The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane (review)

This edition began some years ago as the work of the late Prof. W. R. J. Barron, who planned to publish the poem with the Scottish Text Society but was unable to finish the project before his untimely death in 2005. At the request of the Society, Ralph Hanna agreed to continue Barron’s work and see it through to publication, thereby inheriting “completed portions of an introduction, a carefully punctuated transcription of the text incorporating many provisional emendations, the headings for his glossary, and a transcription of the French source of the poem” (p. vii). Although the edition includes many of Barron’s emendations, Hanna has made quite a few others, provided a new introduction, and written all of the textual commentary. The edition as it stands is thus very much his scholarly product.

Golagros and Gawane survives in a single source: a 1508 printing in one of the eleven booklets known as the Chepman and Myllar prints that are today bound together as Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates Library 19.1.16. The poem has previously been edited several times, most notably more than a century ago by F. J. Amours (Scottish Alliterative Poems in Riming Stanzas, 1897), and most recently by Thomas Hahn (Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, 1995). While each previous editor has improved the text by correcting many errors introduced by Chepman and Myllar’s compositors, including mistakes such as turned type and minim confusion, Hanna’s emendations go beyond corrections of this nature to those that appear “only dubiously to reflect print shop activity” (p. xliv), such as failures in alliteration or end-rhyme, nongrammatical constructions, and alliterative collocations that have been disrupted. Although such an approach invariably attracts critics who disagree on principle with supplying speculative readings not present in any extant witness, it is difficult on any other grounds to fault either Hanna’s approach or execution with this edition. Because the Chepman and Myllar prints are readily available in facsimile form both online and in print, because the text has appeared in a number of previous states with the compositors’ mistakes corrected, and because a number of nonsensical readings and failures in alliteration remain after such corrections have been made, Hanna’s more aggressive editorial approach is precisely what was needed.

This approach would not be profitable, of course, if Hanna’s emendations lacked care or careful explanation, but both are evident in the much-improved state in which he leaves the poem and in the detailed explanations of his decision- making process found in the textual commentary (as well as accounts of any lingering ambiguity in supplied readings). When, for example, the knights Gaudifeir and Galiot meet in battle at line 561, the Chepman and Myllar print informs us that they appeared As glauis glowand on gleid (“Like swords glowing in a fiery coal”), a peculiar comparison of the men to their own weapons that is passed on without comment by Amours and other editors. Hanna emends to With glauis glowand os gleid, noting that “in the conventional set-phrase (compare Awntyrs 117–18, 393), weapons glow like a live coal, and men generally cannot be compared to bits of their equipment” (pp. 63–64), thereby offering a more sensible line that more likely reflects the work of the poet than that of a subsequent scribe or compositor. He also shows careful attention to both the work conditions of the print shop and the work of previous editors. Thus for line 707 he agrees with Amours that the 1508 print’s All to-turnit thair entyre is the result of turned type, as to-turnit is not a known form. Amours does not emend to-turnit in his text, but, citing a letter to The Academy by Skeat dated 1894, states in a footnote that “the word is to-tirvit (to-turuit), from the M.E. to-torvien,” and thus supplies...