2025: "There Are Many Ways to the Green Chapel: Creating a Resource Guide to Adaptations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (2025)

2024: CFP More than The Green Knight: Exploring the Ongoing Tradition of Adapting and Appropriating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hybrid) (9/15/2024; ICMS Kalamazoo 5/8-10/2024)

More than The Green Knight: Exploring the Ongoing Tradition of Adapting and Appropriating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hybrid) Call for Papers Sponsored by Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture; International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB); International Pearl-Poet Society Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Joseph M. Sullivan, and Amber Dunai 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan) Hybrid event: Thursday, 8 May, through Saturday, 10 May, 2025 Please Submit Proposals by 15 September 2024 Session Information Released in 2021, David Lowery’s film The Green Knight thrust the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into the spotlight like never before and attracted the attention of viewers and critics across the globe. Scholars of medieval literature and film have also been inspired by the film’s release, and there is now a flourishing field of The Green Knight Studies as displayed in articles, books, conferences, essays, special issues, and themed sessions. However, all of this attention on Lowery’s work creates a limited understanding of the full post-medieval afterlife of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We propose this session as a counter to the flurry of attention on Lowery’s work. The Green Knight is merely one example of a much wider array of adaptations of the story that began in the sixteenth century with The Greene Knight and continues to this day with comics, drama, fiction, film, games, illustration, music, opera, picture books, radio broadcasts, and television programming. Beyond these, aspects of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight have been appropriated by many creative artists and integrated into their own creations in various media. Collectively, these adaptations and appropriations make up a rich textual tradition for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that now extends over five centuries and deserves more notice. Our intent in this session is twofold: First, to uncover what we lose by focusing on Lowery’s film outside of the larger context of adaptation and appropriations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Second, to highlight what can be added to the larger fields of Arthurian Studies and Pearl-Poet Studies by widening our view of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to include further or other adaptations and appropriations of the text in our research and teaching. Submissions should address at least one (if not both) of the following questions: What other adaptations and appropriations do we miss by focusing on Lowery’s film? What do we gain (for the disciple, our students, and/or ourselves) when we look beyond it? Thank you for your interest in our session. Please address questions and/or concerns to the organizers at MedievalinPopularCulture@gmail.com. Submissions will also be considered as part of an essay collection on the theme. Please see the full call for details on submission information to the conference site.

Perspectives in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Medieval Transgressive Text?

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a complex Arthurian verse romance that features a beheading game coupled with parallel temptation and hunting scenes. These elements are intertwined; yet this is revealed to hero and reader only towards the end of the narrative. The Gawain-poet presents the reader with ambivalent characters and a hero who does not necessarily comprehend the implications of events unfolding around him. The ambivalence permeating the characters has led to manifold, often conflicting, interpretations of the text. The present article explores the characters of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in particular the two protagonists, with reference to literary analogues and other works that offer meaningful insights, as well as with due regard to medieval conceptions of art and the values enshrined in Sir Gawain’s pentangle. The objective of the present article is to determine whether the poem’s ambivalent elements give rise to a text that is open-ended, thereby transgressing medieval conceptions of art, or whether the pentangle passage outlining Sir Gawain’s moral code provides a fixed point against which to interpret the unfolding narrative. Other forms of transgression, particularly those pertaining to the boundaries of genre, are also discussed.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Not Really a Chivalric Romance

Primerjalna književnost, 2019

Medieval English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is unique not only in its form, content and structure, but also in the poet’s skillful use of conventions that play with the reader’s expectations by introducing elements that make the poem exquisitely ambivalent and place it in the fuzzy area where reality and fiction overlap. Although the poem seemingly praises the strength and purity of chivalry and knighthood, it actually subtly criticizes and comments on their failure when practiced outside the court and in real life. This is particularly noticeable when the poem’s symbolism, its hero, and the society he comes from are read against historical context, i.e. as reflections of the realities of medieval life. Accordingly, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can be read as a poem that praises chivalry and knighthood more by way of commenting on their dissipation than through overt affirmation, as the future of the kingdom, its rulers and society, with its faulty Christian knights, is far from bright, given the cracks and flaws that mar its seemingly glossy façade.

Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

This essay explores the synthesis of symbolism of Paganism and Christianity in "Sir Gawain and The Green Knight." The story is rife with symbols of pagan fertility, yet dressed in Christian honor and virtue.

THE CASTLES AS HEAVENLY HOMES IN OPPOSITION TO NATURE WITH A FINAL RECONCILIATION AS PAINTED IN SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

ENGLISH CHIVALRY AND SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

Falling Knights: Sir Gawain in Pre and Post Malory Arthurian Tradition

The present study traces the development of Sir Gawain"s traits in the Arthurian legend through an analysis of Arthurian literature in early medieval works, in transition, and in modern cycle. It aims to show what makes Sir Gawain a multiple character and how his plastic character has appealed to the literary, political, and social taste of the time of his creation and recreation. The focus will be upon the roles that the new characteristics of Sir Gawain should fulfil and the reasons which stand behind this transition in his character. The study examines the representation of Sir Gawain as a heroic knight in mainly three texts from the medieval and modern English Arthurian tradition: Geoffrey of Monmouth"s Historia Regum Britanniae Sir Thomas Malory"s De Morte Arthur, Alfred Lord Tennyson"s Idylls of the King. Some references are made to other contemporary texts. These texts range from literary to history, providing a broad overview of the many ways in which history and romance approaches the question of the roles of knighthood and chivalry through the figure of Sir Gawain. By exploring these narratives in their historical and social contexts, the present study explains why Sir Gawain maintains certain characteristics across a particularly eventful period in English history, as well as why certain characteristics change drastically. It will also offer new insights about public perception of medieval notions of knighthood and chivalry.

The Romance of Exchange: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Viator, 1991

2Bloch (n. 1 above) 17. 3Jauss (n. 1 above) 183 summarizes the "exemplaty" process of the continual "transformation and rejuvenation of the aesthetic canon" of medieval literature, from its "repression by the aesthetic canon of the Renaissance" through to its "learned disclosure by nineteenth-centuty historicism," its "reception by the ideologies of national literature" and finally to modern attempts to establish the modernity of medieval literature in its alterity. 4Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison 1988) x.

So Familiar, Yet So Strange: Mythic Shadows of the Medieval Gawain Romance in Iris Murdoch's Green Knight

2004

Discusses Murdoch’s The Green Knight, which uses themes and plot elements from Gawain, but interpreted in her own fashion. Additional

Supplanting Dominance: Religion Dynamics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Echoes of the knighting ceremony inSir Gawain and the Green Knight

Neophilologus, 1993

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight juxtaposes the ideal of knightly behavior and its reality as practiced. The gap between ideal and actual behavior is most clearly expressed by the contrasting views Gawain and the Green Knight voice in the fourth fitt. There Gawain condemns his failure while Bertilak praises the knight's success: "As perle bi l~e quite pese is of prys more, / So is Gawayne, in god fayth, bi olver gay kny3tes. ''2 While the contrast between ideal behavior and fallen practice is most pointed at the end of the poem, it also surfaces throughout: in the first fitt when the Green Knight attemps to separate the reality of knightly behavior from its reputation by questioning, "What, is l~is Arl~ures hous?" and goading the knights as "Berdlez chylder" (11. 309, 208); in the second when the narrator upholds the most lofty ideals of chivalry through the long exegesis of Gawain's shield (11.619-69); in the bedroom scenes of the third fitt when the poet links this conflict to knightly desire-both for sex and survival. It is in the fourth fitt, however, that the poet summarizes his reflections through an elaborate reenactment of the knighting ceremony. This parodic dubbing unites the real and the ideal by forcing the hero and the audience to reflect on chivalry's roots in truth and humility? To teach such a summary lesson (however complicated and subtle that lesson may be), the Gawain-poet employs the romance form for a didactic purpose. In this way, the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight reflects another genre popular in fourteenth-century England, the ethical manual of chivalry. The ethical manual, as I define it, combines a theory or philosophy of knighthood with practical knowledge. 4 The appeal of this genre lay partially in its presentation of learning through fictive motifs. Indeed, the most popular ethical manuals borrow both the character types and the setting of medieval romance. The Gawain-poet thus follows the authors of the ethical manuals in experimenting with cross or mixed genres as well as in articulating a philosophy of chivalry. This essay will ~urvey a chivalric rite thematically explored by the ethical manuals and parodically depicted by Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the knighting ceremony. Most popular among the ethical manuals of chivalry which circulated in fourteenth-century England were the anonymous Ordene de chevalerie and Ramon Lull's Livre de l'ordre chevalerie. L'Ordene de chevalerie was composed in northern France in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Of its ten surviving manuscripts, three are of Anglo-Norman dialect, English provenance, and fourteenth-century date? MS L was copied and compiled in the first half of the fourteenth century by Friar William Herebert of Hereford, which places the production of the manuscript in close proximity to the dialect area of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Review: Sir Gawain and the Green Knyght * Sir Gawain și Cavalerul cel Verde, translation into Romanian by Mircea M. Tomuș, Cluj Napoca: Editura Școala Ardeleană, 2021, 350 pages, ISBN 978-606-797-644-1, paperback, 50 RON

East-West Cultural Passage

The survival and dissemination of any old literary text written prior to the age of printing are conditioned primarily by a matter of chancethe preservation of at least one copy of the manuscriptand, secondly, by scholarly interest in and translation of the respective text. As Walter Benjamin famously argued in his seminal essay The Translator's Task, the act of translation is crucial for "the survival" (Überleben) and for the "continuing life" (Fortleben) of the original. Far from being perceived as secondary, inferior or derivative, translation is revalorized as a process that involves the invigoration of the original and of the past it belongs to (Benjamin 153). The fate of the medieval English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, generally acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of Middle English literature, presents us with such a story of survival that has been shaped both by chance and by scholarly enthusiasm. The single surviving manuscript of this late 14 thcentury Arthurian romance, whose author has remained anonymous, was accidentally rediscovered in 1839, in the collection belonging to the library of Sir Robert Cotton, a renowned English antiquarian of the early 17 th century. It is to this great collector that we also owe the preservation of the sole extant copy of the greatest of all Old English poems, Beowulf. Besides the text of Sir Gawain, the manuscript contains three more narrative poems

How the Axe Falls: A Retrospective on Thirty-five Years of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Performance

2013

This retrospective represents a new approach to using historical performance as a tool for understanding medieval narrative performance. The core of the article traces how an individual performer's interaction with a stable medieval text both indicates directions medieval performers may have taken and suggests the limitations imposed by modern performance conventions. The discussion touches on issues of adaptation and translation, variation in troupe composition and audience, expectations of modern audiences, impact of costume choices, and limitations of audio and video recordings as documentation of live performance. Juxtaposing eight performances of a single passage clarifies how performance can transform a text, and how a text can impose a consistent character across a range of performance redactions. While one of the "popular romances" might seem a better choice for this study, market issues drive performance as much now as in the Middle Ages. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is well known and loved and widely taught, and that is why I have a continuous record of renditions of this romance rather than any other. Despite its "literary" character, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is resilient enough to withstand the exigencies of performance; even more, it twists its way into living analogs, weaving its "lel letteres" around music so that sometimes one strand shows and sometimes another; glimpses of meanings take shape that were invisible on the two-dimensional page.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : a bibliography of criticism, 1978-88

1991

Biblioth&que nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Direction des acquisitions et Bibliographic Services Branch des services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa Ontario Ottawa (Ontario) K I A ON4 K l A ON4 Your Irle L'olre r0tbrctncc NOTICE AVlS Bibliotheque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Direction des acquis~trons et Bibliographic Services Branch d~s services bibliographiques 395 Welltngton Street 395, rue Wellmgton Ottawa. Ontarlo Ottawa (Ontarlo) K l A ON4 KIA ON4 I (date) ABSTRACT-is bibliography documents scholarly studies of the anonymous fourteenth-century Middie English alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, published from 1978 to 1988 (inclusive). Its 349 entries reflect the puem's complexity and appeal. Nearly eighty-five per cent of these studies are in English and are fully annotated; of the non-English language entries, several are not annotated, but in each case a translation of the title appears. The scope of the bibliography is broad: materials documented range from editions, translations and reference works, to critical essays and monographs, to dramascripts, a ballet and an opera; doctoral dissertations are excluded, but selected reviews of monograph-length studies (including editions) do appear. m.e bibliography is organized inta sections as follows: "Editions", "Translations", "Adaptations and Performances", "Reference Worksn. "General Introductions and Romance Surveys", "Authorship and Manuscript Studies", "Alliteration and Language Studies", "Sources and Analogues" and "General Criticismn. Accessibility to the materials is heightened by these divisions and by four indices: author, subject, word study and line study. Detailed annotations are intended to be non-evduative and thus adopt the voice of each scholar and critic in turn. A brief preface describing the editorial principles of the bibliography is followed by an introduction to &e materials found in each section and to the theoretical approaches brought to bear on Gawain studies in recent years, including fenhist, mythological, psychoanalytic and serniological models. The survey observes that many Gawain critics find the poem open-ended in its meanings, and they reflect postmodem sensibility in Lheir view of the poem as metatextual and self-reflexive: that is, the romance hero's experience is seen to be about meaning, just as the poem is about the limitations of the romance mode and of human perception.

“the graciouseste gome that vndir God lyffede”: a reconsideration of Sir Gawain in the Late Medieval Middle English and Middle Scots romance tradition

2015

In Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, King Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain, is presented as a troublesome figure whose vengefulness hastens the collapse of Camelot. This characterization is unsurprising in the light of traditional French depictions of Gawain, but it is distinctly at odds with a rival, Anglo-Scottish tradition that depicts him rather differently as a figure of moderation, wise counsel, and courtesy. Indeed, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this version of Gawain was used by a number of romance writers to explore themes of kingship, identity, and regionalism in England and Scotland. This thesis attempts to explain the complexities and contradictions of Gawain’s role in the Middle English and Middle Scots tradition. Chapter one establishes a “northern Gawain type”, drawing on thematic patterns in four northern Gawain romances: The Weddyng of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, The Avowyng of Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, and The Knightly Tale ...

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Malory’s Template: “Finding Time for Romance” in Modern Arthuriana

POETICA: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies, 2023

One of the potential attractions of the Arthurian story lies in its historical roots. Chris Brooks and Inga Bryden suggested that "[t]he enduring English cultural fascination with Arthur can be located in a process of myth-making whereby medieval Arthurian literature is reinvented as part of a historicist impulse" (247). Perhaps spurred by this "historicist impulse," Kazuo Ishiguro set his recent novel The Buried Giant in a post-Arthurian era, depicting an apparently peaceful coexistence between the Britons and the Saxons and as well as forebodings of their future. While confessing, "To be honest, I don't know very much about the Arthurian Legends," Ishiguro reveals his interest in "a quasi-historical Arthur" who, "for maybe a generation or two, managed to impose a kind of a peace and stability." He was able to approach this side of the militaristic Arthur, "perhaps because the history there was so murky," indicating that the appeal of Arthurian material stems from its elusive historicity. In other words, this "murky," ostensibly peaceful period was so inspiring that it can creatively be imagined. 2 Ishiguro's contemporary reworking of the legend embodies a microcosm of how the Arthurian narrative has developed over time. Most of the grand narrative has evolved by exploring some untouched space, producing various spin-offs, such as sequels, prequels, or side stories. In this regard, Ishiguro's treatment of the mythical/peaceful setting is intriguing given that it certainly follows an important genealogy of the medieval Arthurian narrative, which is a tension between the two following modes: chronicle and romance. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138) is regarded as the genesis of the "chronicle" tradition (Galfridian, or the Brut tradition). This groundbreaking historical work was devoted to portraying an unbroken line of British rulers over centuries of insular conflicts and military battles. Particularly, King Arthur receives special atten-

Liberties that Editors and Translators Take: Unframing and Reframing the Border of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_

النظام والحرية (Order and Liberty), 2017

In this work, I discuss the management of the initial iconic peritext of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_ in a paper edition, a translation, and a digital facsimile. Writing from the perspective of cognitive narratology, I argue that the miniature is not a disposable illustration but a framing border, the (non) reproduction of which in each modern rendition of the text has different consequences on the mental processes involved in reading the poem.

The Obstacle and the Way: Women and Gender in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This paper examines the double-edged logic behind events and characters in the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In particular, it highlights the ambivalent, contradictory way in which women function and the ramifications of the way women stand in relation to knighthood. Though a woman is the cause of the Knight's failure (the obstacle), she is also the agent of such a realization (the way). Adopting a double approach rather than a problematic mono-dimensional stance, we attempt to show how women are simultaneously the "obstacle" and the "way" to chivalric adventures and the knightly ideal. Women hinder or delay knightly adventures, and yet trigger new adventures in the process. In the very act of testing the knightly ideal, they can hone the individual characters of Arthur's knights as manifested in the case of Gawain. Understanding this double role of women can help us distance ourselves from the contradictory readings of the poem and a...

So Many Wonders - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Tolkien, and Flieger.pdf

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a delightful story for us medievalists, and a wonderful way to engage students into literature of the period. Sometimes, though, they get a little lost in translation. By comparing three different versions of Gawain's adventures - the original, Tolkien's translation, and finally Verlyn Flieger's modern language - I show how to engage students with the text in new ways. My students always end up loving the story, and, more importantly, they are no longer afraid of literature, even if the cadences and language is not quite what they are used to. Plus, it's fun.

Francis Ingledew, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and the Order of the Garter. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Paper. Pp. xi, 308. $40

Speculum, 2008