Notes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Extract

Study of the Gawain-poet in recent years has greatly increased: and with increase it has also grown more intelligent and appreciative. In 1922 there appeared the late Professor Emerson's ‘Notes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (JEGPh. XXI) and ‘Some Notes on the Pearl’ (PMLA. XXXVII), two suggestive and penetrating studies which anticipated many of the emendations and notes of the edition that was to follow three years later. In 1925 there appeared what scholars had long been hoping for, a carefully edited text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This edition, the work of two British scholars, Professors Tolkien and Gordon, provides the reader with good notes and a competent working glossary. The notes, however, it must be said, are sometimes too brief in their discussion and give too little recognition to the work of previous annotators, where credit was justly due. Professor J. R. Hulbert's review of the new edition, which appeared later in the same year (Mod. Phil. XXIII. 246–249), though brief, contains a number of comments which succeeding scholars must take into account. In 1927 Professor Emerson published a further study of the Pearl (PMLA. XLII), and more important for our purpose, his review of the new edition (JEGPh. XXVI) which threw further light on many a textual crux and clarified some details of the story. Nor have studies of Sir Gawain been confined to criticism of the text. Fräulein von Schaubert (Engl. Stud. LVII), has postulated an English rather than a French origin for the poem, thus taking issue with the views of Kittredge. Also translations of the poem have been published by S. O. Andrew and T. H. Banks which keep the alliterative measure of the long line and endeavor not unsuccessfully to maintain the bob and wheel arrangement at the stanza's end.