AUDIOBOOK
About
The famous Middle English poem by an anonymous English poet is beautifully translated by fellow poet Simon Armitage in this edition. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight narrates in crystalline verse the strange tale of a green knight who rudely interrupts the Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager. The virtuous Gawain accepts and decapitates the intruder with his own ax. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. Next Yuletide Gawain dutifully sets forth. His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dream-like castle, a dire challenge answered, and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"Compulsively readable…Simon Armitage has given us an energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version."
New York Times Book Review, front-page review
"Armitage's Gawain is fresh and startling, as though it had been written yesterday; it is rough-knuckled and yet it sings"
New York Sun
"Armitage's version inventively recreates the original's gnarled, hypnotic music…but also has a free-flowing, colloquial twang that allows the poem to partake of the energies of contemporary speech."
Financial Times