Green Knight Research Articles

J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘Gawain’s leave-taking’: A composite translation of ‘Against my will I take my leave’ (Vernon MS 407v) and a door to further criticism

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the manner in which the publication of the deluxe slipcased edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (2020) has helped to uncover some new evidence concerning Tolkien’s poem/translation ‘Gawain’s leave-taking’ (1925), and the possible early influence of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th c.) on the initial stages of Tolkien’s Legendarium, in particular on The lay of Leithian (1925–1931). The article reveals, for the first time, the source for Tolkien’s poem/translation, namely ‘Against my will I take my leave’ (Vernon MS 407 v) as edited in Carleton Brown’s Religious lyrics of the XIVth century (1924), and the importance of ascribing the work by Tolkien to the year 1925 or earlier. It is my hope that this contribution nudges other scholars to examine the evidence with care and to propose enlightening analyses, especially considering that the influence of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Tolkien’s early writing remains unexplored.

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1953 W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture: An Updated Chronology and Related Findings

ABSTRACT On 15 April 1953, J. R. R. Tolkien was at the University of Glasgow to deliver the W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, later published in The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays (1983). Based on new archival research at Glasgow and Oxford, this article offers new information on Tolkien's appointment to deliver this lecture, his journey to and stay at Glasgow, and his relationship with Norman Davis (1913–1989), further illuminating the lecture’s significance in the context of Tolkien’s life as both an academic and creative writer, Tolkien’s links to Glasgow, and his academic and literary reputation at the time. The article, therefore, provides additional biographical, intellectual, cultural, and historical details related to the lecture at the time Tolkien was ushering his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), to print.

Pearl and the Fairies of Romance: Hermeneutics and Intertextuality in a Fourteenth-Century Religious Dream Vision

Abstract: This article focuses on the parallels that can be drawn between the characters and landscapes of the fourteenth-century Pearl poem and the fairy characters and otherworlds that frequently appear in works of medieval romance. It argues that the Pearl -poet is consciously engaging with readily identifiable fairy themes and motifs, made popular through a wide range of romances and other sources, in order to help propagate a certain ambiguity within the poem: one that feeds into the broader epistemological themes that are present within the text. More specifically, this article shows that the poet's manipulation of these motifs forms part of the broader unraveling of the poem, in which both the dreamer's and the reader's ability to comprehend the nature of the vision develops as the poem progresses. Drawing on two works in particular, the fourteenth-century alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chrétien de Troyes's twelfth-century French romance Le Conte du Graal , this article argues that Pearl parallels these texts in the way that they utilize otherworldly conventions to inhibit both the protagonist's and the reader's ability to rationalize the events taking place within the poem. By identifying the poet's use of fairy conventions in Pearl , a poem that consistently draws attention to the limits of human knowledge, this article examines, from a fresh perspective, the poet's exploration of ineffability and of the divide between material and spiritual modes of existence.

The Character of Time in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Abstract: The fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shows how an idiosyncratic literary text can open new ways of thinking about that unruly topic, time. Through close readings of the poem and its sole surviving manuscript, I demonstrate how Gawain elaborates its own vision of dynamic, social time in its descriptions of time and characters. Through its evasion of teleologies, the poem offers a critique of discourses of inevitability. Gawain complicates an already complex picture of medieval time-schemes, demonstrating how literary works can add nuance to our understanding of how medieval time worked.

The Knots of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’s Boar Chase (Lines 1431–7)

ABSTRACT Editors have struggled to reconcile the two appearances of the term knot in the boar chase of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (lines 1431 and 1434) with the competing demands of intelligible syntax and etymological sense. Most opt for the sense “rocky hill” for both, but this forces other terms in the passage, namely umbekesten and even hem (“them”) into the status as very unlikely hapaxes. This essay advocates acceptance of the necessity of emendation at line 1434 as by far the least intrusive solution, and proposes the new possibility of covert, “hiding place, thicket.”

Enker (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 150 and 2477)

Enker (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 150 and 2477)

‘The forme to the fynisment foldes ful selden’ (l.499): A Comparison of David Lowery’s Screenplay and His 2021 Film Adaptation The Green Knight

Abstract: This study closely compares David Lowery’s film The Green Knight to his 2018 screenplay, detailing the many changes he made during two months of filming in 2019 and in post-production. These include changes due to location choices and budget, those regarding Lowery’s use of literary and cinematic subtexts, those made to his main characters (both male and female), and structural modifications distorting the linearity of the storyline. The analysis reveals Lowery’s organic filmmaking techniques, his changing priorities and how one’s vision at the outset of such an endeavor does indeed seldom match its final form.

Shareholder Activism and ESG: From Locust to Green Knight? A Perspective From the Netherlands

Shareholder Activism and ESG: From Locust to Green Knight? A Perspective From the Netherlands

Mary, «Pearl», and Sir John Stanley (d. 1414)

Pearl is a Middle English dream-poem in London, British Library, ms Cotton Nero A.x, of about 1400. It is attributed to the same author as the scriptural poems Patience and Cleanness and the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight also found in this manuscript. The four texts provide abundant information on fourteenth-century social life, including religion, particularly for devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Analysis of Marian imagery in Pearl and its related poems thus tells us much on the attitudes to Christ's mother of a high-ranking provincial layman of about 1390, especially for her as ‘Queen of Heaven’ and ‘Queen of Courtesy’, the latter term denoting the values of court society. Such analysis also tends to confirm attribution on other grounds of the four poems to Sir John Stanley (d. 1414), a magnate and courtier who in the last thirty years of his life dominated the politics of the Lancashire-Cheshire region of north-west England.

Time and Temporality in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

ABSTRACT Unlike its three companion poems, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is set entirely in a temporal world, with no access to transcendence. This article explores its many evocations of time, sequence, and simultaneity, supporting Derek Pearsall’s claim that the religious values in it are absorbed into chivalric secularity.

Petrine Failings and Broken Pentangles: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’s Chivalric Felix Culpa

Abstract In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, supernatural testers disrupt both Arthur’s court and the interlocked perfections of the Pentangle, weighing Gawain and finding him wanting. Gawain’s failure, moreover, foregrounds the human need for grace and forgiveness, demonstrating both the impossibility of human perfection and the humanity of imperfections redeemed. This essay explores the semi-typological relationship between Gawain and St Peter, arguing that the likenesses between the Arthurian knight and Christ’s disciple effectively reinforce the poem’s message that failings are inevitable in a post-lapsarian world, but that those errors can yet be mercifully and graciously redeemed. Gawain’s fairy-wrought ‘fall’ from excellence is, it turns out, a happy one – a chivalric felix culpa that makes room for the forgiveness and recovery of knightly failings.

'Why is He Indian?': Missed Opportunities for Discussing Race in David Lowery's The Green Knight (2021)

Abstract: This article explores the depiction of Gawain in The Green Knight (2021). Despite having cast Dev Patel in the starring role, the film avoids any substantive discussion of race in Camelot. By trading in optical diversity alone, it deploys BIPOC bodies without ever telling their stories. (TDN)

The Reproachful Head of the Green Knight: Exploring the eerie, liminality, deep time and duration in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’

The outcomes presented in this article represent a body of fine artworks that respond to the medieval poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (c.1380), culminating in the realization of the monstrous head of the Green Knight. I outline influences from an extended base of film, and television, including direct adaptations of the poem, and thematically relevant sources that include analogous narratives; as well as looking at fine art sculpture and painting that have informed my making strategies. I also discuss my theoretical framing of the poem which asserts the Green Knight as an eerie agent of temporality. The relationship between liminal space and monstrous intrusion on the subject is explored, looking to French philosopher Henri Bergson and English writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher to articulate the subjective implications of deep time manifested in monstrosity. The article charts the ways in which academic research has combined with studio practices to develop and enrich ideas, allowing for a dramatic error in production to become an attribute of a finished work.

The “Extra-Long” Dip in the Poems of the Gawain Poet

ABSTRACT The structure of the a-verse in Middle English alliterative meter remains unclear. One of the most controversial issues concerns the maximum length of a dip. Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter have argued that an a-verse can have an “extra-long” dip that consists of four or more unstressed syllables, while Noriko Inoue and Myra Stokes have advanced evidence to suggest that a four-syllable limit on dip length may normally be operative in the a-verse. This article examines a-verses in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and show that all the possible instances of a five- or six-syllable dip can be reinterpreted as having two, three, or four syllables, and that in these instances the extra-long dip can be broken up by a beat in the middle. The article concludes that dips that can be considered extra-long are in fact rare in the Gawain poet’s poems.

About This Issue

We are pleased to present The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable, a special issue organized by guest editor Nicholas Myklebust. Taken together, the articles of this issue celebrate Professor Thomas Cable as impactful scholar, teacher, mentor, and friend. For over five decades, Cable’s precise analyses have guided and refined the development of English metrical studies, adding to our knowledge of medieval poetics and authorial practice, particularly as regards historical linguistics and grammar, and the prosodics of alliterative meter from Old English to Middle English.The subjects chosen by the contributors to this issue testify to the energetic scope and influence of Cable’s scholarship. R. D. Fulk analyzes “the aesthetics of metrical usage” in some striking lines of “aural punctuation” (Eduard Sievers’s type A) that show up in Beowulf and other Old English poems. Eric Weiskott pursues four grammatical arguments that could underlie the direct evolution of Old English meter into Middle English alliterative meter; his chief examples are drawn from Exodus and Patience. Nicholas Myklebust examines the afterlife of Chaucer’s decasyllabic meter as it was consciously adapted in John Walton’s fifteenth-century translation of Boethius. Delving into the intricacies of alliterative meter in the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x, and especially in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Noriko Inoue shows how the rules governing an “extra-long” dip in the a-verse can be further elucidated beyond the analysis of Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter. This special issue’s fifth contributor, Ian Cornelius, addresses the metrics of Piers Plowman, widely recognized to be the utmost alliterative outlier; assessing the vocalic quality of syllables and the placement of word divisions in final dips, he concludes that “Langland allows semantic and expository priorities to override prosodic form.”The range of prosodical study inspired here by Thomas Cable is self-evidently expansive, with the collective authors’ explorations roving through the Old English Beowulf and Exodus, as well as through the Middle English canon of Chaucer, the Gawain poet, and Langland. This special issue’s articles exemplify the patient, focused intricacy needed for successful metrical analysis. They also display the incremental steps forward in our understanding of medieval poetical forms and rythymic styles that continue to follow in the wake of Cable’s pioneering work.

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

Landscape in Middle English Romance: The Medieval Imagination and the Natural World

Landscape in Middle English Romance: The Medieval Imagination and the Natural World

Sir Gawain and Saint Julian the Hospitaller: An Overlooked Allusion

The general significance of the Gawain-poet’s mention of Saint Julian in line 774 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hereafter SGGK) has long been known.1 Saint Julian the Hospitaller is the patron saint of wayfaring travelers and it is logical for Gawain, lost in the forest, to supplicate the saint for help. However, the specific significance of Saint Julian’s presence in the poem has not been fully appreciated, nor has the unique allusive potential that the saint brings to SGGK been fully recognized. This potential will be outlined here. But first an outline of the Julian story. The young nobleman Julian receives a miraculous prophecy. A deer he is hunting tells him that he will one day kill his own parents. To avoid this fate, Julian flees to a foreign land, where he eventually marries. Later, his parents learn of his whereabouts, travel to his castle and encounter his wife. She treats the parents kindly and offers them the marital bed. Meanwhile Julian, who has been out hunting, returns to find the couple sleeping in his bed. Assuming them to be his wife and her lover, he slays them in a fit of rage. After realizing his mistake, Julian repents and makes a vow of poverty. He and his wife go into exile. Eventually, they build a hostel beside a river and care for pilgrims and travelers. One night, a strange leper arrives. The couple treat him kindly and the leper is revealed to be an angel who announces that God has accepted Julian’s penance. Julian and his wife are both taken to heaven.

Romance in “Christabel”: Fear of the Supernatural Other

Literary romance is a difficult term to coherently define among critics. Dating back to the thirteenth century in Middle English, the number of romances written in the preceding English centuries offers an expansive opportunity for scholarly research and debate. One commonality that may be examined is the presence of a hero/heroine and a supernatural entity meant to challenge the protagonist’s inability to live up to ideals. Spanning from 1785 to 1832, British Romanticism is a movement that critics also have trouble defining. Literature written during the Romantic period includes the first and second-generation poets, who were present during and after the French Revolution respectively. The selected Romantic-era poem of study is “Christabel” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge due to its presence of a heroine in Christabel and a supernatural entity in Geraldine. When placing literary romance’s Morgan le Fay and Geraldine in juxtaposition with one another, a clearer definition of romance and Romanticism may be formed. “Christabel” invokes literary romance’s tendency to depict a supernatural other who is not inherently evil but complicates through sexual temptation the hero’s struggle with chastity. The supernatural other is someone who is outcasted and alienated from society because they are a perceived threat to normalcy. However, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Le Morte Darthur, and “Christabel” demonstrate how the real threat is often the hero/heroine’s inability to deny temptation. This research ultimately reveals how the hero and supernatural other become vehicles to reflect common weaknesses and flaws that make people human.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Authoritative Translation. Context. Criticism. Sec. ed. Trans. by Marie Borroff. Ed. by Laura L. Howes. Norton Critical Editions. New York: W. W. Norton, 2022 (orig. 2010), xxix, 230 pp.

The Middle English alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight belongs to one of the ‘classics’ of medieval English literature and would not need to be introduced and discussed here again. But W. W. Norton has now issued a second edition of Marie Boroff’s well received translation, prepared by Laura L. Howes, which would make us assume that she would have updated the scholarship, improved the translation, or reflected on the latest research, which has recently experienced a tremendous breakthrough with the publication by Andrew Breeze, The Historical Arthur and the Gawain Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions (2023) and previous publications. Now we finally know the poet’s name and can date this major work rather precisely: Sir John Stanley (d. 1414), a Cheshire and Lancashire grandee, who composed this poem in 1387, if Breeze’s arguments will hold. However, Howes could not yet take anything of that into consideration, but she also disregarded most of other recent research and is woefully underprepared in discussing the possible sources or literary parallels. Granted, she refers to a few French and Irish tales where the motif of the decapitation game appears as well, but she does not know Heinrich von dem Türlin’s amazing Diu Crône (ca. 1280/1290). We also do not learn anything about recent theoretical concepts in approaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or of major interpretations. In her introduction, she cites only a few studies, the latest from 2009. In fact, we cannot really tell what innovation she might have added to the respectable translation by Bornoff, which is not at all the only one available currently. What makes the present translation stand out in comparison with others? Why do we need this one again?