Milieu, John Strecche, and the Gawain-Poet

Summary

The Gawain-poet's contributions to English language and literature were seminal and his quality as a poet maintains its excellence after more than 600 years. Yet the Gawain-poet continues to be anonymous. His most widely read work, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK), is still a mystery, for readers and scholars have yet to understand its many references to places and issues outside the text. The artist's craft and sophistication go underappreciated when much of the humor, irony, and metaphor in SGGK depends upon knowing the context and audience to which the poet's allusions apply. The goal of this study is to open the field to new knowledge of the Gawainpoet and the milieu of SGGK. One premise is that Gawain-poet studies have been inhibited by some conventional habits of mind that limit the range for research in spite of expanding numbers of studies, easier access to transcriptions, growing numbers of translations, digital imaging of texts and illuminations, linguistic analyses, and developments in dialectology. There are four common assumptions in the field of Gawain-studies which are especially persistent and problematic.

Chief among these issues is a dating premise represented by an often-quoted statement published in 1925 by John R. R. Tolkien and Eric V. Gordon. The conjecture placed SGGK in “the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the latest possible date being determined by that of the manuscript, c.1400.” The second complication is the persistent dismissal of a message written over the illumination which appears on folio 129.