Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. 1975; Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, Mariner, 2021.

I am not sure whether it is because of the original material or the quality of the translation—likely both—but this is great reading!

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the earliest extant tales in English concerning King Arthur and his knights. While it and the poem Pearl were likely written by a contemporary of Chaucer, the English dialect was significantly different from Chaucer’s London English. It is much closer to Anglo-Saxon, so for most readers a translation really helps. Here are the opening lines in the original:

Siþen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at troye
þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondez and askez…

Here is Tolkien’s translation:

When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy
and the fortress fell in flame to firebrand and ashes…

Definitely more recognizable!

Now critics have written much about Sir Gawain the Green Knight. Even this edition contains a preface by the editor, an introduction by the translator, and the text of a J. R. R. Tolkien lecture on the subject.

This is not going to be any literary interpretation then, but a mere review of sorts for the reader, with perhaps a little appreciation for Tolkien. (If I just say Tolkien, I am referring to J. R. R., not his son Christopher, who edited this collection.)

Tolkien gives some reasonable evidence that Chaucer knew the poem if not the poet, but the dialect they spoke was notably different. One near contemporary would write that one could travel twenty miles in England and not be able to understand the dialect spoken in the new place. Chaucer is more or less readable to the educated modern reader. The poetry in this volume would not be so.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are found on the same medieval manuscript book, and there is good reason to believe they were written by the same anonymous poet, often called the Pearl Poet. The two poems are quite different, however.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has elements of many of the Arthurian stories, namely courtesy, courtly love, and magic. When reading it, we are reminded that both courtesy and courtly love have the same root, court. Courtesy is the behavior or actions one would be expected to take in the court of a king or nobleman. Courtly love is the formal relation between a man and a woman who are members of a court and expected to chastely honor one another.

The tale begins with some magic. An exceptionally large knight, all dressed in green, with green skin and a similar green horse shows up in Arthur’s court with a challenge. Without going into too much detail, none of the knights (Lancelot, Bors, Bedivere, Agravaine, Iwain, and Lionel among others) want to accept the challenge, so Arthur takes it on himself. The test is dangerous, and no one in the court really wants the king to do it. Finally, Arthur’s young nephew Gawain says he will accept it, even though he will probably be killed in the attempt.

After some serious magic—I will leave the reader to discover what it is—Gawain realizes that in one year, he has to go to the Green Knight’s castle to take the second half of the challenge. He must arrive by New Year’s Day. As the following Christmas approaches, Gawain sets out to try to find the Green Knight and his castle.

He finally is welcomed by a nobleman who says he knows the Green Castle. He invites Gawain to spend a few days with him celebrating the holidays. The nobleman (we find out near the end his name is Bertilak) goes hunting every day for three days, but he insists that Gawain stay at the castle and entertain the ladies of the court. Again, without going into too much detail, the ladies of the court provide pleasant diversion but also temptation. This creates real tension in the story. What if the expectation of courtesy or courtly love conflict? What if either behavior conflicts with the Biblical moral code?

Tolkien’s own commentary notes that “Gawain is forced to draw…a distinction between ‘sin’ (the moral law) and ‘courtesy’” (128). I note that in this story the young Gawain is not the libertine we meet in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and other later tales.

The poetry here is very lively. The poet clearly observed hunts and enjoyed them. On the first day there is a deer hunt led by the nobleman. As I read this, I could not help thinking of the description of fox hunts in The Eustace Diamonds. On the second day the lord and his men hunt a formidable wild boar. And on the third day there is indeed a fox hunt. Meanwhile back at the castle, the tension mounts.

Finally, Gawain sets out for the nearby castle of the Green Knight. The “castle” turns out to be a cave in a hill, more like the Hörselberg in the story of Tannhäuser, a courtly story made famous in more modern times by a Wagner opera and an Aubrey Beardsley novella. Gawain does meet the challenge, but not in the way he was expecting. There really is a surprise ending—sorry, no spoilers here!

The tale is divided into four “fits” or cantos of distinct stanzas with a varying number of lines. The first fit is set at Arthur’s Court (at Winchester here, not Camelot) when the Green Knight shows up. The second is Gawain wandering the British countryside till he finally comes to Bertilak’s castle. The third and longest fit describes his stay at Bertilak’s with the hunting and feasting at the castle. The fourth fit describes the second encounter with the Green Knight at the Knight’s place.

The stanzas are very distinctive, too. Most of the lines follow the older Anglo-Saxon or Old English alliterative style. Though he sometimes changes which sounds alliterate, Tolkien is careful to keep this up throughout. Notice in the second line of the poem translated above, the line still alliterates but instead of repeating the b sound, it alliterates with f. Still, the narrative poem reads here like a short novel.

The final four lines of each stanza are shorter and instead of alliterating, they rhyme abab. The poem, then, has elements of both the older English—think of the alliteration of Beowulf—with the rhyming which was becoming more standard, especially as courts took on French styles of singing. Tolkien masters this as well, so the poetic quality comes through even to a modern ear.

We are reminded that Tolkien himself was a medievalist. His commentary that accompanies the poem is worth reading and very helpful. Unlike many critics, even in his day, he does not try to impose a more contemporary worldview, but takes the work at face value. We are also reminded that his Middle Earth was a medieval world. His love of such things comes through in his novels, his translations, and in his scholarly work. That, plus his skilled writing, makes these writings appealing even to those who have no interest in medieval literature.

At the same time, his own commentary on the poem hints at what makes his storytelling so effective:

Behind our poem stalk the figures of elder myth, and through the lines are heard the echoes of ancient cults, beliefs and symbols remote from the consciousness of an educated moralist (but also a poet) of the late fourteenth century. His story is not about those old things, but it receives part of its life, its vividness, its tension from them. That is the way with great fairy-stories—of which this is one (110, author’s emphasis).

One could say the same thing about the legendarium of Middle Earth.

Pearl

Pearl is the second poem Tolkien translated in this book. While Sir Gawain and the Green Knight could be considered a short epic of four “books,” Pearl is a visionary poem. While quite different in style, it has echoes of Dante’s Paradiso.

Again, Tolkien does a great job of translating the poem into modern English so that it reads like a narrative. Yes, it is devotional. It even has elements of hymns. But it mainly tells a story.

Like The Divine Comedy, it is told in the first person. Like Dante, too, the poet’s role to some degree is as a passive observer. But like Dante in his poem, the Pearl Poet reacts to things and carries on conversations. In this poem, Pearl is the poet’s Beatrice.

Like Dante at the beginning of his poem, the Pearl Poet is distressed, even depressed at first. In his case it is not because of exile; it is because his own young daughter named Pearl has died. (Tolkien notes in his commentary that some do not take this literally but see this simply on a symbolic level. He explains why he takes it literally. Pearl is no mere symbol but a real person.)

Indeed, there is a tone at the beginning not unlike Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son.” Both poets not only miss their child, but they wonder about purpose—both a purpose for their own lives and why God would allow one so young and innocent to die. While Jonson answers that question in a few lines, the Pearl Poet takes a hundred and one twelve-line stanzas.

The stanzas themselves are very tightly written. They clearly have more influence from French style than Old English. Each stanza has an ababcdcdefef rhyme scheme. Also the first line of a stanza takes a phrase from the last line of the stanza before it. The stanzas then are arranged in groups of five (one group of six) that have the common lines, so there is a thematic order to the poem.

As with Dante’s, much of this poem records a supernatural vision. The poet gets taken into Heaven where he sees many things and people including his daughter. Much of the poem consists of ethereal descriptions of what he sees. More of the poem, though, relates the conversation between the poet and Pearl, his daughter in Heaven. There are numerous allusions to the Bible, often naming the book of the Bible where the teaching or story is found.

Ben Jonson says God took his son from him at an early age because he had been turning his son into an idol. He also asks, “Will man lament the state he should envy?” Similarly, the poet and the reader understand that daughter Pearl now lives in a far, far better place. As St. Paul tells us: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (I Corinthians 2:9 KJV, cf. Isaiah 64:4 KJV). The poem, too, especially as it is translated for us, is a thing of beauty, as is the better place it tries to describe.

Sir Orfeo

Sir Orfeo is by far the shortest of the three narrative poems translated by Tolkien in this book. It has a little over 600 lines, so it really is a short story compared to the other two. Most readers can tell that the hero’s name suggests Orpheus, and, indeed, this is a medieval, courtly recasting of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. This poem appears in various forms in three different manuscripts and may have been written as much as a century earlier than the other two poems. Tolkien tells us that it was probably translated from the French into Middle English.

In our story Orfeo and Heuridis are already married. He is a good king ruling a mythical England, not unlike Arthur. He also is a skilled harpist. One day while resting outdoors with her ladies-in-waiting, Heuridis suddenly disappears. The king is so distressed at his loss, that he gives up his throne and his riches to go on a quest to find his queen. He lives the life of a poor begging minstrel. As with Orpheus in Ovid, his music enchants even trees and animals.

A loyal retainer takes over the throne as a steward. Orfeo gets him to promise that if he ever returns with his wife, that he will return the kingdom to him. After roaming for ten years, Orfeo discovers that Heruidis was taken captive by faeries (that is the way Tolkien spells it here—though not in his commentaries). One can guess the rest of the story. He begins singing and playing his harp. He is so moving that the king and queen of the faeries grant him his wish. Let us just say that it has a happier ending than the original Greek myth.

One thing stuck out to this reader. The medieval kingdom has been ruled by a caretaker, a steward, for ten years. What happens when the legitimate king returns after spending time with woodland faeries? Hmm. One can wonder how much this inspired the story of the Stewards of Gondor and Aragorn and the elves in The Return of the King…

Sir Orfeo is fun to read. From all three of these works we see reasons why Return of the King continues to be an Amazon bestseller.

P.S. Speaking of Amazon, when is Season Two of The Rings of Power coming out?