THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

performing spectacular deeds of valour. Having recovered his kingdom, he finally claims Rymenhild as his queen.
King Horn presents its protagonist as matured both by adventure and by love and happily matched by a woman equal
to him in fidelity, wit, and courage. The pattern of exile and return is followed in The Lay of Havelok the Dane
(written in Lincolnshire c. 1300). The poem traces the fortunes of the dispossessed Prince Havelok who seeks refuge
in England. He is at first obliged to eek out a humble existence at Grimsby but his noble origins are twice revealed by
a mystical light that shines over his head. Havelok returns to Denmark with his bride, Princess Goldborough, kills his
usurping guardian and regains his rightful throne. Although the story stresses Havelok’s inborn royalty, it also dwells
on details of ordinary life and labour and shows a hero who is prepared to defend himself with his fists and a wooden
club as much as with his sword.
The subjects of English romances can, like their French models, be broadly categorized as dealing with three types
of historical material: the ‘matter’ of Rome (that is, classical legend); the ‘matter’ of France (often tales of
Charlemagne and his knights, or stories concerned with the struggle against the advancing Saracens); and the
‘matter’ of Britain (Arthurian stories, or tales
[p. 42]
dealing with later knightly heroes). Sir Orfeo (written in the early fourteenth century) proclaims itself to be a story of
Breton origin, though it is in fact an embroidered retelling of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice (with a Celtic
fairyland supplanting Hades and with a happy denouement replacing the tragic ending of the Greek story). Floris and
Blancheflour (written in the first half of the thirteenth century) deals with the adventures of two precocious children
at the court of a Saracen Emir, one of them a magically endowed Muslim prince, the other the daughter of a Christian
lady. The conventionally Christian ending somewhat incongruously requires the Emir to overcome his religious
scruples and to bless their union. Saracens are shown in a less benign light in Otuel and Roland (c. 1330) which
traces the knightly career of a formerly Muslim knight at the court of Charlemagne who is miraculously converted
when the Holy Ghost alights on his helmet in the form of a dove, and in The Sege of Melayne (c. 1400) which deals
with the defence of Christianity in Lombardy. In two particularly popular late thirteenth-century English romances,
both of them designed to celebrate the putative ancestors of prominent aristocratic families, the eponymous heroes
face a series of dire challenges during their respective quests to prove themselves and the quality of their love.
However, where the hero of Bevis of Hampton is finally content to accept the rewards of his international labours, Sir
Guy in Guy of Warwick feels compelled to atone for his worldly pride by embarking on a new series of exploits solely
for the glory of God. He ends his life as a hermit unrecognized by his wife who brings food to his obscure retreat.
Despite the verve and the variety of subject, setting, and treatment of many earlier English romances, none
seriously challenges the sustained energy, the effective patterning, and the superb detailing of Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight. Although the poem’s author is anonymous-like many other medieval writers, painters, and architectshis
language indicates that he was born in the north-west Midlands of England and that he was writing in the second
half of the fourteenth century. He is known as ‘the Gawain-poet’ after the longest of four poems preserved in a single,
crudely illustrated manuscript in the British Library. None of the poems has a title in the manuscript, but it is
generally assumed that they share a common author if not a common subject, theme, or line of development. Pearl,
Cleanness (or Purity), Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are also central to what has been seen as an
‘alliterative revival’ which took place in the literature produced in northern and north-western England from c. 1350
(though it may be that this ‘revival’ is more of a survival of a pre-Conquest interest in alliterative verse made newly
manifest by the patronage of English-speaking noblemen). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its companion
poems cannot properly be seen as the written climax of a largely provincial, oral, and unrecorded tradition. They are
the work of a highly sophisticated narrative artist, well-versed in the Holy Scriptures and in devotional literature and
possessed of an easy familiarity with the French and English romances which continued to divert his contemporaries.
[p. 43]
Gawain opens with reference to the line of British kings, sprung from Brutus, which has culminated in the
glorious reign of Arthur. Into Arthur’s festive court on New Year’s Day rides an armed challenger (Arthur, it appears,
always relishes some kind of adventure before he feasts at New Year), but this challenger is highly distinctive: rider,
armour, and horse are all bright green in hue. The knight’s real ambivalence is, however, signified by his bearing
both of a holly branch and an axe ‘huge and monstrous’ (‘hoge and unmete’). Whereas the green branch betokens life,
an appropriate and familiar enough aspiration for the northern Christmas season, the axe threatens death. The pagan,
Celtic origins of this Green Knight become obvious in the ‘beheading game’ he proposes to the King, a challenge
taken up by Arthur’s champion, his nephew Gawain. Rolling his eyes, knitting his green brows, and waving his green
beard, the mysterious challenger suggests that a knight may cut off his head provided that the knight agrees to submit
to the same bloody rite in a year’s time. When Gawain cleanly severs the neck bone, the unabashed Green Knight