One of the founding stories of English literature, Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green
horse who rudely interrupts Camelot's Round Table festivities one
Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one
of their number to a wager. The virtuous Gawain accepts and decapitates
the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his
head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. The
following Yuletide, Gawain dutifully sets forth. His quest for the Green
Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dreamlike
castle, a dire challenge answered--and a drama of enigmatic reward
disguised as psychic undoing.
Preserved on a single surviving manuscript dating from around 1400,
composed by an anonymous master, this Arthurian epic was rediscovered
only two hundred years ago and published for the first time in 1839.
Following in the tradition of Ted Hughes, Marie Borroff, and J.R.R.
Tolkien, Simon Armitage--one of England's leading poets--has produced an
inventive translation that resounds with both clarity and spirit. His
work, presented here with facing original text and a note by Harvard
scholar James Simpson, is meticulously responsible to the sophistication
of the original but succeeds equally in its ambition to be read as a
totally new poem. It is as if two poets, six hundred years apart, set
out on a journey through the same mesmerizing landscapes--acoustic,
physical, and metaphorical--to share in and double the pleasure of this
enchanting classic.
