The Gawain-poet

Abstract

Gawain, not Lancelot, was the original principal knight of King Arthur. Gawain was the son of Arthur’s sister Morgause, and the relationship of uncle to sister’s son was of great antiquity and power. The chronicles of the history of Britain (not only England) which, after Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (1135), incorporated Arthur into the long story from Troy to the Anglo-Saxons, maintained Gawain’s pre-eminence. Lancelot was the product mainly of the romantic inventiveness of Chrétien de Troyes in the late twelfth century, and of the continuation and expansions by thirteenth-century French romancers of Chrétien’s unfinished poem about Lancelot and Guinevere, Le Chevalier de la Charrette. The English alliterative poems disregard Lancelot and follow the chronicle tradition. Gawain is represented as the idealistic young hero of the greatest of all English romances, the alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2530 lines long and divided into four sections called fyttes. It was composed about 1370 and survives in a modest little manuscript, British Library Cotton Nero A x, with three other poems, Pearl, Patience and Cleanness (or Purity; all are modern titles).