Tolkien and the Gawain-Poet

Volume 21 Number 2 Article 32 Winter 10-15-1996 Tolkien and the Gawain-poet Tom Shippey Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Shippey, Tom (1996) "Tolkien and the Gawain-poet," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 21 : No. 2 , Article 32. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/32 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract One of Tolkien’s major academic works was the edition he prepared, with E.V. Gordon, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Yet this poem is only one of four in identical dialect (an important point to Tolkien) and in the same manuscript. This paper considers the philological issues these poems raise, and shows how the theories, eccentricities and linguistics of the Gawain-poet were read and used by Tolkien. Additional Keywords accent; Arthur; dialect; "etayn"; linguistic transmission; literary transmission; philology; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Woses This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/32 Tolkien and the poet Tom Shippey Abstract: One of Tolkien’s major academic works was the edition he prepared, with E.V. Gordon, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Yet this poem is only one of four in identical dialect (an important point to Tolkien) and in the same manuscript. This paper considers the philological issues these poems raise, and shows how the theories, eccentricities and linguistics of the Gawain-poet were read and used by Tolkien. Keywords: accent, Arthur, dialect, “etayn”, linguistic transmission, literary transmission, philology, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Woses Tolkien’s involvement with the Gawain-poet lasted almost success led to an immediate suggestion that the same pair the whole of his professional or writing life. Before should go on and edit Pearl from the same manuscript. proceeding, I should explain that by “the Gawain-poet” I Almost as soon as the first edition appeared, however, mean not only “the man who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Tolkien and Gordon ceased to live close together, as Tolkien Knight", but also “the man who wrote the four anonymous went off to Oxford while Gordon took over Tolkien’s Leeds poems now preserved in Cotton MS. Nero A.X, i.e. Sir chair. In Humphrey Carpenter’s Biography (p.105), Tolkien Gawain, Pearl, Purity and Patience"'. All four are written in is cited as referring rather ruefully to Gordon as “an the same distinctive dialect. It is true that this need not mean industrious little devil”; it seems likely that Gordon wanted they were written by the same hand, for the person who to press on with Pearl in the late 1920s while Tolkien (whose copied them all might for instance have “translated” poems fears about his own lack of discipline can be glimpsed in in different dialects into his own; while, as Tolkien himself “Leaf by Niggle”) had turned much of his attention to other showed in his 1929 essay on “Ancrene Wisse and llali things. Time went by. Gordon died prematurely, in 1938; and Meidhad", even in the Middle Ages, different people could when the edition of Pearl eventually appeared in 1953 it was under some circumstances have been taught at school to signalled on the title page as “Edited by E.V. Gordon”, but write the same English, no matter where they came from. So actually brought out by his widow Ida L. Gordon, a the four poems could all have had different authors. There considerable medieval scholar in her own right. In her has at least been a suggestion that a fifth poem, St. “Preface” to that work Mrs. Gordon records the original start Erkenwald, in a closely similar dialect but a different as a joint product; mentions Tolkien’s withdrawal from the manuscript, is also by “the Gawain-poet”. I do not propose project “when he found himself unable to give sufficient however to consider these issues. It is clear from note 13 of time to it”; and goes on to give “warmest thanks . to his 1953 essay (Tolkien, 1983b; see below) that Tolkien Professor Tolkien, who had the original typescript for some thought it “beyond any real doubt” that the man who wrote time and added valuable notes and corrections”. One can Sir Gawain “also wrote Pearl, not to mention Purity and probably conclude in the end that while the edition of Pearl is Patience”, while he offered no view on St. Erkenwald. “The indeed largely E.V. Gordon’s work, there are also substantial Gawain-poet”, then, meant to Tolkien the unknown author of contributions by Ida Gordon, with in all probability both an the four late fourteenth-century poems in MS. Nero A.X. initial input and later additions by Tolkien: some of the notes As said at the start of this essay, Tolkien had the Gawain- in the edition (as I indicate below) do seem resonantly poet in mind for at least fifty years. His first work on him Tolkienian. was the joint edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight In addition to these two works Tolkien also devoted the produced by Tolkien and his Leeds colleague E.V. Gordon, W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture of 1953 to “Sir Gawain and the published by the Clarendon Press in 1925. It was an Green Knight”: this essay appears in the posthumous enormously successful book, which altered the whole current publication of 1983, The Monsters and the Critics and Other of English medieval studies — till then heavily Southern and Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien. The “Foreword” to Chaucerian in bias, at least at non-specialist level - and that volume makes it clear that Tolkien had in 1953 just which is still in 1993 the standard edition (as revised and completed his alliterative verse translation of Sir Gawain into updated in 1967 by Tolkien’s pupil Norman Davis). Its 1 modem English, but that the version existing then was 1 I say “the man” not only because of restricted female education in the Middle Ages, but also because of the poet’s clear self-portrayal as feudal servant (in Patience) and as a father (in Peart). 214 J. R. R. TOLKIEN CENTENARY CONFERENCE repeatedly altered and emended. It came out in final form in the centre of a revival of writings in vernacular speech, 1975, along with the translations of Pearl and Sir Orfeo. The of which the most interesting examples preserved are publishing history of Tolkien on the Gawain-poet then runs poems in an alliterative metre descended from the old from 1925 to 1983, while Tolkien, as far as we know, did not verse of Anglo-Saxon times, though clothed in a cease to think and comment on the poet’s works from the language now difficult to read because of its strong 1920s till his own death in 1973. References to the Gawain- Scandinavian element and its many other peculiar and poet in fact crop up in unexpected places in Tolkien’s obscure dialectal words. These texts do not all come scholarly works; the poet’s influence on Tolkien’s fiction is from the same part of the North-West, and where each considered further below. was written is still in debate, but their connexion with Why did Tolkien feel this attraction to the poems of Nero the modem dialects, of which that of Huddersfield is an A.X? Since I have said repeatedly in my book The Road to interesting example, is immediately apparent to any one Middle-earth that philology is “the only proper guide to a glancing at this glossary. Indeed, such books as this one view of Middle-earth ‘of the sort which its author may be sometimes throw valuable light on the meanings or supposed to have desired’” (Shippey, 1992, p. 7)2 it is not forms of words in these old poems, such poems as the surprising that I see Tolkien’s interest in the Gawain-poet as romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, [and] the primarily philological. I would separate it into three strands, beautiful elegiac sermon known as The Pearl . those of class, place and tradition. (Tolkien, 1928, p. xvi) To deal with class first; it is obvious that the dialect of the On the next page Tolkien picks out a particularly Gawain-poet was in no way an ancestor of modern Standard unexpected case of close resemblance between the English. All the poems are full (much fuller than Chaucer) of aristocratic medieval Gawain-poet and Haigh’s working- words now found only, if at all, in non-standard dialects. One class modem informants. The Gawain-pocX. appears at one could say indeed that the modem descendants of the Gawain- point to make a “mistake” in English, when the Green poet’s dialect are among the least-regarded and lowest-status Knight, their challenge settled, asks Sir Gawain “to com to dialects of modem England.

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