And the winner is:

Hi everyone!

For my text for this quarter's discussion, I have chosen "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" by "The Pearl" poet.

While The New York Times provides a full review of a recent prose translation of this poem, the following excerpt from that article captures what I believe is the magic of this very, very old text:

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is one of the eerie, exuberant joys of Middle English poetry. The poem was created in the latter part of the 14th century by an unknown author who probably hailed from the West Midlands of England. He knew the spoken dialect of the rugged country between north Staffordshire and south Lancashire. 

The geography of the poem puts it a world away from cosmopolitan London. The sole surviving copy of the manuscript, now kept securely in the British Library, was recorded by a scribe and bound up with three other poems probably by the same creator (“Pearl,” “Patience” and “Cleanness”). Thus the author is generally known as the Gawain or Pearl poet. He was a contemporary of Chaucer and a master of our mongrel English tongue.

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is a medieval romance (it inherits a body of Arthurian legends that had circulated in England for a couple of centuries) but also an outlandish ghost story, a gripping morality tale and a weird thriller. It is a sexual teaser that keeps you on the edge of your seat. It’s easy to imagine huddling around the fire to listen to it...