Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This volume offers the complete text of a poem which, although an acknowledged masterpiece of medieval literature, makes abnormal demands upon the reader by reason of its subtle exploitation both of a difficult dialect of Middle English and of the special idiom of alliterative verse. There is no short cut through the difficulties, but this edition is designed to enable the modern reader to reach a sensitive first-hand understanding of the text as the only basis for valid literary judgement.