I talked briefly about the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c.1375-1400) in today's Outlines class. You will not have to answer questions about it in the exams or tests, but perhaps some extra information might interest some of you. There is a useful short introduction to the poem here, on the Luminarium webiste. On the same site, you can also find two modern translations of the poem. I mentioned last week that J.R.R. Tolkien (author of The Lord of the Rings) wrote one of the most important studies of Beowulf. He also wrote on, and was influenced by, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Luminarium also has some excellent pages on Geoffrey Chaucer, which you might well find helpful. These include a link to the text of the poem in the original Middle English with parallel translation into modern English. I'll talk more about Middle English at our next class.
Since we had studied Chaucer last year, I have a pretty good idea about both "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Beowulf". I enjoyed "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", but "Beowulf" not so much.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to give an advice or two for the students who study "Beowulf"; don't watch the movie instead of reading the whole text. There are lots of differences which I found out after I watched the movie.
My other advice would be to say not to take other people's opinions about the characters and adopt it as your own because you might have a different opinion once you read the text yourself like I did.(Actually, it is pretty much the same with any other texts too.) To give an example; I thought Grendel was mean and does what he does just for fun. As I read further, I found out that he actually is lonely and nobody tells him to come and have fun with them.
As I said before I enjoyed "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" very much. (Because I was always interested with that period including Arthur,Merlin,Morgan Le Fay etc.) My favorite part of the text was; how the hunted animals and the situations that Sir Gawain was experiencing, match (dear,boar,fox). I highly recommend you to read it (even if you're not studying it in class).
Thanks for the comment - that's going to be very helpful, I think! I'm sorry we don't have time to do Sir Gawain in any detail on this course. We're on a whistle-stop tour through the history of English Literature, and we need to get to the twentieth century (and hopefully the twenty-first) by January! I'd certainly encourage people to read both texts for themselves.
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