A Dark Mirror: Death and The Cadaver Tomb in The Awntyrs off Arthure

This paper proposes a modification to A.C. Spearing’s seminal view of the poem, The Awntyrs off Arthure, as a diptych, and suggests interpreting it as, instead, analogous to the medieval cadaver tomb. The poem then becomes a single ‘awntyr’: Guinevere and Gawain’s encounter with their own mortality and their subsequent failure to integrate this death-awareness into the social and psychological fabric of the Arthurian court.