Sir Gawain and the Green knight ; Piers the Ploughman
INTRODUCTION
SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the finest representative of a great cycle of verse romances devoted wholly or principally to the adventures of Gawain. Of these there still survive in English a dozen or so; in French — the tongue in which romance most flourished — seven or eight more; and these, of course, are but a fraction of what must once have existed. 1 No other knight of the Round Table occupies anything like so important a place as Gawain in the literature of the middle ages. He is the first mentioned of Arthur's knights, for about 1125, ten years before Geoffrey of Monmouth dazzled the world with his revelation of King Arthur, William of Malmesbury in his Chronicle of the Kings of England had told of the discovery of Gawain's tomb in Ross, Wales, and had described him as Arthur's nephew and worthy second. In all the early romances Gawain is peerless for utter courage and courtesy. Where other knights quailed, Gawain was serene; where other champions were beaten, Gawain won; and where no resolution, strength, or skill could avail, Gawain succeeded by his kindness, his virtue, and his charming speech. The strange knight in the Squire's Tale gave his message so politely, says Chaucer,
"That Gawain with his olde curteisye
Though he were come ageyn out of Fairye
Ne coude him nat amende with a word."
But in time other heroes became more popular than he, and in some of the French prose romances of the thirteenth century Gawain's character was defaced that others might appear to excel him; and Malory in his Morte Darthur (c. 1470), which is based chiefly upon these later French romances, and Tennyson in his Idylls of the King, which in turn is mostly based on Malory, have unfortunately perpetuated the debased portrait. To get a glimpse of the real Gawain one should read, besides our piece, such romances as the Carl of Carlisle, 2 Golagros and Gawain, 9 The Wedding of Sir Gawain,* the Mule Sans Frein 5 and the episodes in Miss Weston's Sir Gawain at the Grail Castle, and Sir Gawain and the Lady of Lys, in the attractive little series of Arthurian Romances Unrepresented in Malory's Morte d'Arthur.*
Gawain and the Green Knight has been preserved to us, like many another precious