Ywain and Gawain

(ca. 1325–1350)

   The one extant copy of the MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCE Ywain and Gawain is found in the British Museum manuscript Cotton Galba E. IX, a large parchment manuscript whose contents range from romance to a verse treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins.There is little internal or external evidence concerning the date of composition, but with reference to details of clothing and language, scholars usually date the poem sometime between 1325 and 1350. This anonymous Arthurian romance is a translation of CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES’s YVAIN: THE KNIGHT OF THE LION; indeed, it is the only surviving English version of one of Chrétien’s romances. But as is common with medieval translations (the full sense of the phrase medieval translatio encompasses interpretation), the Middle English version, while faithful to the general plot and structure of its French source (the Middle English poet reduces Chrétien’s 6,818 lines to 4,032), is not particularly faithful in its rendering of language, thematic focus, or sensibility. The English poet never names Chrétien as his source, and Ywain and Gawain is often unfavorably compared to its more polished and courtly French model; yet the transformations effected by the English poet are skillful and serve a purpose in their emphasis on personal responsibility and truth. While the story remains essentially the same, from the very beginning of the Middle English poem, the poet situates his characters in a realm considerably less concerned with the conventions and conceits of COURTLY LOVE. In both versions the poets set the scene in the fabled Arthurian court. But where in Chrétien’s original the knights and ladies speak of love and service to the god of love, and the poet laments the lost days when “true” love flourished, in the Middle English version the English knights and ladies speak of “dedes of armes and of veneri / and of gude knightes flat lyfed flen” (Friedman and Harrington 1964, ll. 26–27), and the poet is nostalgic for the days when truth, honor, and men’s word and faith were trusted and true. The English poet is less concerned with the “fabled” refinements of cultivated and courtly society than he is with adventure and love of a more realistic and less studied form. Nonetheless, like the French version, the Middle English Ywain and Gawain has a clear narrative line and didactic elements accessible to modern and medieval audience and reader alike.

   In the romance Ywain’s cousin relates an adventure of a magic fountain, a fantastic storm, and a challenge from an unknown knight, a challenge in which Ywain’s cousin fails and is shamed. Ywain silently vows to avenge his cousin, but before he can set out, Arthur has learned of the adventure and plans to take the court to witness the marvels and challenge the unknown knight. Ywain, desiring the adventure for himself, sets out alone, meets the unknown knight, kills him in battle, and then woos and wins the knight’s widow. In the love scenes between Ywain and Alundyne (the knight’s widow), the English poet’s transformations are particularly striking: He dispenses with Chrétien’s extended Ovidian descriptions of Love’s wounds and Love’s rule, and much of the rhetoric of courtly love is excised in favor of a simple statement that “Luf, flat es so mekil of mayne, / Sare had wownded Sir Ywayne” (“Love that is so great in power, / Sore had wounded Sir Ywain” [871–72]). The elaborate rhetorical formulations and figures of the French version are either seriously cut or omitted altogether in this and in other scenes, and if the English romance loses metaphoric flights of fancy and subtle disputations, it gains a kind of realism and specificity that is one of the Middle English romance’s strengths. One of the more striking examples of how the English poet’s redaction of the French original adds to, rather than subtracts from, the poem’s meaning is the scene in which, after the marriage of Alundyne and Ywain, when Ywain plans to go with Gawain and the court to tournaments and thus leave his new bride, Alundyne gives Ywain a ring to remind him of his promise to return within a year. The ring is magic, and when worn by a true lover, that lover cannot come to harm. In the French version, Laudine (Alundyne in the English version) tells Ywain: “No true love and faithful lover, if he wears it, / can be imprisoned or lose any blood, / nor any ill befall him” (italics added); in the Middle English the third-person pronoun (“he,” “him”), and the generalized, formalized standard of behavior thus delineated, is replaced with the second-person pronoun and the effect is both immediate and specific: “An ay, whils 3e er trew of love, / Over al sal 3e be above” (ll. 1,539–40, italics added).With the emphasis on “3e” (“you”), the romance, particularly in its dialogue, loses the courtly distance that tends to present relations as formalized style over content.

   Like its French source, the Middle English version shows Ywain’s unthinking betrayal of his lady, the tensions between fealty to one’s lady and fealty to one’s knightly endeavors, and the adventures Ywain must undertake before, at the romance’s end, he is reconciled with his bride; but throughout, the poet edits, omits, and tightens the narrative, particularly in his seeming indifference to his source’s elaborate discussions of courtly love and courtly behavior. Some scholars attribute the lack of emphasis on the courtly to the poet’s focus on the essentials of his story and his tailoring the romance to the sensibilities of his audience (perhaps provincial and baronial). What the poem loses in the way of elaborate conceits and disquisitions on love, it gains in narrative force, powerful language, and a lively and controlled story line, all of which contribute to the poem’s being considered one of the more successful of the Middle English romances.

   Bibliography

   ■ Friedman, Albert B., and Norman T.Harrington, eds. Ywain and Gawain. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.

   ■ Bollard, John K. “Hende wordes: The Theme of Courtesy in Ywain and Gawain,”Neophilologus 78 (1994): 655–670.

   ■ Calf, Berenice-Eve S. “The Middle English Ywain and Gawain: A Bibliography, 1777–1995,” Parergon 13 (1995): 1–24.

   ■ Hamilton, Gayle. “The Breaking of the Troth in Ywain and Gawain,” Mediaevalia 2 (1976): 111–135.

   ■ Matthews, David. “Translation and Ideology: The Case of Ywain and Gawain,” Neophilologus 76 (1992): 452–463.

   Elisa Narin van Court