Analyze Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Abstract
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight describes the story of a young knight in the legendary court of King Arthur. The poem begins with a narration of Camelot’s Christmas party at King Arthur’s court. During the banquet, a mysterious green knight, green hair and green skin, riding a green horse, challenges a strange game to the gathering crowd. This game has triggered a series of events, in which Gawain faces the test and temptation. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight belongs to a school of medieval literature, known as “romanticism”. Romantic texts are not mainly about love, but more about adventure. Romantic texts usually involve a hero (usually a knight) in a mission, and many risky things will happen in the process of performing the mission. This poem experiences a long history, and the Old English used in it is quite different from modern English. This paper discusses the evolution of English by analyzing the differences between vocabulary, grammar and modern English.References
[1] Marie Borroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation (New York: W. W. Norton Company, 1967)
[2] Robert McColl Millar, English Historical Sociolinguistics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2012)
[3] Roger Lass, Old English: A Historical Linguistic Companion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
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