Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2018

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In a programme first broadcast in 2018, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the jewels of medieval English poetry. It was written c1400 by an unknown poet and then was left hidden in private collections until the C19th when it emerged. It tells the story of a giant green knight who disrupts Christmas at Camelot, daring Gawain to cut off his head with an axe if he can do the same to Gawain the following year. Much to the surprise of Arthur's court, who were kicking the green head around, the decapitated body reaches for his head and rides off, leaving Gawain to face his promise and his apparently inevitable death the following Christmas.

The illustration above is ©British Library Board Cotton MS Nero A.x, article 3, ff.94v95

With

Laura Ashe Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford

Ad Putter Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Bristol

And

Simon Armitage Poet and Professor of Poetry at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:48.8	programs. Hello Sir Gwen and the Green Night is regarded as the greatest chivalric poem of the medieval world.
0:55.8	It's set at Camlet at Christmas when a strange green man rides in on the green horse holding
0:59.9	an axe and challenges King Arthur to hit him and be hit back. Gawain steps in, takes the axe and challenges King Arthur to hit him and be hit back.
1:03.3	Gawain steps in, takes the axe and chops off his green head, only for the trunk to pick up
1:07.7	the head telling Gawain to meet him next year when he'll do the same to him.
1:12.0	The chivalrous Gawane takes up the challenge.
1:14.4	It's vividly told and at its heart is how goane approaches
1:17.8	own expected of the following Christmas which he both faces up to and yet tries to
1:21.7	avoid. With me to discuss Sir Gawain and the Green
1:24.4	out are Laura Ash, Professor of English Literature at Worcester College University of
	...

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