Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Fourteenth-century Middle English Arthurian romance in alliterative verse.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a Middle English Arthurian romance preserved in a unique manuscript of the Cottonian Collection, "Nero A. X., preserved in the British Museum" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Preface). The manuscript "dates from the end of the fourteenth century" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Preface), and the poem "is generally accepted to be by the same author as Pearl" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Preface).
The work is substantial in scale, containing "over 2500 lines" and composed "in staves of varying length, ending in five short rhyming lines, technically known as a bob and a wheel," with "the lines forming the body of the stave being not rhyming, but alliterative" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Preface). The dialect has been "decided to be West Midland, probably Lancashire" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Preface). The poem is divided into four parts covering the beheading game, Gawain's journey, the temptation and hunting episodes, and the return blow (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Contents).
Gaston Paris called the poem "the jewel of English medieval literature" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Preface) and "thinks that the direct source was an Anglo-Norman poem, now lost" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Part IV, The End of the Tale).
The poem's relationship to earlier Celtic tradition is its most significant literary-historical feature. The beheading challenge at the poem's core corresponds to "the variations of the story as preserved in the oldest known version, that of the old Irish Fled Bricrend" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Preface). This connection — between a fourteenth-century English alliterative romance and an Old Irish saga — traces a narrative motif across centuries and linguistic boundaries, suggesting transmission routes that may have passed through the Anglo-Norman intermediary Gaston Paris proposed.