I'm not too into this dated kind of literature because I don't do things like go hunting with noblemen or wander around on horseback looking for shit that can easily kill me. Still, it's an excellent translation that reads smoothly, and is an inestimable find as a contribution to the colorful, if rather morbid and two-dimensional, early English literature. ( )

I remember reading a summary of this story in middle or high school, but it is nice to sit down with a classic and let it tell its tale. This is a very good story and its age only makes it more endearing. A simpler story from a different time. ( )

This Folio Society Edition is very nice with huge thick pages and some lovely illustrations. It is Simon Armitage’s translation but it does not have the dual language format, just the new verse.

The story is good, at least for being centuries and centuries old. There are some misogynistic themes in the end unfortunately, but the overall message of cowardice and valor was rewarding in my opinion.

I do not know much about old English translation, but I enjoyed the work that Mr. Armitage did with the alliterations. I'm sure it must have been difficult to compose while staying to true to the meter and meaning of the original.

I was also interested in this story's contribution to the Arthurthian myth. Armitage's translation posits Uther as Arthur's father and Morgan as his mother but also as the wife of the Green Knight. There are strong Christian words used to describe the green chapel where the Green Knight abides: Satan, evil, ect. But once the ruse is up, Morgan's witchcraft seems tolerable and almost necessary as Gawain's test. I wonder if this tolerance is so apparent in the original text. If so, how indicative of the times when it was written. Was “magic”, despite its non Christian origins, tolerable or maybe even just something to be reckoned with?

This was book was pleasure to hold, admire, and read aloud. It might become one of those Christmas books that gets read every year to the family. ( )

I have read and finished 'The Green Knight', which is absolutely top-hole: in fact the only fault I have to find with it is that it is too short - in itself a compliment. It never wearies you from first to last, and considering the time when it was written, some things about it, the writer's power of getting up atmosphere for instance, quite in the Bronte manner, are little short of marvellous: the descriptions of the winter landscapes around the old castle, and the contrast between them and the blazing hearth inside, are splendid. The last scene too, in the valley where the terrible knight comes to claim his wager, is very impressive.
- from a 16 May 1916 letter to Arthur Greeves, in The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume I; refers to the 1912 Kirtlan translation]

I am realising a number of very old dreams in the way of books - reading Sir Gawain in the original (you remember my translation of it in a companion volume to my translation of Beowulf)...
- from a 26 June 1927 letter to Arthur Greeves, in The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume I; refers to the 1925 Tolkien and Lucas Middle English edition ( )

I enjoyed how this book was a poem, it was in verse but when you read it you don't get caught up in the rhyme and rhythm. When i was reading this book, because its told in third- person form, and i imagined the author was some sort of philosopher because there are times where there are parts that sound like something you would find in a quote book, and it is very descriptive and well worded. though in the middle of the book, it was a little hard for me to follow what was going on. The only way I understood what I was reading was when I read out loud. This story itself is great though. It has good moral values, but it has (just a little bit) goriness. ( )