Book Review: “SIR GAWAYN AND THE GREENE KNYGHT / SIR GAWAIN ȘI CAVALERUL CEL VERDE”. PREFACE, TRANSLATION AND NOTES BY MIRCEA M. TOMUȘ. CLUJ-NAPOCA: ȘCOALA ARDELEANĂ, 2021, 352 P.

Abstract

The medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight instantly gained unreserved scholarly admiration when it was first published, in a Middle English version, in 1839. Its editor, Sir Frederic Madden, a palaeographer from the British Museum, had been fascinated by the story contained in the “stern, stylish letters, like crusading chess pieces” falling into “orderly ranks along faintly ruled lines” (Simon Armitage, Introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A new verse translation, translated by Simon Armitage, W. W. Norton & Company, 2007, p.10) of the now famous Cotton MS Nero A. x. manuscript and thought it worthwhile to make it available to the larger public. At that time, the anonymous manuscript had been patiently waiting in libraries for no less than five centuries. Composed towards the end of the fourteenth century, it was rather loosely put on paper in the next century by a scribe who also added 12 miniatures of a somewhat rudimentary nature that mark the division of the text into four poems (apart from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, three other religious narratives in verse: Pearl, Patience and Purity/Cleanness).