Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

by Simon Armitage Narrated by Bill Wallis

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Poetry Review

"Brilliantly orchestrated.... Armitrage has produced a brilliantly well-tuned modern score for one of the finest surviving examples of Middle English poetry."

Wall Street Journal - Michael Dirda

"Full of make-believe and festivity, this wonderful narrative poem possesses a Mozartean lightness and wit. Luckily, several modern versions, particularly those by W.S. Merwin and Simon Armitrage, deftly replicate much of the feel and rhythm of the Middle English original."

Seamus Heany

"Drives the force of the old poem through the green Armitrage fuse. Highly charged work."

Financial Times - Mark Ford

"[Armitrage's] version inventively recreates the original's gnarled, hypnotic muscle, its vivid tableaux and landscapes, its weird, unsettling drama."

Sunday Herald - Brian Morton

"Armitrage makes it utterly, even compulsively readable, and as fresh as it must have been in 1400."

The Guardian - Kevin Crossley-Holland

"I enjoyed it greatly for its kick and music; its high spirits, its many memorable passages. I enjoyed it because, like the Gawain poet, Armitrage is some storyteller."

New York Sun - Eric Ormsby

"A free and wonderfully offbeat version of this unusual masterpiece... fresh and startling, as though it had been written yesterday; it is rough-knuckled and yet it sings.... From start to finish, Mr. Armitrage has clearly had great fun; each of his words has been tasted with gusto."

John Ashbery

"Simon Armitrage's luscious version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight continues the tradition of great poet-translators such as Edward FitzGerald, Arthur Waley, and Seamus Heaney. Like them, he has taken an artifact from a remote era and made it his own, while simultaneously restoring it to itself."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169690163
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	11/06/2007
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,115,716

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