Though the story is taken from a French source, in style the poem is a culmination of Middle English alliterative tradition; the poet draws freely on the traditional stock of words and phrases. He does not appear to be indebted to any particular alliterative poem which is still extant. The parallels with the work of other poets are merely conventional or fortuitous. He has, however, made use of phrases and descriptive details from poems that appear to be earlier productions of his own, [1] notably in his description of Arthur’s New Year’s Feast (114 ff.), which resembles closely the description of Belshazzar’s feast in Purity (1401 ff.), and in the description of Bercilak’s castle, where he repeats phrases used in Purity to describe the ’aþel vessel’ brought into Belshazzar’s feast.
The Author and his Work.
The identitity of the author of Sir Gawain is unknown. There is no good evidence for ascribing the poem to Huchown,[2] or to Strode (whom Sir I. Gollancz suggested as its author), and a priori probability is strongly against either of them
Sir Gawain is closely related in language and
- ↑ See notes to ll. 790, 796, 802.
- ↑ The ascription was first made by Guest, who was followed by many Scottish scholars. The hollowness of their case is shown by MacCracken, Publ. M. L. Ass., 1910. The only specific evidence for this ascription is that at the head of Sir Gawain a fifteenth-century hand has written ’Hugo de’, but there is no reason why this should have any reference to Huchown; there were more Hugos than one. The one poem which may reasonably be ascribed to Huchown, The Pistill of Susan, is obviously not by the author of Sir Gawain.
conventional figure of French romance (see Kittredge, p. 134, and Madden’s Syr Gawayne, note to 2460, and is more likely to have been introduced by a French poet.
