The Columbia History of British Poetry by Carl Woodring, James Shapiro

largely independent of the learned world, to whom poems and verse were important: those who made their living by them. There must have been minstrels, singers, storytellers, and entertainers in great numbers, but they belong to a class whose unrecorded voices have not come down to us. It is

 

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apparent, even though what we have has been filtered through the literate, that there were some poets who treated their craft as a skill rather than an inferior art and who often seem more concerned with pleasing their audience than edifying it.
It is perhaps no accident that the poetry in which these characteristics are most evident is the alliterative verse that was written down in the North and West of England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is perhaps too romantic to visualize a line of oral poets stretching back unbroken to pre-Conquest days entertaining the English-speaking population in their own tongue in the alehouse, while the "official" Latin and French culture of the governing classes pursued its parallel course in court, castle, and university. But alliterative verse does make use of Old English poetic techniques (although altered and developed); it does, like Old English, employ a highly specialized vocabulary, and the poet does present himself as a master of a difficult craft, a latter-day "scop." The pride in mastery and the sense of an important social role for the poet receive fresh impetus from the theorists of the Renaissance, whose altered priorities and exaltation of classical precedents prove to be enormously enriching, but the alliterative style itself goes out of fashion. Most alliterative poems survive in only one or two manuscript copies and owe their present fame to the scholars of the nineteenth century who rediscovered them.
The most famous of all alliterative poems are the four works contained in a single grubby fourteenth-century manuscript now in the British Library (MS Cotton Nero A, x). All four are written in a consistent West Midland dialect; we know nothing about the author or authors. The poems are technically highly skilled, learned, and full of sophisticated vocabulary wielded like a precision tool. A great many of the words are survivors of Old English, since lost, but many more are derived from French, Latin, and Old Norse, all deployed with the conscious expertise of a professional, not the self-deprecating irony of Chaucer.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the most accessible of these poems. It is today the most nearly classifiable of all alliterative verse: more like a romance than anything else, it purports to be an adventure from the Arthurian cycle of stories. Framed by the legendary medieval history of Britain, the story tells how Sir Gawain accepted the challenge the Green Knight presented to the court of King Arthur at the New Year's feast to take part in a beheading contest. Gawain chops off the Green Knight's head, only to find that his blow is not at all final; the

 

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Green Knight rides off insouciantly swinging his head by its hair, reminding Gawain to seek him out for the return blow a year later. Gawain keeps his word, but while searching for his adversary is hospitably received in a castle where he agrees to another game: to exchange his daily winnings with his host. While the host goes hunting, Gawain stays indoors, and on each of the three successive days his host's wife makes what appear to be attempts to seduce him. Quantities of slaughtered beasts are exchanged each evening for the kisses Gawain has received; but on the third day the lady gives Gawain a girdle that, she claims, will protect him against all blows. Gawain pays his host the kisses but not the girdle. When at last he confronts the Green Knight, the two games come together: Gawain is humiliated to realize that the Green Knight and his host are one and the same, and that at every point he has been in ignorance of the real dynamics behind the play.
The poet's extraordinary slant