Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a mysterious tale weaving threads of English, Irish, and Welsh folklore with ideas of the medieval chivalric code and ethical and moral trials into a coherent but complex tapestry.

J. R. R. Tolkien called it “the best conceived and shaped narrative poem of the fourteenth century, indeed of the Middle Age in English, with one exception only. It has a rival, a claimant to equality not superiority in Chaucer’s masterpiece “Troilus and Criseyde” . . . . Both these poems deal, from different angles, with the problems that so much occupied the English mind: the relations of Courtesy and Love with morality and Christian morals and the Eternal Law.”

Given that it survived to the nineteenth century in a single known manuscript now in the British Library, from the Library of Sir Robert Cotton, we cannot be sure that it was a direct source for Shakespeare but neither can one know how many copies were available in Shakespeare’s time.

Join us as we read through and discuss this enigmatic tale. There will be four sessions.

No preparation required and any translation is acceptable.

Sessions led by Jenny Kirby.