Celebrating 70 years since J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sir Gawain lecture in Glasgow (1953-2023)
On 15 April 1953, Tolkien delivered the W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture, on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to an audience of 300 at the University of Glasgow.
Call for Papers: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, text and images
Conference in Paris, from December 7th to 9th, 2023
The Green Knight and Sir Gawain
The Green Knight has just been released in the cinemas. This week on The Medieval Podcast, Danièle is joined by Peter Konieczny to talk about the film and how it compares to the 14th-century story Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Medieval Movie Review: The Green Knight
For many years, medievalists have gone to the movies with the expectation that their beloved stories will be given only lip service in favour of directorial changes meant to pander to a modern audience. With The Green Knight, they are in for a surprise.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the Movies
A look at the movie adaptions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, along with other media.
Teaching Tolkien’s Translations of Medieval Literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, and Pearl
J.R.R. Tolkien, the medievalist who became the father of modern fantasy literature, translated many poems out of Old English, Old Norse and Middle English into carefully versified modern English.
Speech Representation as a Narrative Technique in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The spoken word plays a central role in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the best-known Middle English texts.
Was the Gawain Scribe also the Artist?
That the scribe and artist of the Gawain manuscript may have been one and the same person raises some interesting questions about this unique and famous manuscript.
New Light on the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Manuscript: Multispectral Imaging and the Cotton Nero A.x. Illustrations
Among the striking features of the modest manuscript, London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x., are ten full-page illustrations of the poems and a further two taking up most of their pages.
Medievalists at the Movies: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword premiered May 2017 MAN CANDY ALERT! When I sat down to watch “King Arthur” over this past…
Greening Gawain: connecting environmental damage and masculinity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
This paper explores medieval environmental attitudes through a historical reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain Gets an 80s Reboot: The Sword of the Valiant Movie Review
This week, we have the retelling of the epic Arthurian romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in this 1984 fantasy reboot.
Courtesy and Politeness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
A close reading of three selected passages of the Middle English alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight provides a detailed picture of fictional and fairy-tale manifestations of courtly and polite behaviour in Middle English, a period that imported many new terms of courtesy and politeness from French.
Teaching Tolkien’s Translations of Medieval Literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo and Pearl
J.R.R. Tolkien, the medievalist who became the father of modern fantasy literature, translated many poems out of Old English, Old Norse and Middle English into carefully versified modern English
Fourteenth-Century Weaponry, Armour and Warfare in Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
This essay attempts to re-appraise selected passages of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from a wider military historical and archaeological perspective.
The Strategy of Challenges: Two Beheading Games In Medieval Literature
The Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its Old Irish ancestor The Feast of Bricriu recount a remarkable stranger’s challenge to the hero, in effect, ‘You can chop off my head if you’ll let me return the blow.’
Roses are Red, Violets are Beowulf
Let’s take five minutes to look at medieval alliterative poetry, using some of the most famous poems of the period.
Crafting the witch: Gendering magic in medieval and early modern England
This project documents and analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.
Medieval Misogyny and Gawain’s Outburst against Women in “‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’
The view has been gaining ground of late that the Gawain of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a knight renowned as ‘Pat fyne fader of nurture’ (1. 919) and as ‘so cortays and coynt’ of his ‘hetes’ (1. I525), degenerates at the moment of leave-taking from the Green Knight, his erstwhile host, to the level of a churl capable of abusing the ladies of that knight’s household (11.2411 -28).
A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The famous line from that modern romance- “A kiss is just a kiss”- is the message the Gawain-poet gave his listeners six centuries ago.
The Canterbury Tales as Framed Narratives
Although I think that the notion of modern art as organic must be qualified and questioned, there is a certain force and validity to Jordan’s distinction between medieval and modern art. Modern art expects the parts to be somewhat subordinate to the whole. The dominant stress of New Criticism was on the organic nature of art.
Towards A Poetics of Marvellous Spaces in Old and Middle English Narrative
I argue that the heart of this poetics of marvellous spaces is displacement. Their wonder and dread comes from boundaries that these places blur and cross, from the resistance of these places to being known or mapped, and from the deliberate distancing between these places and the home of their texts.
“The Taint of a Fault”: Purgatory, Relativism and Humanism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
“The Taint of a Fault”: Purgatory, Relativism and Humanism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Bill Phillips Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, No.…
Seasonal Setting and the Human Domain in Early English and Early Scandinavian Literature
Seasonal Setting and the Human Domain in Early English and Early Scandinavian Literature Paul Sander Langeslag University of Toronto: Doctor of Philosophy, Centre for…
Function and Representation of Women in Fourteenth-Century English Arthuriana
This thesis investigates the function and representation of female characters through Arthurian tropes in three fourteenth-century English Arthurian texts: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale,’ and Sir Launfal.