The poem of which the following pages offer a prose rendering is
contained in a MS., believed to be unique, of the Cottonian Collection,
Nero A. X., preserved in the British Museum. The MS. is of the end of
the fourteenth century, but it is possible that the composition of the
poem is somewhat earlier; the subject matter is certainly of very old
date. There has been a considerable divergence of opinion among scholars
on the question of authorship, but the view now generally accepted is
that it is the work of the same hand as _Pearl_, another poem of
considerable merit contained in the same 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, technically known as a bob and a wheel,—the lines
forming the body of the stave being not rhyming, but alliterative. The
dialect in which it is written has been decided to be West Midland,
probably Lancashire, and is by no means easy to understand. Indeed, it
is the real difficulty and obscurity of the language, which in spite of
careful and scholarly editing will always place the poem in its original
form outside the range of any but professed students of mediæval
literature, which has encouraged me to make an attempt to render it more
accessible to the general public, by giving it a form that shall be
easily intelligible, and at the same time preserve as closely as
possible the style of the author.
For that style, in spite of a certain roughness, unavoidable at a period
in which the language was still in a partially developed and amorphous
stage, is really charming. The author has a keen eye for effect; a
talent for description, detailed without becoming wearisome; a genuine
love of Nature and sympathy with her varying moods; and a real
refinement and elevation of feeling which enable him to deal with a
_risqué_ situation with an absence of coarseness, not, unfortunately, to
be always met with in a mediæval writer. Standards of taste vary with
the age, but even judged by that of our own day the author of _Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight_ comes not all too badly out of the ordeal!
The story with which the poem deals, too, has claims upon our interest.
I have shown elsewhere[a] that the beheading challenge is an incident of
very early occurrence in heroic legend, and that the particular form
given to it in the English poem is especially interesting, corresponding
as it does to the variations of the story as preserved in the oldest
known version, that of the old Irish _Fled Bricrend_.
[a]“The Legend of Sir Gawain,” Grimm Library, Vol. VII. (Chapter IX. Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight).
But in no other version is the incident coupled with that of a
temptation and testing of the hero’s honour and chastity, such as meets
us here. At first sight one is inclined to assign the episode of the
lady of the castle to the class of stories of which the oldest version
is preserved in Biblical record—the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife;
a _motif_ not unseldom employed by mediæval writers, and which notably
occurs in what we may call the _Launfal_ group of stories. But there are
certain points which may make us hesitate as to whether in its first
conception the tale was really one of this class.
It must be noted that here the lady is acting throughout with the
knowledge and consent of the husband, an important point of difference.
In the second place, it is very doubtful whether her entire attitude was
not a _ruse_. From the Green Knight’s words to Gawain when he finally
reveals himself, “I wot we shall soon make peace with my wife, who was
thy bitter enemy,” her conduct hardly seems to have been prompted by
real passion.
In my _Studies on the Legend of Sir Gawain_, already referred to, I have
suggested that the character of the lady here is, perhaps, a
reminiscence of that of the Queen of the Magic Castle or Isle, daughter
or niece of an enchanter, who at an early stage of Gawain’s story was
undoubtedly his love. I think it not impossible that she was an integral
part of the tale as first told, and her rôle here was determined by that
which she originally played. In most versions of the story she has
dropped out altogether. It is, of course, possible that, there being but
a confused reminiscence of the original tale, her share _may_ have been
modified by the influence of the _Launfal_ group; but I should prefer to
explain the episode on the whole as a somewhat distorted survival of an
original feature.
But in any case we may be thankful for this, that the author of the most
important English metrical romance dealing with Arthurian legend
faithfully adheres to the original conception of Gawain’s character, as
drawn before the monkish lovers of edification laid their ruthless hands
on his legend, and turned the model of knightly virtues and courtesy
into a mere vulgar libertine.
Brave, chivalrous, loyally faithful to his plighted word, scrupulously
heedful of his own and others’ honour, Gawain stands before us in this
poem. We take up Malory or Tennyson, and in spite of their charm of
style, in spite of the halo of religious mysticism in which they have
striven to enwrap their characters, we lay them down with a feeling of
dissatisfaction. How did the Gawain of their imagination, this
empty-headed, empty-hearted worldling, cruel murderer, and treacherous
friend, ever come to be the typical English hero? For such Gawain
certainly was, even more than Arthur himself. Then we turn back to these
faded pages, and read the quaintly earnest words in which the old writer
reveals the hidden meaning of that mystic symbol, the pentangle, and
vindicates Gawain’s title to claim it as his badge—and we smile,
perhaps; but we cease to wonder at the widespread popularity of King
Arthur’s famous nephew, or at the immense body of romance that claims
him as its hero.
Scholars know all this, of course; they can read the poem for themselves
in its original rough and intricate phraseology; perhaps they will be
shocked at an attempt to handle it in simpler form. But this little book
is not for them, and if to those to whom the tale would otherwise be a
sealed treasure these pages bring some new knowledge of the way in which
our forefathers looked on the characters of the Arthurian legend, the
tales they told of them (unconsciously betraying the while how they
themselves lived and thought and spoke)—if by that means they gain a
keener appreciation of our national heroes, a wider knowledge of our
national literature,—then the spirit of the long-dead poet will
doubtless not be the slowest to pardon my handling of what was his
masterpiece, as it is, in M. Gaston Paris’ words, “The jewel of English
mediæval literature.”
Bournemouth, _June 1898_.
[Illustration: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]