![]() Gordon, after reviewing the allusions, style, and themes of Gawain and the Green Knight, concluded in 1925: Even so, the Gawain Poet must have been educated and was probably of a certain social standing, perhaps a member of a family of landed gentry. The poems show a tendency to refer to materials from the past (the Arthurian legends, stories from the Bible) rather than any new learning, so it is perhaps less possible to associate the poet with universities, monasteries or the court in London. However, the writer of the Cotton MS Nero A X poems never refers to contemporary scholarship, as, for example, Chaucer does. ![]() The poet seems to have been well-educated shows a deep knowledge of the technical vocabulary of hunting, as in the description of the horn signals in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight also shows some knowledge of royal courts vividly describes the landscape of the region and has an interest in poverty as a Christian virtue. Īny other information must be deduced from the poems' themes, as there is neither a definite authorial attribution within them nor any 'tradition' as to the author's identity (as with Langland and Piers Plowman). The caves at Wetton Mill, near Leek, Staffordshire, have been identified as a possible inspiration for the "Green Chapel" in Gawain and the Green Knight, given the author's dialect and the geography indicated in the poem. Internal evidence indicates that all four works were probably written by the same author, though their similar dialect and presence in the same manuscript have usually been taken as the strongest evidence of common authorship. It is, therefore, thought most likely that the poet was a native of north Shropshire, east Cheshire or west Staffordshire and was writing in the latter part of the 14th century: based particularly on the narrative voice of Pearl, the poet is thought to have been male. ![]() ![]() This may merely indicate the dialect of the scribe responsible for copying the poems, but there is good evidence that the dialect of poet and scribe were very similar. All four poems of the Cotton MS Nero A X manuscript are in the same Middle English dialect, localised to the area of north-western Staffordshire, north east Shropshire and south-eastern Cheshire, in the English Midlands. The language of the poems shows that the poet was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William Langland, who are sometimes (following the suggestion of academic John Burrow) collectively called the Ricardian Poets in reference to the reign of Richard II of England. This is not widely accepted, however, and the labels "Pearl Poet" or "Gawain Poet" are still preferred. Various scholars have suggested that the poem is attributable to a member of the landed Massey family of Cheshire, and in particular John Massey of Cotton. This body of work includes some of the most highly-regarded poetry written in Middle English. Save for the last (found in BL-MS Harley 2250), all these works are known from a single surviving manuscript, the British Library holding ' Cotton MS' Nero A.x. Its author appears also to have written the poems Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness some scholars suggest the author may also have composed Saint Erkenwald. late 14th century), is the name given to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an alliterative poem written in 14th-century Middle English. The " Gawain Poet" ( / ˈ ɡ ɑː w eɪ n ˈ ɡ æ-, - w ɪ n, ɡ ə ˈ w eɪ n/ ), or less commonly the " Pearl Poet" ( fl. 1375–1400), manuscript painting (as the father in Pearl)
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