Периоды английской литературы. Карпова В.А - 16 стр.

        “Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight” tells of the adventures of one of
King Arthur’s knights, Sir Gawayne, in a struggle against the Green Knight who
possessed some magic powers as well as great strength and cunning. Sir
Gawayne finishes his adventures with all honour and gets Arthur’s delighted
laughter for his pains.
        The story of Sir Gawayne is very ancient and there are analogues in both
early Celtic and French documents. But all we can see for certain is that the
story is widely dispersed and may have been of remote Celtic origin. It is written
in an English dialect and has vast rhythmic resources and possibilities. The
“Gawayne” poet’s form of English or dialect is that of a community in a rough,
mountainous country with a scattering of castles. The Gawayne poet’s dialect
reflects the uniqueness of his place and generation and the triumph of “Sir
Gawayne” is largely rhythmic. It is essential to read the poem aloud to enable
the masterly rhythm to come into play. Perhaps the author of Gawayne also
wrote “Pearl” and “Patience”, two of the best alliterative poems of the time.
“Pearl” has been preserved on the same manuscript as “Sir Gawayne and the
Green Knight” and is in the same dialect. Pearl was the name of the poet’s
daughter, who died at the age of two; but he is comforted when, in a dream, he
sees her in heaven. “Patience” is the story of Jonah who was thrown into the sea
and swallowed by an immense creature of the sea, which carried him to the
place where God wished him to go.
        “Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight” is a fourteenth-century metrical
romance. This term is applied both to medieval verse romances and to the type
of verse romances produced by Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. There are
about sixty English medieval metrical romances extant. They appear to belong
to stages in the transition – during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth
centuries – from oral poetry to written composition. Many of these tales have
been regarded as Celtic, and their principal channel of development into French
and English and German as the Breton story – tellers who were bilingual. As
professional story-tellers at the courts of kings and nobles in early medieval
France and England, the Bretons told their tales in French. Thus what may have
been originally Celtic tales were made into French romances, influenced in
greater or less degree by the spirit of the troubadours. From French they passed
into German and English. So the gods of ancient mythology became medieval
knights, the spring or earth goddesses became courtly ladies or queens.
        If we compare the extant romances we should quickly recognize that a
number of themes or motifs keep recurring in them, though always as variations.
There is, for example, the theme of the union of a mortal with an other-world
being. Sometimes a mortal queen meets a splendid other-world stranger, or she
is abducted by the king of the Other World. Or a mortal man – a knight – may
meet in a forest a lady, surpassingly lovely, who is clearly a fay and who woos
him.
        In many romances the theme is of a succession of tests – a kind of
initiation - which a knight must undergo to prove his manhood; of a contest

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