'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'

Genre: Medieval Romance

This is my first book review on such an old text; now that I’m all done with uni I thought it was time I stepped out of my comfort zone and reviewed a maybe not so popular genre: medieval romance.

The author of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ is unknown, however, I have read the version translated and edited by W. R. J. Barron where the middle English and modern English are both provided. I read this book as part of my ‘Medieval Romance’ module in uni, and I thoroughly enjoyed the class activities of having to translate the middle English lines, and is something I would recommend to anyone who has the time to research and try for themselves as it’s surprisingly quite fun!

The narrative itself is also very interesting, it is an Arthurian tale of a knight, Sir Gawain, proving his chivalry and bravery for the sake and reputation of the knights of King Arthur. The court of King Arthur is visited by a gigantic green knight (he is quite literally green, and his horse too!) who wants to challenge a knight. Sir Gawain takes up the offer and loses the game, meaning he must be slaughtered in a year’s time by the green knight. He faces other trials and tests of chivalry and the ending was fairly surprising. There is quite a lot of plot repetition, which is used as a narrative device, but this does become boring quite quickly and I did find myself skipping over these sections, unfortunately.

As this was for a module called ‘Medieval Romance’ there is of course a romance sub-plot, which is very interesting and tension-building, although I must say, for a medieval romance tale the romance did not take a majority of the narrative like you would assume; this will either be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how much you like Arthurian romances or romances in general.

Overall, this was a good read, it had tension, action, deception, romance, so I would say it is a good first medieval romance tale if you are looking for an easy way into the genre.

Rating: * * *