Share this:

Okay, class, it’s Twelfth Night, which means that we’re at the end of our annual reading of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” I trust you’ve all been keeping up with your reading assignments, and you should be finished with the poem. Before we discuss some conclusions about our reading, I want to look at some very interesting verses early in the poem, starting with line 495. That should be on page 70 of your texts in Cawley, if you’d open them there.

(sound of books being drawn out, pages turning.)

Umm … Mr. Cabezaloco? What’s that little computer you’re looking at? If you’re making a Facebook entry, I’m sure we’d all be interested in what you’re posting about us.

“It’s not a computer, Professor Nixon, it’s my Kindle.”

That’s very amusing, Mr. Cabezaloco. However, I’d like you to join us in our study of the text, if you don’t mind.

“I have the text here, on my Kindle.”

You have the Cawley text on that little device?

“Yes. I downloaded ‘Gawain and the Grene Knight’ from Project Gutenberg.”

Is that so? Very interesting. And was it not made clear to you that the authoritative edition we’d be studying in this course would be the edition by A.C. Cawley? Is Mr. Cawley the editor of the version you have there?

“No, Professor. Um …. (Cabezaloco presses keys on his tablet) … this is edited by Richard Morris.”

Ah, I see. So you’re working from a variant of the text we’ve been studying for the past two weeks. I wonder, were you unable to download a facsimile of the actual manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x. in the British Museum? I’m sure that would have been much more authoritative than the primitive printed books the rest of us have in front of us. (tittering from the class.)

“Um … I don’t know. What’s that?”

Had you been paying attention during my introductory lecture instead of texting your girlfriend, you would have known that the unique manuscript of Sir Gawain is contained in the manuscript Cotton Nero A.x., now housed in the British Museum. I was just curious to learn if your skills in Middle English had far surpassed all of us and you were reading from the original manuscript.

“Umm … I don’t think so.”

Nor do I. Be so kind as to begin reading from the line I had in mind today, 495, IF your edition has followed the traditional enumeration the rest of us are following, that is …

(Cabezaloco is pressing a key repeatedly.) “Okay, I’m there.”

Please read lines 495 through 499, if you would, please.

“Ah … OK … ‘Gawan wats glad to begynne those gomne in halle/ Bot thas the ende be hevy, haf ye no wonder; / For thas men ben mery in mynde, quen thay han mayn drynk, / A … uh … serne sernes ful serne, and seldes never lyke, / the forme to the fynisment foldes ful selden’.”

And are you certain of that reading?

“Um … pretty sure … ?”

And, I’m sorry to say, Mr. Cabezaloco, that I am relatively certain that you have NOT got it right. You see, I happen to know that that due to font limitations AND from Mr. Robinson’s editorial approach, that engaging little device in your hand is incapable of differentiating between several of the original 14 Century scribe’s representations of different vocal sounds that ranged from the voiced glottal “gh” which we might interpret as an “h,”  from the unvoiced version, which we call a “y” or even the unvoiced labio-palatal “z,” which in your reading you missed several times. I also know that one can buy the Cawley text online from Amazon for as little as one cent, so your free download of the Early English Text Society version has left you without the edits of Mr.  Cawley, for a net savings of one cent, which may cost you dearly in your grade in this course.

“Oh.”

OK, enough of this. As regular UWS readers know, each year, I mark the holiday season by rereading (and subjecting you to) the 14th Century alliterative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It’s my way of keeping my formerly acceptable Middle English skills honed to something above nonexistence. Since we’re now in the third year of Under Western Skies (I posted the first piece about Sir Gawain in December, 2009 — thanks all you loyal readers!),  it’s therefore the third annual opportunity for you to journey with me to that  dire and dismal era at the end of the middle ages.

I have to admit that on this third attempt to share my passion for middle English alliterative poetry I was running out of ways to make good ol’ Sir Gawain seem compelling for reader with only a passing interest in extinct versions of our language, until I discovered a free download of the poem to my Kindle from www.gutenberg.org. There, I discovered that one can indeed download a scholarly version of the poem, but in a way that presented some serious difficulties. Back in the year 1400 or so, the scribes who wrote this stuff down were copying texts onto parchment with quill pens, and not always with a full understanding of the local dialects in which the texts were originally written. Quality control was not their strong suit. To illustrate what scribes did at about that time, here’s a fresco from an abbey in Italy that shows a typical monastic scribe at work:

Hugh of St Cher in San Niccolo, Treviso

(Notice, by the way, that this monk, Hugh of St. Cher, is wearing eyeglasses. This is, supposedly, the first depiction of a human wearing spectacles, recorded by Tomaso of Modeno, in the Hall of the Chapter of Dominicans, part of the Church of San Nicolas in Treviso, Italy.)

The problem with downloading this text for free, vs. buying a used copy of the edited, printed text for 1 cent on Amazon, is that the monks who transcribed manuscripts were a bit casual in the way they represented a number of sounds from the oral tradition, and their recordings of “s” and “y” and “gh” and a few other sounds were distinguished in ways that ordinary fonts in electronic documents today are not prepared to deal with, unless you have a very specialized custom font in your system. Therefore, a text in my well-worn copy of “Gawain” that’s been edited for print looks like this (click on photos for larger images):

Gawain, Cawley edition

While the transliterated electronic version you can download from gutenberg.com looks like this:

Gawain, electronic download from gutenberg.org

As you can see, the electronic version substitutes a version of the number “3″  for a number of sounds that Mr. Cawley, in his wisdom, edited into various forms like “s” or “y” or “gh,” because that’s what they were meant to represent. The problem is that computers can’t represent the subtle variations between the different signs. So, while they look different on the printed page, they appear as “3s” on the screen. That’s the source of Mr. Cabezaloco’s problem.

I have seen the original manuscript in the B.M., and it’s a beautiful work of illustrated artistry, but I can tell you that without years of study (which I did not undertake) one cannot read it — at least not very easily. (There are no online facsimiles of the original manuscript available without cost that I can find. CLICK HERE for the Wikipedia entry, which shows a page from the M.S.)

The poem stands as one of the icons of English literature, but it’s tough to read. Over the past three years I’ve shared my enthusiasm for it with you, but, ultimately one has to read it. There are excellent translations by Marie Borroff and by J.R.R. Tolkein, and I encourage you to check your local library for them.

For links to the previous posts on this subject, which explore more about the poem’s story, language and the historical context, please look at the bottom of today’s article. To start, if you don’t know the story, you may want to review the first of those posts, “Silent Night, Green Knight.” CLICK HERE. 

Then, I wrote, “A 14th-Century Christmas” on 12/24/10.

Also, “The Knight in Winter“  on 12/26/10.

And, last year, “Don We Now Our Green Apparel” on 1/1/11.

I hope that 2012 will hold many fascinating reading adventures for all of you, whatever your interests. Don’t forget to support your local library. As the Gawain scribe would have written, Happy Nw Yere!