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The Legend of Sir Gawain; Studies Upon Its Original Scope and Significance
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
- GenresArthurian
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1972
About the author
Jessie Laidlay Weston
116 books16 followersJessie Laidlay Weston (1850–1928) was an independent scholar and folklorist, working mainly on mediaeval Arthurian texts.
Weston was the daughter of William Weston a tea merchant and member of the Salters' Company and his second wife, Sarah Burton, and named after his first wife Jessica Laidlay. Sarah, after giving birth to two more daughters died when Jessie was about seven. William remarried Clara King who gave birth to five more children. The elder siblings were born in Surrey, but youngest son Clarence was born in Kent. Jessie, her sister Frances and brother Clarence later moved to Bournemouth, where Jessie began her writing career, remaining there until around 1903. Her home at 65 Lansdowne Road still stands, as of 2010. Jessie studied in Hildesheim then Paris under Gaston Paris. She also studied at the Crystal Palace School of Art.
One of her first printed works was a lengthy sentimental verse called The Rose-Tree of Hildesheim. A narrative about "sacrifice and denial", it was modelled on the story of the Thousand-year Rose, which grows on a wall at Hildesheim Cathedral. Published in 1896, it was the title verse in an omnibus of her poems.
(from Wikipedia)
Weston was the daughter of William Weston a tea merchant and member of the Salters' Company and his second wife, Sarah Burton, and named after his first wife Jessica Laidlay. Sarah, after giving birth to two more daughters died when Jessie was about seven. William remarried Clara King who gave birth to five more children. The elder siblings were born in Surrey, but youngest son Clarence was born in Kent. Jessie, her sister Frances and brother Clarence later moved to Bournemouth, where Jessie began her writing career, remaining there until around 1903. Her home at 65 Lansdowne Road still stands, as of 2010. Jessie studied in Hildesheim then Paris under Gaston Paris. She also studied at the Crystal Palace School of Art.
One of her first printed works was a lengthy sentimental verse called The Rose-Tree of Hildesheim. A narrative about "sacrifice and denial", it was modelled on the story of the Thousand-year Rose, which grows on a wall at Hildesheim Cathedral. Published in 1896, it was the title verse in an omnibus of her poems.
(from Wikipedia)
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December 27, 2022
Jessie Weston was born in South London (like me, but over a hundred years earlier) in 1850 and seems to have shared, if not positively contributed to, my Gawain Complex.
It all started for me when at some point in my childhood I noticed that many of the streets on the Downham Estate where I grew up were named after Arthurian characters. My street, Pendragon Road, was surrounded by Roundtable Road. Launcelot, Galahad, Gareth, Tristram all had streets named after them. There was even a small close named after an obscure son of Merlin, found only in an equally obscure poem by Sir Walter Scott - while my nan lived on Lamerock Road. You will almost certainly not have heard of any Sir Lamerock, but if you've read Sir Thomas Malory you will have come across a brother of the more famous Sir Percivale, called Lamorak or Lamerok, who ends up being murdered by Sir Gawain and his brothers. Needless to say a cowardly, treacherous murderer like Gawain didn't have a road named after him.
But then I came across a modern translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in a Penguin paperback which soon fell apart from frequent re-reading. I was hooked. Gawain was now my favourite Knight of the Round Table and even Malory's account of his death seemed unbearably poignant. I set to work immediately on a poem on the subject - the first one I ever wrote which I deemed worthy of preservation.
So what's going on? Will the real Sir Gawain please stand up...At this point, enter Jessie L. Weston, who was determined to set the record straight and present to the general public an image of Gawain to counter that promoted by Malory. She would publish English language translations of several of his adventures, apeing Malory's style - but she began her revisionist work by writing a monograph on the legend of this much maligned knight.
This early and relatively short study is very tentative compared with the controversial theories Weston would later espouse – most famously in From Ritual to Romance, which influenced both T.S. Eliot’s 'The Waste Land' and Francis Ford Coppola’s 'Apocalypse Now!' Her nevertheless bold claim is to take “an important step in the great work” which is the elucidation of the “confused tangle” of Arthurian romance through “the careful sifting of the stories connected with the individual knights; the attempt to discover what was the original form of each legend; to find out, if we can, how much they have borrowed – in the case of the leading knights, how much they have lent; and thus by separating, as far as may be, the threads of the fabric, to discover the nature of the ground-work.”
This she would later do with the legends of Sir Lancelot and Sir Perceval, but she began with what she called “one of the most puzzling, and at the same time most fascinating, characters of the Arthurian cycle, a character which later developments of the legend have greatly obscured, and most unjustly vilified.” Thus begins what one continental scholar dismissed as her Gawain Complex, a complaint which I am proud to share.
Following her friend (and son of her publisher) Alfred Nutt, Weston espouses the Insular or Celtic theory of origins, focusing particularly on the Irish myths of Cú Chulainn (Cuchulinn) who, like Gawain, plays the dangerous Beheading Game and lives to tell the tale. This is a test of the worthiness of a solar hero who journeys to the Otherworld and wins the love of a fairy mistress; but Gawain’s indefatigably pagan spirit meant that he fell foul of “the strongly moralising tendencies of the later romances”, such as those on which Malory based his Morte Darthur.
As the lover of the Queen of the Otherworldly Isle of Women, “he was, naturally enough, regarded as the champion of all the dwellers in it”, hence his soubriquet of the Knight of Maidens: “Gradually, as Christian ideas gained ascendancy, this Celtic other-world would come to be looked upon somewhat in the light of a Mohammedan paradise, and the character of Gawain, as dweller in it, suffered proportionately.” He would come to be seen as a “faithless libertine”, a serial seducer whose prowess in the bedroom was not matched in the field of combat, where he was frequently depicted as treacherous; but Weston also suggests that he was originally “the lover of his uncle’s wife,” a role that would later be taken by Lancelot.
Some of Weston’s re-evaluation of Gawain would be continued by the American scholar Roger Sherman Loomis (who sees him as the solar lover of the moon goddess) and, more recently, by John Matthews in Sir Gawain: Knight of the Goddess, a book that develops the esoteric aspect of the legend in a way that is more congruent with the later theories of Weston, who was influenced by occultists in her interpretation of the Grail legend. Also, given that Weston does not translate passages in medieval French that she quotes (although she does provide her own verse translation for passages from the German poem Parzival, in which Gawain shares the limelight with the title character), her book is not for the casual reader; whereas Matthews manages to be both in-depth and accessible.
Weston would eventually come to the view that in this early work she had “arrived at her views too hastily”, as Janet Grayson puts it in her biography of her (see Arthurian Literature XI). Nevertheless this is an important foundational work for those who wish to continue Weston’s mission to remove the layers of vilification which have obscured this archetypal hero.
There is more on Jessie Weston, Arthurian literature and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter). A series of posts on Weston begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
It all started for me when at some point in my childhood I noticed that many of the streets on the Downham Estate where I grew up were named after Arthurian characters. My street, Pendragon Road, was surrounded by Roundtable Road. Launcelot, Galahad, Gareth, Tristram all had streets named after them. There was even a small close named after an obscure son of Merlin, found only in an equally obscure poem by Sir Walter Scott - while my nan lived on Lamerock Road. You will almost certainly not have heard of any Sir Lamerock, but if you've read Sir Thomas Malory you will have come across a brother of the more famous Sir Percivale, called Lamorak or Lamerok, who ends up being murdered by Sir Gawain and his brothers. Needless to say a cowardly, treacherous murderer like Gawain didn't have a road named after him.
But then I came across a modern translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in a Penguin paperback which soon fell apart from frequent re-reading. I was hooked. Gawain was now my favourite Knight of the Round Table and even Malory's account of his death seemed unbearably poignant. I set to work immediately on a poem on the subject - the first one I ever wrote which I deemed worthy of preservation.
So what's going on? Will the real Sir Gawain please stand up...At this point, enter Jessie L. Weston, who was determined to set the record straight and present to the general public an image of Gawain to counter that promoted by Malory. She would publish English language translations of several of his adventures, apeing Malory's style - but she began her revisionist work by writing a monograph on the legend of this much maligned knight.
This early and relatively short study is very tentative compared with the controversial theories Weston would later espouse – most famously in From Ritual to Romance, which influenced both T.S. Eliot’s 'The Waste Land' and Francis Ford Coppola’s 'Apocalypse Now!' Her nevertheless bold claim is to take “an important step in the great work” which is the elucidation of the “confused tangle” of Arthurian romance through “the careful sifting of the stories connected with the individual knights; the attempt to discover what was the original form of each legend; to find out, if we can, how much they have borrowed – in the case of the leading knights, how much they have lent; and thus by separating, as far as may be, the threads of the fabric, to discover the nature of the ground-work.”
This she would later do with the legends of Sir Lancelot and Sir Perceval, but she began with what she called “one of the most puzzling, and at the same time most fascinating, characters of the Arthurian cycle, a character which later developments of the legend have greatly obscured, and most unjustly vilified.” Thus begins what one continental scholar dismissed as her Gawain Complex, a complaint which I am proud to share.
Following her friend (and son of her publisher) Alfred Nutt, Weston espouses the Insular or Celtic theory of origins, focusing particularly on the Irish myths of Cú Chulainn (Cuchulinn) who, like Gawain, plays the dangerous Beheading Game and lives to tell the tale. This is a test of the worthiness of a solar hero who journeys to the Otherworld and wins the love of a fairy mistress; but Gawain’s indefatigably pagan spirit meant that he fell foul of “the strongly moralising tendencies of the later romances”, such as those on which Malory based his Morte Darthur.
As the lover of the Queen of the Otherworldly Isle of Women, “he was, naturally enough, regarded as the champion of all the dwellers in it”, hence his soubriquet of the Knight of Maidens: “Gradually, as Christian ideas gained ascendancy, this Celtic other-world would come to be looked upon somewhat in the light of a Mohammedan paradise, and the character of Gawain, as dweller in it, suffered proportionately.” He would come to be seen as a “faithless libertine”, a serial seducer whose prowess in the bedroom was not matched in the field of combat, where he was frequently depicted as treacherous; but Weston also suggests that he was originally “the lover of his uncle’s wife,” a role that would later be taken by Lancelot.
Some of Weston’s re-evaluation of Gawain would be continued by the American scholar Roger Sherman Loomis (who sees him as the solar lover of the moon goddess) and, more recently, by John Matthews in Sir Gawain: Knight of the Goddess, a book that develops the esoteric aspect of the legend in a way that is more congruent with the later theories of Weston, who was influenced by occultists in her interpretation of the Grail legend. Also, given that Weston does not translate passages in medieval French that she quotes (although she does provide her own verse translation for passages from the German poem Parzival, in which Gawain shares the limelight with the title character), her book is not for the casual reader; whereas Matthews manages to be both in-depth and accessible.
Weston would eventually come to the view that in this early work she had “arrived at her views too hastily”, as Janet Grayson puts it in her biography of her (see Arthurian Literature XI). Nevertheless this is an important foundational work for those who wish to continue Weston’s mission to remove the layers of vilification which have obscured this archetypal hero.
There is more on Jessie Weston, Arthurian literature and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter). A series of posts on Weston begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
Displaying 1 of 1 review