Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not only the best of the Middle English Arthurian romances but also one of the really significant literary achievements of the entire Middle Ages. The difficult dialect in which it was written has, however, kept the poem inaccessible to all but the specialist, so that the interested reader must depend entirely upon translations.

Here, at last, a finely sensitive translation gives us the poem itself, not just a translator’s impression, for Miss Borroff’s translation successfully preserves the formulaic character of the language, reflects the diction of the original poem, and reproduces the metrical variety of the original and the cumulative momentum or “swing”.

In her Introduction, Miss Borroff places the work in its historical context, succinctly outlining the rich literary tradition surrounding Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and delineating the “alliterative long line” of the poem.