Moreover, it persuasively fills this world with sophistication, courage, humor, terror, magic, and mutual affection that seem unsurpassed. As a medieval poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight transports audiences back to a world of knights and ladies, mysterious beings, fantasy landscapes, and picturesque castles whose hold on the imagination appears undiminished. In its concentrated style and intense demands on readers, its closest parallels are contemporary high art narratives like ChaucerвЂ™s Troilus and Criseyde or his Wife of BathвЂ™s Tale. Inexplicably, it achieves this without ever becoming top-heavy or allowing readersвЂ™ attention to drift from the continuously surprising turns of the story. Though it presents its plot as an obscure early anecdote in the vast Arthurian mythos, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens channels to profound and urgent questions, exploring issues of masculine identity, heterosexual (and homosocial) love, the conflicts of public identity and the private self, the ideals and contradictions of chivalry, and the comforts, mysteries, and shortcomings of medieval Christianity as practice and belief. In this, it stands apart from contemporary verse romances, which tend to be fast-paced, spectacularly action-packed, and filled with sensation it also differs strongly from MaloryвЂ™s Morte Darthur, whose expansive prose offers pleasures opposite to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Its density of meaning, verbal pyrotechnics, fantastic playfulness, and dizzyingly intricate structures will repay any amount of careful reading or imaginative probing, as the hundreds of books and essays written on the poem in the last half century prove.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not only the best, but also in many ways the most unusual or unprecedented of medieval English romances. It has frequently been вЂњmodernizedвЂќ as a school text, but it has also inspired literary retellings by major poets, establishing its appeal among educated and even casual readers outside the classroom. Since World War II, it has claimed a central place in any account of writing in medieval England, and at the same time it has been widely taught in survey and introductory courses it is such a good read that even novice readers immediately recognize its excitement and complexity. Though its language and dialect have challenged readers from the beginning-some of its archaisms must have seemed almost as unusual to medieval audiences as they do in the 21st century-its appeal remains fresh and powerful. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight stands in a class by itself as the most ambitious, most accomplished, most enjoyable poetical romance written in the English language during the Middle Ages.

Gaye the norton reader 14th edition