Review, "The Meaning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight".

1991

Biblioth&que nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Direction des acquisitions et Bibliographic Services Branch des services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa Ontario Ottawa (Ontario) K I A ON4 K l A ON4 Your Irle L'olre r0tbrctncc NOTICE AVlS Bibliotheque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Direction des acquis~trons et Bibliographic Services Branch d~s services bibliographiques 395 Welltngton Street 395, rue Wellmgton Ottawa. Ontarlo Ottawa (Ontarlo) K l A ON4 KIA ON4 I (date) ABSTRACT-is bibliography documents scholarly studies of the anonymous fourteenth-century Middie English alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, published from 1978 to 1988 (inclusive). Its 349 entries reflect the puem's complexity and appeal. Nearly eighty-five per cent of these studies are in English and are fully annotated; of the non-English language entries, several are not annotated, but in each case a translation of the title appears. The scope of the bibliography is broad: materials documented range from editions, translations and reference works, to critical essays and monographs, to dramascripts, a ballet and an opera; doctoral dissertations are excluded, but selected reviews of monograph-length studies (including editions) do appear. m.e bibliography is organized inta sections as follows: "Editions", "Translations", "Adaptations and Performances", "Reference Worksn. "General Introductions and Romance Surveys", "Authorship and Manuscript Studies", "Alliteration and Language Studies", "Sources and Analogues" and "General Criticismn. Accessibility to the materials is heightened by these divisions and by four indices: author, subject, word study and line study. Detailed annotations are intended to be non-evduative and thus adopt the voice of each scholar and critic in turn. A brief preface describing the editorial principles of the bibliography is followed by an introduction to &e materials found in each section and to the theoretical approaches brought to bear on Gawain studies in recent years, including fenhist, mythological, psychoanalytic and serniological models. The survey observes that many Gawain critics find the poem open-ended in its meanings, and they reflect postmodem sensibility in Lheir view of the poem as metatextual and self-reflexive: that is, the romance hero's experience is seen to be about meaning, just as the poem is about the limitations of the romance mode and of human perception.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a complex Arthurian verse romance that features a beheading game coupled with parallel temptation and hunting scenes. These elements are intertwined; yet this is revealed to hero and reader only towards the end of the narrative. The Gawain-poet presents the reader with ambivalent characters and a hero who does not necessarily comprehend the implications of events unfolding around him. The ambivalence permeating the characters has led to manifold, often conflicting, interpretations of the text. The present article explores the characters of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in particular the two protagonists, with reference to literary analogues and other works that offer meaningful insights, as well as with due regard to medieval conceptions of art and the values enshrined in Sir Gawain’s pentangle. The objective of the present article is to determine whether the poem’s ambivalent elements give rise to a text that is open-ended, thereby transgressing medieval conceptions of art, or whether the pentangle passage outlining Sir Gawain’s moral code provides a fixed point against which to interpret the unfolding narrative. Other forms of transgression, particularly those pertaining to the boundaries of genre, are also discussed.

Primerjalna književnost, 2019

Medieval English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is unique not only in its form, content and structure, but also in the poet’s skillful use of conventions that play with the reader’s expectations by introducing elements that make the poem exquisitely ambivalent and place it in the fuzzy area where reality and fiction overlap. Although the poem seemingly praises the strength and purity of chivalry and knighthood, it actually subtly criticizes and comments on their failure when practiced outside the court and in real life. This is particularly noticeable when the poem’s symbolism, its hero, and the society he comes from are read against historical context, i.e. as reflections of the realities of medieval life. Accordingly, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can be read as a poem that praises chivalry and knighthood more by way of commenting on their dissipation than through overt affirmation, as the future of the kingdom, its rulers and society, with its faulty Christian knights, is far from bright, given the cracks and flaws that mar its seemingly glossy façade.

Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400) refers to foes of Camelot using a Germanic term for giant: the Middle English etayn, from the Old English eoten and cognate with the Old Norse jötunn. Reading Sir Gawain in light of key sources on Norse giants such as Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (c. 1220), reveals suggestive parallels. In the Edda and other sources the god Thor (Þórr) journeys to the castle Utgard (Útgarðr), where giants exploit his expectations to demonstrate the limitations of his understanding. Perhaps Gawain's similar attempt to live up to his reputation at Hautdesert, baffled by the guileful hunter Lord Bertilak, echoes Germanic myth; at least, such a view would fit with the poem's use of Norse-cognate vocabulary. Both Snorri and the poet of Sir Gawain complicate their interpretations of mythological traditions through irony, glamour, euhemerism, and metafiction; yet this very framing also presents parallels, most notably in the concept of ancestral wisdom. While giants can seem monstrous, they also preserve supernatural knowledge antedating that of gods. Although J. R. R. Tolkien preferred to interpret Sir Gawain theologically, his work still hints at the possibility of a Germanic-mythological reading of the poem. Taking Tolkien as a kind of philological guide to the "Land of Giants," this article refers not only to his scholarly work (including translations), but also occasionally to his creative work. Tracking Gawain's journey and synthesizing evidence from the subsequent tradition of "romantic philology," the following interpretation considers to what extent Germanic mythology may inform the representation of magic, nature, and wisdom in Sir Gawain.

This essay argues in favor of two emendations concerning women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: of MS "Þaʒ I [i.e., the lady] were burde bryʒtest, þe burde in mynde hade" (line 1283) to "Þaʒ [ho] were burde bryзtest, þe bur[n]e in mynde hade, " adopted by many editors but under increasing pressure in recent years; and of the convoluted MS passage in which Bertilak reveals the role of Morgan le Fay (lines 2445-55) to the clearer one resulting from Gollancz's addition of a line whereby he says that through her might he was transmogrified.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a delightful story for us medievalists, and a wonderful way to engage students into literature of the period. Sometimes, though, they get a little lost in translation. By comparing three different versions of Gawain's adventures - the original, Tolkien's translation, and finally Verlyn Flieger's modern language - I show how to engage students with the text in new ways. My students always end up loving the story, and, more importantly, they are no longer afraid of literature, even if the cadences and language is not quite what they are used to. Plus, it's fun.

Viator, 1991

2Bloch (n. 1 above) 17. 3Jauss (n. 1 above) 183 summarizes the "exemplaty" process of the continual "transformation and rejuvenation of the aesthetic canon" of medieval literature, from its "repression by the aesthetic canon of the Renaissance" through to its "learned disclosure by nineteenth-centuty historicism," its "reception by the ideologies of national literature" and finally to modern attempts to establish the modernity of medieval literature in its alterity. 4Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison 1988) x.

Proceedings from the Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature, 2016

The Chaucer Review, 2003