Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

translated by

SIMON ARMITAGE

Contents

1. Title Page
2. Introduction
3. FITT I
4. FITT II
5. FITT III
6. FITT IV
7. About the Author
8. Copyright

Introduction

We know next to nothing about the author of the poem which has come to be called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was probably written around 1400. In the early seventeenth century the manuscript was recorded as belonging to a Yorkshireman, Henry Saville of Bank. It was later acquired by Sir Robert Cotton, whose collection also included the Lindisfarne Gospels and the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf. The poem then lay dormant for over two hundred years, not coming to light until Queen Victoria was on the throne, thus leapfrogging the attentions of some of our greatest writers and critics. The manuscript, a small, unprepossessing thing, would fit comfortably into an average-size hand, were anyone actually allowed to touch it. Now referred to as Cotton Nero A.x., it is considered not only a most brilliant example of Middle English poetry but one of the jewels in the crown of English Literature, and sits in the British Library under conditions of high security and controlled humidity.

To cast eyes on the manuscript, or even to shuffle the unbound pages of the Early English Text Society’s facsimile edition, is to be intrigued by the handwriting: stern, stylish letters, like crusading chess pieces, fall into orderly ranks along faintly ruled lines. But the man whose calligraphy we ponder, a jobbing scribe probably, was not the author. The person who has become known as the Gawain poet remains as shadowy as the pages themselves. Among many other reasons, it is partly this anonymity which has made the poem so attractive to latter-day translators. The lack of authorship seems to serve as an invitation, opening up a space within the poem for a new writer to occupy. Its comparatively recent rediscovery acts as a further draw; if Milton or Pope had put their stamp on it, or if Dr Johnson had offered an opinion, or if Keats or Coleridge or Wordsworth had drawn it into their orbit, such an invitation might now appear less forthcoming.

The diction of the original tells us that its author was, broadly speaking, a northerner. Or we could say a midlander. The linguistic epicentre of the poem has been located in the area of the Cheshire-Staffordshire-Derbyshire border. Some researchers claim to have identified Swythamley Grange as the Castle of Hautdesert, or the jagged peaks of The Roaches as those ‘rogh knokled knarres with knorned stones’ (2166). Lud’s Church, a natural fissure in the rocks near the village of Flash, in Derbyshire, has been proposed as the site of the Green Chapel. ‘Hit had a hole on the ende and on ayther syde,/ And overgrowen with gres in glodes aywhere,/ And all was holw inwith, nobot an olde cave/ Or a crevisse of an olde cragge’ (2180–4). It may or may not be the place, but to stand in that mossy cleft which cannot have changed much over the centuries is to believe that the author had an actual landscape in mind when he conceived the poem, and lured his young protagonist into a northern region to legitimize his vocabulary and to make good use of his surrounding geography. A similar strategy has informed this translation; although my own part of northern England is separated from Lud’s Church by the swollen uplands of the Peak District, coaxing Gawain and his poem back into the Pennines was always part of the plan.