Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : Penguin Classics - Burrows

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Penguin Classics

By: Burrows, J. Burrow (Editor)

Paperback | 29 July 1992 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback


RRP $32.99

$30.99

or 4 interest-free payments of $7.75 with

 or 

Ships in 3 to 5 business days

Although the date of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is uncertain, and we know nothing about the author, its composition is roughly contemporary with Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in the latter part of the fourteenth century.

It is a remarkably subtle and accomplished poem, in which the hero's knightly virtues of courage, courtesy and fidelity are put to the test in a strange adventure involving a huge green knight on a green horse, a winter journey, a lady in a mysterious castle and a challenge answered. It ranks as one of the greatest works of the English Middle Ages and perhaps the greatest triumph of the English alliterative tradition.

Unlike The Canterbury Tales, however, Sir Gawain is written in a dialect belonging to Cheshire, Lancashire or Staffordshire, and this seems more remote to the modern reader than Chaucer's London language. The aim of this edition has been to remove unnecessary impediments while retaining the integrity of the original. Notes and a glossary have been provided to assist an informed, critical reading of the text.


@GawainsWorld So listen here, some green man came to the hall and wants someone to cut his head off. Some sort of dare? Could be fun, right?

The deal is I cut off his head now, and he cuts off mine a year later. What a jester, doesn't he know he'll be dead?

This goblin fellow is totally dead.

All seemed fine until Ichabod Crane here fell to the floor, stood up, and picked up his head. His head, in his hands. In HIS HANDS!

From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less

More in Literary Studies of Poetry & Poets

The Iliad : Penguin Classics - Homer

RRP $17.99

$14.39

20%
OFF
My Year of Reading Welshly : Discovering Wales in 52 Books - Alex Johnson
The Epic of Gilgamesh : Penguin Classics - Andrew George

RRP $22.99

$18.39

20%
OFF
Paradise Lost : Penguin Classics - John Milton

RRP $17.99

$16.75

Bertolt Brecht in Context : Literature in Context - Stephen Brockmann
The Iliad : Penguin Clothbound Classics - Homer

RRP $39.99

$31.99

20%
OFF
Letters to a Young Poet : Penguin Classics - Rainer Maria Rilke
The Poems of Seamus Heaney - Seamus Heaney

RRP $89.99

$64.99

28%
OFF
The Ode Less Travelled : Unlocking the Poet Within - Stephen Fry
Metamorphoses : Oxford World's Classics - Ovid

RRP $23.95

$15.75

34%
OFF
How Women Became Poets : A Gender History of Greek Literature - Emily Hauser
Beowulf : A New Verse Translation - Seamus Heaney

RRP $29.99

$23.75

21%
OFF
The Metamorphoses : Penguin Classics - Publius Ovidus Naso

RRP $17.99

$14.39

20%
OFF
Agatha Christie : Little People, BIG DREAMS - Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara
The War Poems Of Wilfred Owen : Vintage Classics - Wilfred Owen