Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

  First three verses in the manuscript of ‘Gawain’s Leave-Taking’

  Fourth verse in the manuscript of ‘Gawain’s Leave-Taking’, followed by an early draft of part of the opening Canto of the ‘Gest of Beren and Lúthien’

  Copyright

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  First published in Great Britain by

  George Allen & Unwin 1975

  Revised edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

  Copyright © The Tolkien Estate Limited 1975, 1983, 2020

  ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ reproduced from

  The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays first published by

  George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd 1983

  ‘Gawain’s Leave-Taking’ © The Tolkien Trust 2020

  Preface © Christopher Tolkien 1975, 1983, 2020

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Introduction

  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

  W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture on Sir Gawain

  Notes

  Pearl

  Sir Orfeo

  Glossary

  Appendix on Verse-forms

  Gawain’s Leave-taking

  Keep Reading …

  About the Authors

  Works by J.R.R. Tolkien

  About the Publisher

  PREFACE

  When my father, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, died in 1973 he left unpublished his translations of the medieval English poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo. A form of his Pearl translation was in existence more than thirty years ago, though it was much revised later; and that of Sir Gawain soon after 1950. The latter was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1953. His version of Sir Orfeo was also made many years ago, and had been (I believe) for long laid aside; but he certainly wished to see it published.

  He wished to provide both a general introduction and a commentary; and it was largely because he could not decide on the form that these should take that the translations remained unpublished. On the one hand, he undoubtedly sought an audience without any knowledge of the original poems; he wrote of his translation of Pearl: ‘The Pearl certainly deserves to be heard by lovers of English poetry who have not the opportunity or the desire to master its difficult idiom. To such readers I offer this translation.’ But he also wrote: ‘A translation may be a useful form of commentary; and this version may possibly be acceptable even to those who already know the original, and possess editions with all their apparatus.’ He wished therefore to explain the basis of his version in debatable passages; and indeed a very great deal of unshown editorial labour lies behind his translations, which not only reflect his long study of the language and metre of the originals, but were also in some degree the inspiration of it. As he wrote: ‘These translations were first made long ago for my own instruction, since a translator must first try to discover as precisely as he can what his original means, and may be led by ever closer attention to understand it better for its own sake. Since I first began I have given to the idiom of these texts very close study, and I have certainly learned more about them than I knew when I first presumed to translate them.’

  But the commentary was never written, and the introduction did not get beyond the point of tentative beginnings. My concern in preparing this book has been that it should remain his own; and I have not provided any commentary. Those readers whom he most wished to reach will be content to know that in passages of doubt or difficulty these translations are the product of long scrutiny of the originals, and of great pains to embody his conclusions in a rendering at once precise and metrical; and for explanations and discussions of detail reference must be made to editions of the originals. But readers who are wholly unacquainted with these poems will wish to know something about them; and it seemed to me that if it were at all possible the translations should be introduced in the words of the translator himself, who gave so much time and thought to these works. I have therefore composed the introductory and explanatory parts of the book in the following way.

  The first section of the Introduction, on the author of Sir Gawain and Pearl, is derived from my father’s notes. The second section, on Sir Gawain, is (in slightly reduced form) a radio talk which he gave after the broadcasts of his translation. For the third section, the only writing of his on Pearl that I could find suitable to the purpose was the original draft for an essay that was subsequently published in revised form. After my father and Professor E.V. Gordon had collaborated in making an edition of Sir Gawain, which was published in 1925, they began work on an edition of Pearl. In the event, that book was almost entirely the work of Professor Gordon alone, but my father’s contribution to it included a small part of the Introduction; and the essay is here reproduced in the form it finally took as the result of their collaboration.1 Its appearance here has been made possible through the generosity of Mrs I. L. Gordon. I wish also to thank the Delegates of the Clarendon Press for their permission to use it.

  I was not able to discover any writing by my father on the subject of Sir Orfeo. Here therefore, in keeping with my general intentions for the book, I have restricted myself to a very brief factual note on the text.

  Since a primary object of these translations was the close preservation of the metres of the originals, I thought that the book should contain, for those who want it, an account of the verse-forms of Sir Gawain and Pearl. The section on Sir Gawain is composed from drafts made for, but not used in, the introductory talk to the broadcasts of the translation; and that on the verse-form of Pearl from other unpublished notes. There is very little in these accounts (and nothing that is a matter of opinion) that is not in my father’s own words.

  It is inevitable that in thus using materials written at different times and for different purposes the result should not be entirely homogeneous; but it seemed to me better to accept this consequence than not to use them at all.

  At his death my father had not finally decided on the form of every line in the translations. In choosing between competing versions I have tried throughout to determine his latest intent
ion, and that has in most cases been discoverable with fair certainty.

  At the end of the book I have provided a short glossary. On the last page will be found some verses translated by my father from a mediaeval English poem. He called them ‘Gawain’s Leave-taking’, clearly with reference to the passage in Sir Gawain where Gawain leaves the castle of Sir Bertilak to go to the tryst at the Green Chapel. The original poem has no connection with Sir Gawain; the verses translated are in fact the first three stanzas, and the last, of a somewhat longer poem found among a group of fourteenth-century lyrics with refrains in the Vernon manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

  Christopher Tolkien

  Editor’s Note

  As Christopher Tolkien notes in his preface, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo was the very first book by J.R.R. Tolkien edited by him for posthumous publication. Indeed, the editorial work was begun soon after his father’s death. Among Christopher’s papers is a letter that he wrote to Rayner Unwin, while working on the edition in 1974, where he mentions having come upon the fragment of a wholly different poem translated by his father and entitled by him, ‘Gawain’s Leave-Taking’, and suggests that it might be included, to which Rayner enthusiastically agreed. It is a measure of Christopher’s careful stewardship of his father’s work that he placed this ‘discovery’ discreetly at the end of the book, with little explanatory apparatus.

  During the preparation of this new edition, Christopher mentioned a remarkable feature present in his father’s manuscript of ‘Gawain’s Leave-Taking’ (reproduced on the inside covers to this edition). Immediately following on from the final stanza there appears a draft of part of the opening Canto of the ‘Gest of Beren and Lúthien’. The draft very closely follows the A-text reproduced in The Lays of Beleriand (p.157) though precedes it as it contains an alternative couplet after line 12:

  from England unto Eglamar

  o’er folk and field and lands afar.

  Christopher noted that evidence that both texts were composed no later than 1929 can be seen by referring to the criticism provided to J.R.R. Tolkien by C.S. Lewis after he read the poem on the night of 6 December 1929, in which Lewis quoted the phrase ‘meats were sweet’ (The Lays of Beleriand, p.315). These words were absent from later versions as Tolkien rewrote the text, very probably as a direct consequence of Lewis’s criticism. Christopher concluded that it can therefore be stated with reasonable certainty that J.R.R. Tolkien had Sir Gawain in mind even as he worked on the poem that would become The Lay of Leithian.

  When Christopher and I began work on this new edition, it was intended that Christopher himself would revise his introduction to share the above insight, but was ultimately unable to do so, having laid down his pen for the final time: he died on 16 January 2020. It is fitting that, as we look back upon forty-five years of dedicated service to his father’s legacy, and thanks to Christopher’s ceaseless love for his father’s writings, we may find renewed pleasure and appreciation for the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. And, in ‘Gawain’s Leave-Taking’, a fitting coda to the work of father and son.

  ‘For now at last I take my leave …’

  Chris Smith

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are both contained in the same unique manuscript, which is now in the British Museum. Neither poem is given a title. Together with them are two other poems, also title-less, which are now known as Purity (or Cleanness), and Patience. All four are in the same handwriting, which is dated in round figures about 1400; it is small, angular, irregular and often difficult to read, quite apart from the fading of the ink in the course of time. But this is the hand of the copyist, not the author. There is indeed nothing to say that the four poems are the works of the same poet; but from elaborate comparative study it has come to be very generally believed that they are.

  Of this author, nothing is now known. But he was a major poet of his day; and it is a solemn thought that his name is now forgotten, a reminder of the great gaps of ignorance over which we now weave the thin webs of our literary history. But something to the purpose may still be learned of this writer from his works. He was a man of serious and devout mind, though not without humour; he had an interest in theology, and some knowledge of it, though an amateur knowledge, perhaps, rather than a professional; he had Latin and French and was well enough read in French books, both romantic and instructive; but his home was in the West Midlands of England: so much his language shows, and his metre, and his scenery.

  His active life must have lain in the latter half of the fourteenth century, and he was thus a contemporary of Chaucer’s; but whereas Chaucer has never become a closed book, and has continued to be read with pleasure since the fifteenth century, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are practically unintelligible to modern readers. Indeed in their own time the adjectives ‘dark’ and ‘hard’ would probably have been applied to these poems by most people who enjoyed the works of Chaucer. For Chaucer was a native of London and the populous South-East of England, and the language which he naturally used has proved to be the foundation of a standard English and literary English of later times; the kind of verse which he composed was the kind which English poets mostly used for the next five hundred years. But the language of this unknown author from the far less populous, far more conservative West Midlands, his grammar, his style, his vocabulary, were in many respects remote from those of London, off the main track of inevitable development; and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight he used the ancient English measure which had descended from antiquity, that kind of verse which is now called ‘alliterative’. It aimed at quite different effects from those achieved by the rhymed and syllable-counting metres derived from France and Italy; it seemed harsh and stiff and rugged to those unaccustomed to it. And quite apart from the (from a London point of view) dialectal character of the language, this ‘alliterative’ verse included in its tradition a number of special verse words, never used in ordinary talk or prose, that were ‘dark’ to those outside the tradition.

  In short, this poet adhered to what is now known as the Alliterative Revival of the fourteenth century, the attempt to use the old native metre and style long rusticated for high and serious writing; and he paid the penalty for its failure, for alliterative verse was not in the event revived. The tides of time, of taste, of language, not to mention political power, trade and wealth, were against it; and all that remains of the chief artist of the ‘Revival’ is the one manuscript, of which nothing is now known before it found a place in the library of Henry Savile of Bank in Yorkshire, who lived from 1568 to 1617.

  And these, then, are the reasons for translation: it is necessary if these poems are not to remain the literary pleasure only of mediaeval specialists. And they are difficult to translate. The main object of the present translations is to preserve the metres, which are essential to the poems as wholes; and to present the language and style, nonetheless, not as they may appear at a superficial glance, archaic, queer, crabbed and rustic, but as they were for the people to whom they were addressed: if English and conservative, yet courtly, wise, and well-bred – educated, indeed learned.

  II

  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

  If the most certain thing known about the author is that he also wrote Patience, Purity and Pearl, then we have in Sir Gawain the work of a man capable of weaving elements taken from diverse sources into a texture of his own; and a man who would have in that labour a serious purpose. I would myself say that it is precisely that purpose that has with its hardness proved the shaping tool which has given form to the material, given it the quality of a good tale on the surface, because it is more than that, if we look closer.

  The story is good enough in itself. It is a romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and colour; and it has virtues that would be lost in a summary, though they can be perceived when it is read at length: good scenery, urbane or humorous dialogue, and a skilfully ordered narrative. O
f this the most notable example is the long Third Part with its interlacing of the hunting-scenes and the temptations. By this device all three main characters are kept vividly in view during the three crucial days, while the scenes at home and in the field are linked by the Exchange of Winnings, and we watch the gains of the chase diminish as the gains of Sir Gawain increase and the peril of his testing mounts to a crisis.

  But all this care in formal construction serves also to make the tale a better vehicle of the ‘moral’ which the author has imposed on his antique material. He has re-drawn according to his own faith his ideal of knighthood, making it Christian knighthood, showing that the grace and beauty of its courtesy (which he admires) derive from the Divine generosity and grace, Heavenly Courtesy, of which Mary is the supreme creation: the Queen of Courtesy, as he calls her in Pearl. This he exhibits symbolically in mathematical perfection in the Pentangle, which he sets on Gawain’s shield instead of the heraldic lion or eagle found in other romances. But while in Pearl he enlarged his vision of his dead daughter among the blessed to an allegory of the Divine generosity, in Sir Gawain he has given life to his ideal by showing it incarnate in a living person, modified by his individual character, so that we can see a man trying to work the ideal out, see its weaknesses (or man’s weaknesses).

  But he has done more. His major point is the rejection of unchastity and adulterous love, and this was an essential part of the original tradition of amour courtois or ‘courtly love’; but this he has complicated again, after the way of morals in real life, by involving it in several minor problems of conduct, of courtly behaviour to women and fidelity to men, of what we might call sportsmanship or playing the game. On these problems he has been less explicit, and has left his hearers more or less to form their own views of the scale of their values, and their relation to the governing value of sin and virtue.