Seeing The Gawain Poet

Offers the full-length study of the descriptive art found in four medieval poems: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Purity, and Patience.

A fresh examination of the four poems of the Cotton manuscript, arguing that they share a profound theological vision.

Featuring both the original text and a modern, translated version, this fourteenth-century Arthurian poem tells the legendary tale of the mysterious Green Knight and Sir Gawain, a great knight of the Round Table. The knights of the Round Table are celebrating Yuletide when their festivities are interrupted by the mystifying Green Knight riding on his green horse. The Green Knight challenges King Arthur’s legendary men to a wager. He who takes a blow at the Green Knight must be prepared to accept a return attack one year and one day later. It is the gallant Sir Gawain who takes this challenge on. He raises his axe and strikes off the head of the Green Knight. Yet, the intruder is undefeated. Still alive, he picks up his head, and promises he will see Sir Gawain in a year and a day. In stanzas of alliterative verse ending in a rhyming bob and wheel, the poem chronicles Sir Gawain’s heroic quest. This high-quality edition features both William Allan Neilson’s 1917 translated text and the original version by the anonymous writer, known as the ‘Pearl Poet’ or the ‘Gawain Poet’. Ragged Hand has proudly republished this classic poem in a beautiful new edition, complete with an introduction by K. G. T. Webster. This volume is not to be missed by fans of the famous legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Chrysanthemum loves her name, until she starts going to school and the other children make fun of it.

The late 14th century produced a crop of brilliant writers: Chaucer, Langland and Gower. Their achievement was rivalled only by a series of four works generally agreed to have been written by a single northern author, known as the Gawain-Poet. This book introduces the reader to the Gawain-poet's four surviving works: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl and Cleanness. The four poems are made accessible to the student by setting them in their relevant historical and cultural context and by developing some lines of critical argument. All studies are based on the author's own research and translations.

It ends with a discussion of the reception of the Morte Darthur from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and a select bibliography.

This book presents a comprehensive account of what is known about the four poems commonly ascribed to the Gawain poet.

This literary study offers a fresh view of the significance of the famous group of fourteenth-century poems, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It is a comprehensive study which puts the poems themselves firmly at its center, though it is always alert to relevant aspects of their literary and cultural context. John Anderson finds that the great fourteenth-century struggle, between religious and secular forces for control of men's minds, underlies all the poems. Despite its wide range of reference and the radicalism of some of its leading ideas, this book is written in a jargon-free style designed to appeal to specialist, non-specialist and student readers alike.