Sirgawain and the Green Knight

S IR GAWAIN AND THE GREE N KNIGHT REND ERED LI TERALLY INTO MOD ERN ENGLI S H F ROM THE ALLI TERATIV E ROMANCE -P OEM OF M D F O OTTO MS . O A IN A. 1360 C x . , R N NER BRITI S H MUS EUM WITH AN INTROD UCTION ON THE ARTHUR AND GAWAIN S AGAS IN E ARLY E NGLIS H LITE RATURE NE S T ! . B. KIRTLAN REV . E R R W S B . A. (LO N D ON) , B . D . (S T . AN D E ) FRE D E R IC LAWRE NCE $ 0 11 h o n H K E LLY CHAR LE S . - Y R D AND 2 6 PATERN OS TE R R o w E C 2 5 35 CI T OA , , S ir Gawain hath sough t th e isles of Ligh t Be th e sh es da yond or of y, Where moon never wan eth to shades o f nig ht An th il e u t i s la d e s v r fo n a n p y . ’ There h e holdeth high c ourt as th e maiden s knight ’ ’ th m i s isl a In e a den e for y . PART I KING ARTHU R AN D THE KNIGHTS OF THE ROU ND TABLE N i s e v e r r e a c h i n g o u t p a s s i o n a t e h a n d s t o g r a s p t h e ideal . With a c h i n g h e a r t a n d b l e e d i n g feet he pur sues the phantoms o f his dreams , only W to find , hen he stretches out to grasp 2 INTRODUCTION them , that he is wildly clutching at no thing . The whole cycle of the Arthur o f Legends is an illustration this . Those of us who have lived in Camelot and walked its streets , peeping shyly re into the bower of Queen Guineve , and have mingled with the crowds at the o f great Feast Pentecost, when knights and kings rode forth into the green meadows decked with gorgeous pa vil ions , and have seen the doughty deeds o f many a gallant knight , will find small comfort in the knowledge that C amelot, and the palace of Arthur, and the bower of Guinevere, and the j oustings are but the baseless fabric ’ o f a dream . The Arthur Legends are an eternal credit to humanity . For man is ever in revolt against sordid actuality . He ’ is ever seeking the land o f his heart s is desire . There probably no other saga that h a s so universally captured the heart and imagination of the world as the Arthur saga . Arthur, though a s Briton , belongs to univer al history . He and his court, his knights and their INTRODUCTION 8 ladies , and their feastings and their strivings , have become the possession of universal humanity . Yet King Ar thur probably never existed . And it ’ is just because humanity s heart feels that he ought to have existed , and that all the great and high ideals o f the Arthur saga ought to be realized , that the saga has completely saturated the soul of the world . The man who is satisfied with what is or what has been will never advance along the path o f ’ destiny . Humanity s destiny lies along i a path never yet trodden , and w ll never be realized till it becomes some t ’ thing i has never yet been . Man s path is upwards , along the shining way of the sun , not downwards , among the sordid failures and sins of the past . Arthur as a man probably did exist . He was a British soldier of great prowess and loyalty in the sixth cen fo r tury . He fought his country and his people and his God against the invading Saxon hordes , the pagan folk whose warlike deeds are celebrated in ’ ’ Beowulf . The first notice of Arthur s 4 INTRODUCTION existence in history is to be found in o f Nen n iu s o f the chronicle , Monk o f Bangor . He wrote a History the Britons in Latin in the tenth century . In that history we read the following account ! Then it was that the war like Arthur , with all the kings and military force of Britain , fought against th ou h h the Saxons . And g t ere were man more n oble th an hi msel y f, yet he was twelve times chosen their com ’ mander and became a conqueror . The eighth battle he fought near Gu in m o ir Castle, where Arthur bore the image o f Go d the holy Virgin , mother Of , upon his shoulders , and through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and the holy Mary , he put the Saxons to flight , and pursued them the whole day with great slaughter The twelfth o f battle he fought at the hill Badon , where 940 Saxons fell by his hand alone, no one but the Lord affording him assistance . In all these the British were successful , for no strength can avail against the will of the ’ Almighty . INTRODUCTION 5 Now it is quite possible for even the uninitiated to detect in this some what unromantic and matter -o f -fact rehearsal the seed o f the Spreading forest of romance that has grown up throughout Western Europe around the person of the simple yet heroic were man British soldier , than whom y b Yo u more n o le in the land . see in this account of Nen n iu s a colossal hero plunging into the very thick of the ’ enemies spears , inflamed by a burning patriotism and a passionate loyalty to Jesus Christ , and an implacable hatred o f paganism ; dealing terrible and deadly dints into the armour and o f bodies the foe, and leaving hundreds o n slain the field of battle . The memory of such heroic deeds would be kept ever green among the ancient British inhabitants of these islands . Imagination would play upon the germs of historical fact , investing them with a halo of romance . Imagina tion is like the sunshine . Sunshine fertilizes and causes the seeds sleeping in the earth to germinate . So does the 6 INTRODUCTION warm sun of imagination play upon o f the hard seed historical fact , till there sprin gs forth the flower of ro mantic and legendary literature . Even when the British were reduced to a band of fugitives among the hills of Cornwall , Devonshire, Wales , and West morland , they still cherished the me mory o f their great heroic deliverer o f former days . The Saxon Conqueror appropriated him as a national asset , a man who had fought, as Miss Jessie ‘ o u t Weston points , for the land of ’ England . The next appearance of Arthur in literature is in a manuscript written by Geoffrey of Monmouth . Very little is known about this most extraordinary romancer, except that he lived in the o f first half the twelfth century , was u an ambitio s man in holy orders , who fo r many years aspired to an arch bishopric, and finally succeeded in get ting preferred in the year 1 152 to the ‘ S ec o f ! St . Asaph a poor little ’ bishopric, with a poor little cathedral . INTRODUCTION 7 He seems to have written two versions of his famous Histories o f the British kings , in the latter of which appears for the first time the great wonder worker, Merlin . He tells us that while he was thinking that the deeds of the early British kings were worthy of ‘ everlasting praise, Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford , a man learned not only in the art of eloquence but in the histories o f foreign lands , offered me a certain most ancient book in the British lan guage that did set down the doings of them all in due succession from Brute, ’ the first king of the Britons . Most critics believe that this fascinating and sa fanciful priest was , to y the least , incorrect in makin g this assertion and that in effect no such wonderful book ever fell into his hands . Their theory is that Geoffrey does himself an in justice by this misstatement in that he cheats himself o f that meed o f praise to which he is entitled . In all probability this remarkable history o f the British kings was the prod uct of his own fertile imagination working 8 INTRODUCTION upon fragmentary tradition that he had come across in the Welsh marches . It would be quite o u t o f place to discuss this question here The fact upon which I would fix attention is that Geoffrey did write a History of the British kings , which immediately u became popular thro ghout Europe, and upon which was reared the super structure, fanciful and beautiful , of the Arthurian legend , which culminated ’ ’ in Sir Thomas Malory s Morte d Ar ’ thur, and after lying dormant for centuries has come to a new birth in ’ ’ S win Tennyson s Idylls of the King , ’ burne s sonorous and entrancing poems , f and in the immortal music o Wagner . It is a remarkable fact , however , that though this astounding mass of romantic legend has enthralled the imagination of Europe , there has never yet arisen a man who has thoroughly blended the separate elements into one great poetic whole .

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