Re-read.

Originally, I read this alongside LotR for the connection to Tolkein (having been a translation of Tolkein, himself, from the original Middle English), but it was surprisingly great all on its own.

Allegory? Of course. But it was also a tale of Sir Gawain the most pure, going on his own little quest and getting seduced and bumping heads against mother nature.

Literally, in this case.

I loved the pride and the twist back then and enjoyed it just as much again. And I also have a great fondness for the Green Knight, regardless, so this story was a bit of a no-brainer for me.

Perhaps my favorite Arthurian classic so far. Loved the alliterative verse and the beautiful descriptions of seasons - the conflicting ideas centered on chivalry, courtship, religion, etc. all made the reading much more intellectually stimulating. Not to mention that the ending throws in a wedge that forces one to evaluate the overall theme of the poem, or whether a unifying theme exists at all. Highly recommended for those interested in British literature and for those who want to give it a try; it's much more bearable than Beowulf, and the seduction scene is one of my favorites.

For what it's worth, this is such a good story! And it makes for such a good moral message about chivalry and honor while also discussing human weakness and how we all have our faults and misgivings too. It was such a creative, and magical story. The descriptions were lovely, and you can tell this was well written.

What would have made me enjoy it more: if I was reading a translation. However, as this was a read for uni, we had to translate it ourselves. And as this was my first encounter with medieval English, it was quite a trying process. It sucked the fun out of reading it a little, but that is a personal experience and not a criticising of the work.

Elke ridderroman die niet Ferguut is verdient een hoge rating❤

I know this is a basic English major text, but I loved this so much. Apparently, this is the first appearance of red + green + white as Christmas colors! The seduction as hunt, the Pagan and Christian tensions, learning about the motif of the Green Man throughout history... I'm realising that this is more of a review of my class than this text, but they're inextricable for me.

Taking this medieval literature class has been one of the best decisions I've made this year. If I had been born 50 years ago, I would probably want to be a medievalist––this literary tradition is fascinating. It feels like there's some incredible kernel of truth in everything we read, and it's crazy to see how the texts we're studying have already influenced my way of understanding the world so much (often by way of consuming other texts and media they've influenced). Really great essays in this edition too––especially the one about violence as courtly play by Martin.

This review is of the translation, not the poem itself.

I've now read five translations of Gawain as well as tackling it in the original Middle English. Before tonight, I may have said Simon Armitage's effort was my favorite. It still ranks high, especially in its accessibility to a contemporary audience. That said, Weston's is by far the truest to the original, preserving the rhyme scheme, the bob and wheel technique, and the alliteration. It won't be easily approachable to the casual reader, as she retains many archaic and Middle English diction. In the first few pages we are treated to "trow," "ywis," "wroth," "eke," "emprise," and "hap." It wouldn't hurt to have a Middle English dictionary nearby, which of course I did because "NERD ALERT!"

I guess this should come as no surprise since Weston's best-known work is From Ritual to Romance, which--though it has had its detractors since its publication in 1920--inspired generations of artists and creations from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

For those who teach or study early English literature or Arthurian legend or those who have more than a passing interest in it, this is a must-read. For everyone else, maybe just stick with Armitage.

Chivalry, Gallantry, Loyalty, a knights most admired qualities, all are tested. An enjoyable story.

When it comes to reading older English texts, understanding the language becomes the most important tool to comprehending the story. This text was enjoyable, and the lines, when isolated, are beautiful and descriptive - but without having an understanding of “how” to read it, i think it would be difficult to enjoy. When reading Shakespearean sonnets, we know the “rules” of iambic pentameter and so it’s easier for us to consume the lines even despite the difficulty we might find with the language. For Gawain, however, there is no rhythmic dictation of that sort, and so I found understanding the text to be the main challenge. The story itself was entertaining, if perhaps a bit drawn out, and the poetry was lovely. As uni texts go, I enjoyed this one a lot more than I expected.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a medieval poem by which a one of the stories of Arthurian legend is told. It concerns Sir Gawain, youngest Knight of the Round Table who is also King Arthur's nephew. On a New Year's Eve, a strange green knight enters the court of King Arthur and challenges the knights in to a "beheading game" which challenge, sir Gawain accepts. According to the challenge by the green Knight he was to be beheaded by his axe and whoever accepts the challenge to expect the same return in a year and a day. Sir Gawain beheads the green Knight and he retreats with his severed head informing sir Gawain to meet him in the green chapel on the stipulated day. The story progresses as sir Gawain journeys to the green chapel to meet his fate. And on this journey, his honour and loyalty is tested.

I'm interested in the legend of King Arthur and his Round Table but cannot recall to have read any other than childhood fables; so this work really piqued my interest. I read the poetic translation and it was quite interesting to read the verses while a story of courage, strength of character, honesty and loyalty is unfolded. The story was good enough though not great as I expected. But I'm happy to have read a proper Arthurian story after all.

Simon Armitage translation (Faber & Faber / Norton), and the Oxford edition's notes

I'd half forgotten about Gawain and the Green Knight - and I'd definitely forgotten it was set over Christmas and New Year, until I heard this mid-December episode of In Our Time. As I thought during the programme how bored I now was of Simon Armitage - he's become a very regular fixture on BBC arts shows in the last few years - I didn't expect to end up reading his translation of Gawain. But I looked at a couple of others and they seemed too formal and RP. The poem's northernness (or perhaps more precisely north-west-midlandness) is one of the most distinctive things about it, and is what makes it different from other 14th-century English works like The Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman, and I wanted that to be evident in the translation. Although the beginning of Armitage version didn't have as many dialect words as I'd hoped (nor did it in the full poem), you can hear an accent in it if you're looking, the way you can't in the Penguin or Oxford translations.

However, he says about the translation, "the often-quoted notion that a poem can never be finished, only abandoned, has never felt more true. Even now, further permutations and possibilities keep suggesting themselves, as if the tweaking and fine-tuning could last a lifetime" - and a new revised edition was published in October 2018, so there may even be more dialect in it now.

And - its other great advantage I only fully realised after starting to read it properly - Armitage's version uses alliteration like the original, rather than blank verse or a rhymed meter. One edition's introduction explains that Germanic languages frequently use alliteration as a poetic device, whereas romance languages use rhyme. I love alliteration, but it's kind of uncool: done to excess (and excess is easy to do with alliteration) it can seem like the dad-dancing of English wordplay. (Is that anything to do with its being an older, pre-Norman component of the language?) It was perhaps my favourite aspect of Armitage's Gawain, seeing, for the first time, alliteration used in such quantity and so well, and utterly *allowed*, and never once with a need to cringe.

On the appearance of the Green Knight at Camelot:

The guests looked on. They gaped and they gawked
and were mute with amazement: what did it mean
that human and horse could develop this hue,
should grow to be grass-green or greener still,
like green enamel emboldened by bright gold?
Some stood and stared then stepped a little closer,
drawn near to the knight to know his next move;

Gawain's adventures on the journey northwards in winter:

Where he bridges a brook or wades through a waterway
ill fortune brings him face-to-face with a foe
so foul or fierce he is bound to use force.
So momentous are his travels among the mountains
to tell just a tenth would be a tall order.
Here he scraps with serpents and snarling wolves,
here he tangles with wodwos causing trouble in the crags,
or with bulls and bears and the odd wild boar.
Hard on his heels through the highlands come giants.
Only diligence and faith in the face of death
will keep him from becoming a corpse or carrion.

It brings home how bloody cold a medieval winter felt, with so many fewer hopes of getting warm than we have.

And the wars were one thing, but winter was worse:
clouds shed their cargo of crystallized rain
which froze as it fell to the frost-glazed earth.
With nerves frozen numb he napped in his armour,…

So in peril and pain Sir Gawain made progress,
crisscrossing the countryside until Christmas
Eve…
---
Now night passes and New Year draws near,
drawing off darkness as our Deity decrees.
But wild-looking weather was about in the world:
clouds decanted their cold rain earthwards;
the nithering north needled man’s very nature;
creatures were scattered by the stinging sleet.
Then a whip-cracking wind comes whistling between hills
driving snow into deepening drifts in the dales.

It's clear how exhausting a journey through this was, with rest and recuperation much needed, and no shame in the knight lying abed while the lord went out hunting.

“You were weary and worn,
hollow with hunger, harrowed by tiredness,
yet you joined in my revelling right royally every night.

What a contrast Christmas was with the rest of winter under these conditions:
And with meals and mirth and minstrelsy
they made as much amusement as any mortal could,
and among those merry men and laughing ladies
Gawain and his host got giddy together;
only lunatics and drunkards could have looked more delirious.
Every person present performed party pieces
till the hour arrived when revellers must rest,

(Which may have been later than you'd think; A Tudor Christmas, which I read a couple of weeks earlier, stated that in 1494, Henry VII processed at 11pm after mass on Twelfth Night.)

As with all good long poems, there are a handful of lines that don't work, but those that do outweigh those that don't sufficiently to make the off-notes negligible.


Needless to say, all this left me with renewed respect for Armitage, and I enjoyed watching this documentary in which he visited the likely locations the Gawain-poet thought of as he was writing. Lud's Church in North Staffordshire, the probable site of the Green Chapel, really did look like somewhere a high-fantasy film hero would fight a pivotal battle with a monster (or maybe they just filmed it well to make it look that way). If you also remember Armitage from the 90s Mark Radcliffe Radio 1 show, you will probably enjoy the soundtrack too.


Armitage's edition has a short - and interesting - intro, but if you want the best historical background info, the Oxford edition is the place to look, at Helen Cooper's introduction and notes. (The Penguin Bernard O'Donoghue version doesn't have nearly as much.) Info like this was exciting (to me at least) after having heard several briefer, less detailed histories of the text:

the precise detail of this location may however represent the origin of the scribe who copied the poems into the manuscript rather than of the poet himself, who certainly came from the same region but may not be possible to locate with quite the same degree of exactness.

The Wirral was notorious as a refuge for outlaws though the comment here on the wildness of its inhabitants could also be a joke against the poem's first readers since Gawain is travelling into their own home territory. This is, however, the dangerous past, not the familiar present. (So the Liverpool jokes have an ancient history…)

Other highlights included various estimates of when wild boar became hunted to extinction in England; the ranked, and also gendered, classification of hunted beasts; when carpets were probably introduced by Eleanor of Castile; mini-biographies of candidates for the authorship and dedication; the influential coterie of Cheshiremen around Richard II in the 1390s; and that Gawain was part of an Alliterative Revival in poetry, all known works written "in the north or west of England or in southern Scotland".


For a long time I was not all that interested in reading Gawain because I'd never found chivalric culture very interesting and couldn't help but imagine it taking place in the sanitised scenes of Victorian Gothic revival paintings, even though they were obviously hundreds of years later. Not only did I enjoy the alliteration and the descriptions of the winter weather and its effects in the poem, but it helped me start to see chivalry in a different context: grittier, for want of a better word, and part of what seems to have been a confusing, demanding and perhaps sometimes contradictory set of social standards for medieval nobility which I'd actually like to know a bit more about (but paper-length rather than book-length).

The only reason for giving 4 stars rather than 5 is the known fault with the original, that the purported plot by Morgan Le Fay, as explanation for events, is unconvincing. Otherwise, the poem ends with a beautiful and unexpectedly moving final line, as if it were a prayer; although the story is playful and mythical, this reminds the reader of the religion at the heart of medieval life.

(read Dec 2018, review Jan 2019)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is another great read for one of my English classes. I honestly love being able to read classic literature and hearing someone else's thoughts on it. I like seeing if I had the same understanding or if I was "way off" (per say, literature can be subjective).

This one was not my favourite but it was pretty cool. I always wanted to venture into some King Arthur and Camelot stories, so this one fit the bill. While it's not my favourite, it was very interesting to read it!

There's a lot going on in this book depending on how you read it. Sir Gawain maybe being a coward or following the time's ideal hero trope. The sexual aspect of it. The ties of animals and how the heroes and villains act. Throw in the cool alliteration (depending on the translation you get), and it makes for one epic tale. It's all so interesting. And then, you know, maybe it was just meant to be a story and all of the themes weren't intended to be there?

Either way, I found Sir Gawain to be a more humanistic character than in other classic hero fiction. Sir Gawain seems like he fought for Arthur because he was the only one who had the guts to do it - not because he wanted too. He almost chickens out, avoids his problems for a bit and is actually scared. This romance doesn't feel as epic because he isn't the warrior prince we are all expecting, but instead he's a scared knight just doing his best. That's what I find super interesting about it. I didn't enjoy it as much, and maybe that's because he was... human? He acted reasonably and how we expect people to act? It's so strange.

If you get the chance, I recommend reading this and then finding some translations or explanation videos. Seeing all the different ideas about this work really made it stand out for me and make me enjoy it more!

Four out of five stars.

A captivating glimpse into medieval storytelling and into Arthur's Britain. This modern translation is the only one I've read, but I definitely am intrigued to try others to see how they compare. The writing here is absolutely beautiful.