What Sir Gawain means to me

Abstract

When I went to London University in the 1960s the English degree was in Language and Literature. This meant that half of the degree consisted of learning to translate Old English, reading and translating the literary works of that time, studying the development of the English language, as well as studying Middle English language and literature. I thoroughly disliked Old English. I had undertaken the degree without fully realizing the extent of this part of the course. While I found the history and development of the language fascinating, I had neither the ability to understand easily nor the interest or humility to summon the determination to work at Old English. Furthermore, the nature of Old English literature, all accounts of early battles and the exploits of Beowulf Žghting the monster Grendel in the mead hall, left me cold. It seemed a cold world, a world of men and Žghting with no human interest (no women, in fact), and, as Alice said of the book her sister was reading, ‘no pictures and no conversations in it’. But when Middle English arrived on the scene things looked up. For one thing the language was more intelligible to a twentiethcentury person. Chaucer was writing in the early version of the language which was to become standard English. But the subject matter had changed too. This also was recognizable to a twentiethcentury person. Individual characters, love, sex and women had entered into it. In writing a ‘frame-story’, that is a series of tales within an enclosing narrative, Chaucer is sometimes suggested to be looking backward to the Decameron, Ovid’s Metamorphoses or The Thousand and One Nights. However, I think what is equally important is the modernness of The Canterbury Tales. A group of people are portrayed as individuals in that they are at least clearly