Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose
Jessie L. Weston
Fantasy
Book language: English
57 pages
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a Middle English Arthurian romance, here retold in modern prose by Jessie L. Weston. It follows a knight of King Arthur's court as he faces a strange supernatural challenge and tests of honour and loyalty. A classic of chivalric fantasy, it rewards listeners with atmosphere, mystery and medieval romance.
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Cover of the original edition (Project Gutenberg, public domain).
Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
ARTHURIAN ROMANCES
Unrepresented in Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur”
No. I
Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight
A Middle-English Arthurian Romance Retold in Modern Prose, with Introduction & Notes, by Jessie L. Weston, Translator of
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Parzival” • With Designs by M. M.
Crawford
London: David Nutt in the Strand
mdcccxcviii
Preface
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
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