Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ed. by Paul Battles (review)

Paul Battles’ new edition aims to make Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) accessible to readers encountering the poem for the first time in Middle English (ME). It presents the text in a form that mitigates SGGK’s linguistic difficulties while remaining true enough to the original that students will have the virtual experience of reading the ME text.

Battles’ text is based directly on the manuscript, but it modernizes the ME original’s spelling in order to make the manuscript’s ‘unfamiliar graphemes and spelling conventions’ (p. 27) less difficult for modern students. Battles modernizes the spelling of v and u, i and j, qu- and wh-; he transcribes ME thorn with th and ME yogh with y, gh, or w; he respells final z and tz as s; he renders vocalic w as ue or ew (e.g., trwe>true, nw>new); he expands second-person the (object case) to thee; and he expands scribal abbreviations without comment. The opening lines provide a fair example. Battles: ‘Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye, / The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes...’ Tolkien-Gordon-Davis: ‘Siþen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye, / Þe borʒ brittened and brent to brondez and askez...’ (emphases added). Given the care he has taken to preserve the phonology of the text, it must be said that Battles could have modernized the pronoun hit (=it) as well, because its initial h would have been silent in unstressed positions, as he recognizes in his guide to meter (p. 14). However, since there is no pronunciation guide, this text is apparently not intended for teaching students to read SGGK aloud. Nevertheless, students acquainted with Chaucer’s ME might be able to approximate SGGK’s pronunciation with this text, since the modernizations produce few changes in pronunciation.

Battles also eases the beginner’s way with marginal glosses for hard words. For example, in the lines just quoted, Sithen, sege, sesed, brittened, brent, brondes, and askes are glossed. Words deemed difficult enough to merit glosses are defined each time they occur, implying that the reader is not expected to retain the ME as he/she progresses through the text. The marginal glosses are reinforced by a glossary at the back. Words in the glossary are spelled as they occur in the text, but line numbers are not given except in the case of words for which there is an explanatory note ad locum. This edition’s placement of textual, linguistic, historical, cultural, and critical notes at the foot of each page of text, where students are more likely to consult them, rather than at the back, is very helpful. The sometimes cluttered appearance of the page (a few pages have more notes than text) is a worthwhile aesthetic compromise. It was particularly shrewd of Battles to use the notes to direct his readers to critical studies of specific passages, instead of bulking up the Introduction with discussions about them.

The Introduction—compressed, elegant, and judicious in its presentation of major issues—covers significant aspects of the poem in unpretentious prose that students would do well to emulate. Recounting hypotheses about authorship, Battles quickly explains why the poem’s language points to an author from the intersection of southeast Cheshire and northwest Staffordshire; he dispenses in short order with attempts to identify the author, succinctly observing that these arguments ‘have not widely been accepted’ (p. 11). His account of the poem’s aristocratic social and cultural contexts cautiously avoids choosing between the courts of Richard II and Edward III as the place of SGGK’s origin, although Battles unfortunately refrains from explaining the various linguistic issues that make dating the poem so difficult.

The section ‘Meter, Style and Structure’ in the Introduction is admirably short and lucid. In little more than a single page, it distinguishes Chaucer’s...