Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Norton Critical Edition

“Marie Borroff’s translations of Middle English verse became legendary in her lifetime. She was an acclaimed critic, teacher, translator and poet, and pioneering female scholar at Yale, and her impeccable sense of rhythm infuses every choice in this translation. Read aloud, her words sing and declaim, transporting a modern reader into the vivid sounds and colours of medieval romance.” -Ardis Butterfield, Yale University

Marie Borroff’s acclaimed verse translation, marginal glosses, and explanatory footnotes.

Laura L. Howes’s full introduction along with Borroff’s seminal essay, “The Metrical Forms,” as well as her “Translator’s Note.”

For comparative study and classroom discussion, two French tales of Sir Gawain, four selections from the original Middle English poem, and a passage from the Alliterative Morte Arthure.

Nine critical essays on the poem’s central themes, four of them new to the Second Edition.

A chronology and a selected bibliography.

About the Series

Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

“Almost lost to the ages, now surviving in but one faded, precious, manuscript, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight calls forth with exceptional brilliance and mordant precision a chthonic force rarely investigated in other works of the later Middle Ages. Unquestionably, this poem would have been challenging even to its first readers in the turbulent fourteenth century, and so the present volume brings to bear all the advantages of the Norton Critical Edition format—superlative translations, comparative source and background texts, and landmark critical studies—to facilitate an access made even more challenging (but no less enticing) by the passage of centuries.” ?Stephen H. A. Shepherd, Loyola Marymount University

“A masterpiece of Middle English literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight spins an Arthurian tale full of suspense, magic, and adventure. This newly revised edition of Marie Borroff’s classic verse translation offers a lively and accessible text as well as a rich array of contextual and critical material for the reader who wants to dig deeper into the poem’s fantastical world, alliterative poetry, or literary themes.”

--Shannon Gayk, Indiana University, Bloomington