"A bold race bred there, battle-happy men causing trouble & torment"

December 10, 2015 10:12 AM

“So at Christmas in this court I lay down a challenge: / If a person here present, within these premises, / Is big or bold or red-blooded enough / To strike me one stroke and be struck in return, / I shall give him a gift of this gigantic cleaver / and the axe shall be his to handle how he likes. / I'll kneel, bare my neck and take the first knock. / So who has the gall? The gumption? The guts? / Who’ll spring from his seat and snatch this weapon? / I offer the axe — who’ll have it as his own? / I’ll afford one free hit from which I won't flinch, / and promised that 12 months will pass in peace, / then claim / the duty I deserve in one year and one day. / Does no one have the nerve to wager in this way?”

Poet and native northerner Simon Armitage’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight aims to not merely translate the poem’s words from middle English, but to retain the the style and alliteration of the original verse. All that is known about the original author is that he, like Armitage, was from the north of England. Some scholars have linked the story of Gawain & the Green Knight to the founding of Order of the Garter by King Edward III in 1312.

posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey (14 comments total)

Oh, hello -- Armitage has done some good (and not so good) work in his translations and adaptations, and this sample suggests this is one of the good ones. SGatGK deserves more love and attention in the modern world.
posted by Quasirandom at 10:16 AM on December 10, 2015

All that is known about the original author is that he […] was from the north of England.

This is not exactly true. The identity of the Pearl poet may never be known with certainty, but there's a fair amount of circumstantial evidence and a small handful of concrete possibilities.
posted by RogerB at 10:51 AM on December 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, man, I love this. My favorite book in my college Medieval Literature class was The Alliterative Morte d'Arthur and I have always like the story of Sur Gawain and the Green Knight but every version I've read was lacking. This s3ems like it it's going to hit me in the sweet spot.
posted by KingEdRa at 11:07 AM on December 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: Hits you in the sweet spot.
posted by Billiken at 11:18 AM on December 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

One of my favorite memories from my teenage years was being at a Quaker youth retreat, sprawled out on a pile of sleeping bags with about six friends, and listening to this woman tell the entirety of Gawain and the Green Knight, in verse, from memory. I've always had a soft spot for medieval English literature and poetry, but Gawain has been one of my favorites ever since. This is definitely going in the to-read pile.
posted by WidgetAlley at 12:11 PM on December 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

I only have time to watch the first quarter-hour at the moment, but it was fun; thanks for the post! I do have one quibble: Gawain is traditionally pronounced with the stress on the first syllable (GAH-wain), and I twitch a little every time he says "ga-WAIN."
posted by languagehat at 12:26 PM on December 10, 2015

Depends really. If we were following the ordinary Welsh pronunciation it would be closer to gah-wine (compare Owain).
posted by howfar at 1:23 PM on December 10, 2015

Right, but I'm talking about the traditional English pronunciation. Arthur is quite different in Welsh, too.
posted by languagehat at 3:38 PM on December 10, 2015

I mean, in Welsh, really, he'd be called Gwalchmai...
posted by running order squabble fest at 3:56 PM on December 10, 2015

But anyway, I generally like Simon Armitage a lot, although I like his original works more than his translations and I would like him to do more of those, and he has a really nice voice, so I am in favor of this.
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:02 PM on December 10, 2015

Nicely timed. Gawain and the Green Knight used to be THE Christmas Story (until the advent of Die Hard)
posted by fredludd at 6:46 PM on December 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

The author Alan Garner writes that his father's dialect was so close to the dialect of the poem that he could understand it clearly, despite his very limited formal education.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:04 PM on December 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Right, but I'm talking about the traditional English pronunciation.

The really issue is not correctness, of course, just that "GAH-wain" would, of course, sound affected to a mainstream British audience. Stories about Gawain are pretty common for children, so people feel a sense of familiarity with the pronunciation used hear. I've never heard an emphasis on the first syllable used in Britain outside a university, and not exclusively there.
posted by howfar at 1:48 AM on December 11, 2015

I have an older cousin named Gawain. He and the rest of the family pronounce it (roughly) GOW'n.

Just about everybody he meets mispronounces (guWAIN) it until he corrects them.
posted by Lexica at 11:11 AM on December 11, 2015