Sir Gawain

Srednjovekovna poema Ser Gavejn i Zeleni vitez izuzetno je značajan tekst za istoriju engleske književnosti. Uz bogatstvo jezika i priče, kompleksnost strukture i pesničku veštinu, razlog što joj teoretičari s nesmanjenim interesovanjem posvećuju pažnju leži u činjenici da je inspirativna za nova tumačenja zahvaljujući ambivalentnom stavu autora prema idealima viteškog romana i uopšte idealima svoga doba, što njegov odnos prema svom vremenu čini bliskim današnjem. Ovo delo još uvek je aktuelno, zagonetno, izazovno za čitanje i inspirativno za savremene autore jer sadrži obrasce uočljive, takođe, u brojnim delima savremene fantazijske književnosti na engleskom i srpskom jeziku: prožimanje mitske i istorijske, naročito srednjovekovne prošlosti, zatim prirodnog, natprirodnog i božanskog, kao i potisnutih i aktuelnih verovanja, to jest predhrišćanskih i hrišćanskih motiva. Zbog navedenih razloga važno je njegovu vrednost približiti čitaocima na srpskom jeziku, kako prevodom, tako i dodatnim, sveobuhvatnijim i dubljim analizama.

The De Ortu Walwanii is a Latin prose romance, surviving in a single early fourteenth century manuscript, BM Cotton MS. Faustina B VI. Scholars agree that it is by the same author as the Historia Meriadoci which is preserved in the same manuscript. There is some disagreement over the date of composition: some scholars ascribe it to the twelfth century, while others prefer the late thirteenth century. Scholar agree, however, that it was written by a learned cleric, for its Latin is deliberately complex. It is clearly not simply a reworking of a French romance. James Douglas Bruce demonstrated in 1898 that the original source for the crucial episode of the story – the child born illicitly and in secret who is sent away across the sea and brought up by foster parents – was the legend of Pope Gregory the Great. Previous studies have not, however, succeeded in identifying the source of the long central episode in the story concerned with the relief of the land of Jerusalem. This article points out that the essential details of this episode, far from deriving from a French romance as has been suggested by earlier scholars, are strikingly similar to the account of the Third Crusade and in particular the journey of King Richard the Lionheart to the East in the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi. It demonstrates that several episodes in the De Ortu and the Itinerarium peregrinorum are so similar that they could not have been conceived independently. As no intermediary source is known, the author of the De Ortu probably took these incidents directly from the Itinerarium itself, using the concept of Richard the Lionheart’s journey to the Holy Land and its major events on which to hang his hero’s adventures. However, the article concludes that the author did not mean to indicate that Gawain was Richard, or that Richard was Gawain; the Itinerarium was simply a source of inspiration, and a reminder of what a hero should be.

Book and lyrics by Bryan Reynolds, music by Michael Hooker.

What is a soldier? What are ethics? What is code? What is terrorism?

Through an ironic representation of a modernized version of chivalry, The Green Knight tells a story about bravado, xenophobia, and sociocultural codes that questions motivations and tenets underlying both “the war on terror” and the war on the United States or Western “infidels” as it presents challenges to conventional notions of being a good soldier, honor, and marriage vis-à-vis primal desires.

The Green Knight, Dir. Reynolds, Transversal Theater project: World Premiere,17th Annual Sibiu International Theatre Festival, Cisnădioara Fortress, Romania, June 2010.

From surface to structure, Gawain and the Green Knight is a fundamentally triadic text. We are presented with three major settings (Arthur and Bertilak’s courts/ the Green Chapel), three narrative ‘phases’ (offer of the game/temptation at the castle/conclusion of the game), three hunts, three temptations, three resistances, three sets of kisses thrice given over to the lord, three Masses attended by Gawain. Thrice the Green Knight’s blade falls. It will not be the aim of this essay to historicise the number three, that is, to consider its particular significance to the chivalric romance, to the knights and ladies of the story, or to the period and person of the Gawain-poet. It will rather be an attempt to read Gawain’s relationship to the number within the context of a particular theoretical system, that of Jacques Lacan, in an effort to gain the insights into the story offered by that system. The number three is the most important in all of Lacanian theory, perhaps psychoanalysis. The introduction of the father as the ‘third term’ (Fink 1995: 55) between mother and child is the principle consequence of the paternal or ‘phallic’ function, literally producing the subject in Lacan’s version of what Freud called the ‘castration complex’ (Freud 2001: 195). For Lacan, castration really does occur, but as a symbolic castration, a process of terrifying the subject into existence. This essay will argue that Gawain and the Green Knight is particularly well-suited to a Lacanian reading in this vein, unifying under one narrative all the key themes of the paternal function: exchange, debt, choice, coercion and identity.

This paper examines two closely related romances of the late Middle Ages: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1375-1400) and The Greene Knight (ca. 1500). Whereas the oldest of these two romances has been studied extensively, fairly little attention has been paid to its sibling. Yet The Greene Knight makes a number of choices which clearly set it apart from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I here argue that while Sir Gawain and the Green Knight explores the main character's responses to the circumstances arising from the Green Knight's challenge in order to raise questions about his community's ability to fully live up to its ideals, the latter romance ultimately utilises the interactions between the main character and the Green Knight to celebrate the Arthurian community's ability to attract and bind opposing forces.