SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, 9pm, BBC4 PICK OF THE DAY WRITTEN in around 1400, the 2,500-line poem describing the Arthurian knight's adventures has no official title -- and its locations are shrouded in mystery.
The contributions, which frequently comment on each other, discuss such topics as the "triggers" of changes in vowel systems that tend to be represented as chain shifts, methods of coding for information-structure of Old English syntax, the use of older verse in determining authorship and reconstructing language change, analysis of the fidelity of scansion in modern English translations of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the exploitation of independent metrical evidence to assess the (possibly Chaucerian) authorship of The Romaunt of the Rose, and current approaches to morphosyntactic change in English.
THEATRE: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the first ever staging of the powerful new translation of a young knight's journey by award-winning poet, playwright and broadcaster, Simon Armitage.
Chapter 5 concerns two gentlemen who have trouble in the bedroom: Gawain, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Judge Schreber, the famed psychotic whose memoirs served Freud and Lacan as their primary case study of psychosis.
In many cases, as Shippey demonstrates, Tolkien sought to solve or rectify in his own mythopoeic creations the apparent mistakes, cruces, and lacunae he discovered in the course of his academic work on Beowulf, the Eddas, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and other medieval writings.
The students know of King Arthur, or Guenevere, or Lancelot, or even Gawain (particularly if they read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight earlier in the semester) in a way that most students do not know of the Red Cross Knight or Chaucer's The Wife of Bath.
