dead wood. Consequently all his pictures, whether of action or man’s works or wild nature, are as clear and sharp as the miniatures of the period. It is not without reason that the poem has been described by a great scholar and a great lover of letters as “the jewel of medieval English literature.”
The name of the author is unknown. He evidently knew the forest of the Wirral (which he describes as a wilderness), and his statement that “few dwelt there that either God or man loved” is the sort of half-malicious generalisation that points to his being a neighbour. He was probably a native either of Lancashire or some part of North Cheshire adjoining it. The date of the manuscript is about 1400, and that of the poem perhaps twenty or thirty years earlier, 1370–1380. This agrees very well with the internal evidence; Sir Gawain’s sabatons, or broad-toed steel shoes, the younger lady’s fretted headdress, and the elaborate details of castle architecture are all features pointing to the last quarter of the fourteenth century.
The poem is written in a Northwestern dialect, which is the ancestor of the South Lancashire folk-speech of today. Characteristic features of it are present plurals in -en (we thinken), second person singulars in -s (thou says), preterites like geet and leet, and the o -sound before nasals in mon, mony, hommer, bront (brand), etc. The reader must be cautioned, however, against supposing that Sir Gawain is a dialect poem in the usual acceptation of the term, written by a rustic bard for a rustic audience. In the fourteenth century there was as yet no standard literary English, and each writer wrote as he spoke, in the dialect of the district to which he was native; for all its dialect, Sir Gawain is as courtly, both in matter and style, as the best of French romances. There is nothing rustic or provincial about it.
The alliterative metre in which the poem is written had evidently come down in an unbroken tradition from Old English times, and was a living