ABOUT THE GAWAIN POET   

The identity of the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not known. Only a single copy of the poem survives, bound in a manuscript with three other poems. Like the Gawain poem they bear no specific title but have come to be known as Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. Scholarship tells us that all four poems were probably composed by the same person. The manuscript also contains twelve simple but intriguing illustrations of which four relate to moments in the Gawain story. Many other immaculately preserved ancient texts appear hardly to have been opened, let alone read. But the Gawain manuscript has been well thumbed over the centuries, and seems to have been put to the task it was intended on many occasions.

The person who inscribed the poem was not its author. The Gawain poet, or the Pearl poet as he is sometimes called, was probably an educated man living and writing in the late part of the fourteenth century. His eclectic, almost eccentric vocabulary distinguishes him from other authors of the Middle English period. He was familiar with the stories of Arthurian Romance, and might also have been aware that some elements within his story, such as the beheading motif, could be traced back to early Irish literature. He would have been a contemporary of Chaucer, though we know from the language of the poem that he was not a Londoner but from somewhere further north. Dialect words in the poem suggest an imprecise area around Staffordshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, or Lancashire. The geography of the poem, such as that of North Wales and the Wirral, along with other recognizable topographies are further evidence of the Gawain poet’s “regional” background. In trying to establish his identity, one line of enquiry has been to look for numerological clues within the text (a common practice within medieval writings), for example by matching the total number of verses (101) to a name with an equivalent alphabetical value. Tantalizingly, perhaps teasingly, the words “Hugo de” appear near the beginning of Sir Gawain. Supposition about authorship has also been based on biographical readings of the poems themselves. Put crudely, the religious nature of Cleanness and Patience might imply he was a man of the church, and the beautiful and haunting poem Pearl, in which a man laments the death of his young daughter, could lead us to think that the author was a bereaved father. On the other hand, he may just as well have been a childless layman with a big imagination and the required amount of religious faith. And it is informed guesswork rather than factual certainty that leads us to suppose that the author was male.

Intriguingly, within Sir Gawain, the poet refers to himself in the first person on a number of occasions, as in “I schal telle hit astit, as I in toun herde” (31). Of course, such familiarization between reader and writer is a commonplace literary device, yet it reminds us that somewhere behind the poem is a real person with a story to tell and a gift for telling it. Whether he will ever be named is doubtful, and I for one hope this remains the case, since in my own mind the mystery of his identity and the magic of his poem are quite properly and forever entwined.