of a facile morality, which was exaggerated by the pious compilers of the later Grail romances into persistent and aggravated wrong-doing; at the same time it is to be noted that Gawain is never like Tristan and Lancelot, the hero of an illicit connexion maintained under circumstances-of falsehood and treachery. Gawain, however, belonged to the pre-Christian stage of Grail tradition, and it is not surprising that writers, bent on spiritual edification, found him somewhat of a stumbling-block. Chaucer, when he spoke of Gawain coming again out of faerie, spoke better than he knew; the home of that very gallant and courteous knight is indeed Fairy-land, and the true Gawain-tradition is informed with fairy glamour and grace.

An excerpt from

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 11

INTRODUCTION

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the finest representative of a great cycle of verse romances devoted wholly or principally to the adventures of Gawain. Of these there still survive in English a dozen or so; in French — the tongue in which romance most flourished — seven or eight more; and these, of course, are but a fraction of what must once have existed.[¹] No other knight of the Round Table occupies anything like so important a place as Gawain in the literature of the middle ages. He is the first mentioned of Arthur's knights, for about 1125, ten years before Geoffrey of Monmouth dazzled the world with his revelation of King Arthur, William of Malmesbury in his Chronicle of the Kings of England had told of the discovery of Gawain's tomb in Ross, Wales, and had described him as Arthur's nephew and worthy second. Where other knights quailed, Gawain was serene; where other champions were beaten, Gawain won; and where no resolution, strength, or skill could avail, Gawain succeeded by his kindness, his virtue, and his charming speech. The strange knight in the Squire's Tale gave his message so politely, says Chaucer,

"That Gawain with his old curteisye

Though he were come ageyn out of Fairye

Ne coude him nat amende with a word."

But in time other heroes became more popular than he, and in some of the French prose romances of the thirteenth century Gawain's character was defaced that others might appear to excel him; and Malory in his Morte Darthur (c. 1470), which is based chiefly upon these later French romances, and Tennyson in his Idylls of the King, which in turn is mostly based on Malory, have unfortunately perpetuated this debased portrait. To get a glimpse of the real Gawain one should read, besides our piece, such romances as the Carl of Carlisle,[²] Golagros and Gawain,[³] The Wedding of Sir Gawain,[⁴],the Mule Sans Frein[⁵] and the episodes in Miss Weston's Sir Gawain at the Grail Castle, and Sir Gawain and the Lady of Lys, in the attractive little series of Arthurian Romances Unrepresented in Malory's Morte d'Arthur.[⁶]

Gawain and the Green Knight has been preserved to us, like many another precious work — for example Beowulf — by a single lucky manuscript, Cotton Nero A.X. of the British Museum. It is found there along with three other remarkable poems of the same dialect and style, all in the same handwriting; and naturally the four pass as the work of one author, although not all scholars are agreed on this point. These three are Pearl (1212 lines), a highly finished elegy in an elaborate stanza, a masterpiece of delicate beauty and craftsmanship; Patience, and Cleanness (or Purity), of 500 and 1800 lines respectively, both written in the most powerful and highly colored alliterative verse, the former telling the story of Jonah, the latter of Belshazzar's feast and fate.[⁷]

These poems are the artistic culmination of what is called the alliterative revival of the fourteenth century in England, the best known example of which is Piers the Ploughman. Other splendid pieces, worthy to stand beside these, are Winner and Waster, The Parliament of Three Ages, and the Thornton Morte Arthure.[⁸] It is a surprising and not-well-explained phenomenon that after two centuries or so of the short-lined, rhyming verse in stanzas or in couplets such as the young Chaucer wrote — which is generally considered to have been of French origin — there should suddenly appear a great bulk of poetry in the archaic unrhymed style of the Anglo-Saxons. The great peculiarity of this verse is alliteration, the repeating of the same letter or sound at the beginning of several words in a line — a device which has never been given up in English poetry. A characteristic Anglo-Saxon line is,

"Wadan ofer wealdas; wudd baer sunu."

To wade over the wolds; the son bare the wood.

Any vowel could alliterate with any other, thus, —

"Innan ond utan iren-bendum."

Inside and outside with iron-bands.

The chief accent fell on the alliterative syllables, of which there could be three, as in the examples given, or two — these being the commonest types; or four, or none — these rarer. The number of unaccented syllables was immaterial; but a line consisted normally of four feet, with a cæsural pause in the middle. In our poem we find somewhat the same conventions, as in line 3, —

The tulk that the trammes of tresoun there wrought;

and line 27, —

For-thi an aunter in erde I attle to schawe.

In our piece groups of such lines are concluded by an odd phrase and a little rhyming stanza of five lines, often called a bob and a wheel. This poetry was dignified, strong, resonant, and in skillful hands apt for stirring deeds and rich, highly colored description; but it was the aliteration, probably, which tempted to use words in a forced sense, and to invent odd and fanciful terms — at any rate, these northern and Scottish poets were very much given to that sort of thing. Of course, the fact that they wrote with extreme virtuosity in a richly worded dialect, strange to us heirs of a more southern speech, has much to do with this effect. This poetry flourished chiefly in the north. Chaucer, naturally, was familiar with it, and makes his parson say, —

"But trusteth wel, I am a Southren man,

I can nat geste — rum, ram, ruf — by lettre,

Ne, God wot, rym hold I but little bettre;"

which rather sounds as if Chaucer had meant to have an alliterative poem precede the Parson's Tale.[⁹]

Our romance, and the rich field of folklore within which it lies have recently been made the subject of a penetrating study by Professor G.L. Kittredge,[¹⁰] whose main results may be thus summarized. Gawain and the Green Knight is doubtless, like the great majority of the mediæval English romances, a translation from the French, although the French original is now lost. To the author of this French poem is due the happy combination of two fine old widely current stories. One of these, the Challenge, can be traced back to an