Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: with Pearl and Sir Orfeo
    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: with Pearl and Sir Orfeo
    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: with Pearl and Sir Orfeo
    Audiobook4 hours

    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: with Pearl and Sir Orfeo

    Published by HarperCollins

    Narrated by Terry Jones

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    A collection of three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for the modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex and honour.

    Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are two poems by an unknown author written in about 1400. Sir Gawain is a romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and colour; but it is also much more than this, being at the same time a powerful moral tale which examines religious and social values.

    Pearl is apparently an elegy on the death of a child, a poem pervaded with a sense of great personal loss: but, like Gawain it is also a sophisticated and moving debate on much less tangible matters.

    Sir Orfeo is a slighter romance, belonging to an earlier and different tradition. It was a special favourite of Tolkien’s.

    The three translations represent the complete rhyme and alliterative schemes of the originals.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    TranslatorJ. R. R. Tolkien
    Release dateMay 19, 2006
    ISBN9780007254293

    More audiobooks from J. R. R. Tolkien

    Related to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

    Related audiobooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Tolkien’s Watercolors

      Mar 1, 2019

      Tolkien’s Watercolors
      1 min read

    • Article

      Swedish Gaming Giant Buys Lord Of The Rings And Hobbit Rights

      Aug 18, 2022

      The company that owns the rights to JRR Tolkien’s works, including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, has been bought by the Swedish gaming firm Embracer Group, which has hinted it could make spin-off films based on popular characters such as Gand

      1 min read

    • Article

      What Kind of Angel: On Percy Shelley

      Nov 21, 2022

      Shelley saw himself as a conduit for the electricity of the universe. The post What Kind of Angel: On Percy Shelley appeared first on The Millions.

      15 min read

    • Article

      Mark Haddon’s Latest Curious Incident Sails the High Seas

      Jul 18, 2019

      Sex and attraction feature prominently throughout, as do birth and death, terror and violence—the stuff of life that hasn’t changed one bit over the eons. The post Mark Haddon’s Latest Curious Incident Sails the High Seas appeared first on The Millio

      5 min read

    • Article

      Orlando Spirit Of The Age

      Jun 11, 2019

      Orlando Spirit Of The Age
      5 min read

    • Article

      Three Novelists Pushing The Bloat Out

      Feb 29, 2024

      THE ART OF OMISSION SEEMS TO BE UNfashionable in fiction these days. Word-bloat and page-plumping are the literary crises of our age. It’s not hard to see where this might come from. First, there is the same misguided view of value for money that lea

      6 min read

    • Article

      In The Middle Of Even This: Poetry

      Jan 1, 2020

      To be brought from the bright schoolyard into the house:to stand by her bed like an animal stunned in the pen:against the grid of the quilt, her hand seemsstitched to the cuff of its sleeve—although he wantsmost urgently the hand to stroke his head,a

      7 min read

    • Article

      War Memorial

      Oct 5, 2023

      War Memorial
      4 min read

    • Article

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work

      Dec 15, 2018

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work
      6 min read

    • Article

      Time Out

      Mar 27, 2020

      Time Out
      5 min read

    • Article

      In Defense of Discomfort: On Naivo’s ‘Beyond the Rice Fields’

      Jan 25, 2018

      If a writer from Madagascar wishes to reach a wide audience, they write in French, not Malagasy. In Madagascar, French is the language of higher education, of high-paying jobs, and of international communication. The story of how Madagascar came to u

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Devil Strides Our Countryside

      Jan 26, 2023

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Jeremy Harte Reaktion Books 2022 Hb, 296pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781789146509 One of the most beloved of Doctor Who stories has long been 1971’s “The Daemons”. Over the cou

      15 min read

    • Article

      Unveiling The Villanelle

      Sep 1, 2022

      Unveiling The Villanelle
      5 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Jun 6, 2017

      by Mark Laurie. by Sarah Schmidt Published by Hachette ISBN 9780733636882 $32.99 Our fascination with violent crime seems to find its zenith with the particular brutality of axe murders, all the more so when the perpetrator may be a young woman. The

      4 min read

    • Article

      An Unlikely Friendship

      Jun 25, 2021

      An Unlikely Friendship
      4 min read

    • Article

      An Unlikely Friendship

      Jun 25, 2021

      An Unlikely Friendship
      4 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Nov 3, 2022

      Shelf Life
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Grueling, Painful, Beautiful Fiction of László Krasznahorkai

      Aug 8, 2017

      To misread Krasznahorkai as merely, or primarily, a political writer is to risk squandering the profoundly personal nature of his stories. More tragically, it is to foist a kind of sloppy activist, and determinately secular métier onto one of contemp

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

    4/5

    500 ratings28 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Alliterative translation was musical, rich with meaning. I played it at slower setting in order to understand it better,
    • 3/5
      Middle English, King Arthur tale. Sir Gawain meets up and cuts off the head of Green Knight and is challenged to meet up again. In the meantime, Sir Gawain travels and meets up with a lady who tries to seduce him, giving him a green girdle. The themes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight include the relationship between chivalry, courtesy, and Christianity, sinful nature, and the importance of truth. Sir Gawain did well but he was not perfect as is the case for all of us.
    • 3/5
      Arthurian legendary fight with supernatural Knight.Read Samoa Nov 2003
    • 4/5
      A great translation- I thought the endnotes were especially helpful. I had to read the book for English, but it made me interested in the genre as a whole. I want to read more now about Arthur and Camelot. I never realized that there were these intricate stories that went deeper into the legend of King Arthur.  
    • 4/5
      An epic poem about Sir Gawain from Arthur's court.
    • 3/5
      This relatively short medieval poem is written in lyrical verse with interesting structure that is quite readable. A take on Arthurian legend that is often light-hearted, but there is some blood. The main plot device is a beheading, after all. Not to mention Sir Gawain's temptation by the Lady of the castle in which he takes in lodging over the Christmas holiday. Juicy.
    • 5/5
      Excellent.
    • 5/5
      A splendid translation of the best of the English Arthurian romances. Armitage has made this classic readable and exciting for the 21st century. SGGK is a gorgeously crafted tale full of games, laughter, human foibles, tragedy averted and humanity triumphant .
    • 3/5
      I wouldn't trust anyone wearing all green in the first place.
    • 2/5
      I read this in 2011 for one of my university modules.I found it interesting to read something as old as this but didn't find it especially entertaining. I only read this because I had to!
    • 5/5
      The second poem was one of the most beautiful pieces of literature ever composed.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A good reading of Tolkien's version of the tale. I thought of rating it a bit lower because I am very unhappy Tolkien's lecture is is the book itself, but not the audiobook. Ultimately, I do not have the heart.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The changing of the seasons, the clothing of the characters, and the bloody battles and hunt scenes are all described with such vivid detail. I love the expression of the struggle that Gawain faces between chivalry and what he knows to be right.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I like this translation because the introduction is long enough to get me started, but not so long that it feels like work to read. And there is a great appendix that explains the poetical form, which I really enjoyed learning about and that helped me to appreciate the poem more. The poem itself is surprisingly vivid. The images are rich and the story is detailed and even brutal at times. I also liked the moral message - even the "best" of us had better beware of pride!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      While perhaps not the most accurate translation, it remains one of the more readable by the general reader, and maintains a sense of vitality and flow throughout. My main complaint would be a few too modern, or too slang-y phrasing choices of the sort that feel forced and dated a mere handful of years later.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      It seems strange giving a book like this a rating in stars, because it's so ancient and it's not like it's the latest Dan Brown novel or something. ;)I studied this book, and I write an essay or two on it, and I loved it mostly because of where it came from.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I'm so glad I got a chance to read this one. It took a while, but it was totally worth it. I love this story!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Sir Gawain's story was pretty interesting, as was Sir Orfeo's. Pearl was just . . . boring. And long.
    • 5/5
      The Oxford don J.R.R. Tolkien is mostly known for composing the Lord of the Rings trilogy. However, before this trilogy, he built his academic career as an acclaimed expert on Anglo-Saxon culture, language, and literature. In his work, he translates three works from the Middle English into modern idiom. The quality of the translation demonstrates the vastness of Tolkien’s literary brilliance.Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales are the two most-read works from the Old English and Middle English tongues. As suggested by Tolkien, these three tales deserve to have a prominent place in this literary canon as well. As with Beowulf, their original author or authors is/are unknown. They were probably passed down orally (think stories by the fire at night) before being inscribed at some point. Nonetheless, they share interesting tales that illustrate the quality of life during medieval England and represent an early triumph of the expanding English tongue.Sir Gawain makes great use of alliteration in Tolkien’s translation. Many lines repeat words starting with one letter. In addition, this work encodes a story of love, honor, duty, and courage. It describes a sacred quest by a knight from King Arthur’s time. Humanistic qualities in addition to literary quality place it among the great works of Old and Middle English.Pearl describes holy beauty, symbolized by a pearl and a child, in the midst of a profane, ugly world. It is marked by a complex rhyming structure. Indeed, this lyrical frame probably aided in memorization at some point in history. This poem contains much Christian theology and deals with quintessentially medieval, Augustinian views on God and life.Sir Orfeo is a comparatively short poem, also rhymed, of a king’s quest for redemption and inner nobility. It lauds a servant – a medieval everyman – who dutifully honors his lord and is rewarded in the end.These translations are entertaining and masterful. They contain words that are not common to American usage – words like “gramercy” and “bayed.” Diction like these expands our imagination into medieval Britain and the language of Middle English. Through this translation, we see Tolkien’s scholarly mastery of the ancient Anglo-Saxon world and are enriched by its gifts.
    • 5/5
      I'm mostly here for Sir Gawain; Pearl is very much medieval theology, and thus interesting primarily for academic reasons, and Sir Orfeo is an interesting retelling of Orpheus set in England with faeries but of that style of poetry that's liable to put you to sleep if you don't pay close attention. The Sir Gawain, however, is fantastic, and if you can parse the deep language of academia, the translation notes are rather enlightening on medieval English styles of poetry.
    • 4/5
      This slim volume, put together by Christopher Tolkien, collects three translations done by J.R.R. of 14th-century British poems, together with writings by Tolkien Sr. on the poetry.

      'Gawain and the Green Knight' is the classic, and not surprisingly, the best. Originally written in an alliterative style, Tolkien reflects that style in his translation, but the verse-form is such that it is not distracting to the story - it's very readable.
      The story is, of course, that of one of Arthur's knights who agrees to a (rather foolish contest) with a strange, fey knight of mysterious powers. Bound by his word to seek out the knight (and, undoubtedly, his own death) the next year, he wanders in search of the knight and his appointed meeting - but encounters the hospitality of a merry lord and his all-too-seductive wife....

      'Pearl' didn't do it for me, I have to admit. The narrator encounters the ghost of his dead daughter, who tells him, at great length, about how the dead are with god and the living have to accept it, blah blah blah religious dogma blah blah.

      'Sir Orfeo,' however, is a very interesting poem, especially considering how old it is. It's a very intentional 'updating' of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, making the characters a British lady, and her lord, who seeks her when she has been taken under the hill by Faerie. Pretty cool that we can see that in the 14th century, people were adapting stories to their own mythologies (as they've always done, of course)
    • 4/5
      The first two poems in this book are by an unknown author written around 1400.I liked Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The translation had a great narrative and the quality of the original poetry was clear. I found Pearl incomprehensible in places and was put off by the amount of religious dialogue and dogma.Sir Orfeo is an earlier poem but like Sir Gawain it has a clear and compelling narrative.The rhyming nature of the poem is quite charming,as is the fairytale theme.
    • 5/5
      Though by Tolkien, this book is largely academic, and is the Professor's translation of three middle English poems from the west of Britain around the same time that Chaucer wrote. Chaucer used the dialect of London and the elite and so was better remembered. The author of the three poems used a different dialect that was subsumed by Chaucer's dialect. The translations are eminently readable and readers can easily see these poems' influence on Tolkien's later work.
    • 4/5
      Sir Gawain is a weird story, but Sir Orfeo is a cool story (the Middle English version of the myth of Orpheus), and Pearl is really good too.
    • 4/5
      Quite good translations of difficult medieval poetic metres and rhyme schemes. I wholly enjoyed Gawain, found Pearl a bit tedious (probably due to topic rather than language), and liked Sir Orfeo well enough. Would have preferred glosses to be provided at the foot of the page rather than at the back, but that's a minor quibble.
    • 4/5
      Certainly well worth the expense to have 3 medieval classics in one volume. Tolkien's translations are far more than adequate, although his Sir Gawain is not, to my mind, as effective as Marie Boroff's, which appears in the Norton Anthology, beloved of college sophomores everywhere. The alliteration is a little to insistent and the meter is a little to regular for my taste. But that's coming from a person totally unqualified to make such judgments with any degree of credibility. I am amused, a little, by Tolkien's habit of introducing allusions to LOTR into his translation. Just one example: early in the poem, we find the line "Such a fole vpon folde, ne freke þat hym rydes." "Tolkien gives us "Such a mount on middle-earth, or rman to ride him." "Folde" means, simply, "earth" or "the world". By saying "middle"-earth, Tolkien certainly adds another "m" to the alliteration, but, of course, also sets the poem directly in a terrain somewhere between the Shire and the land of the elves.
    • 5/5
      This poem was written about 1400 and provides an insight into the medieval mind. It contains three accounts of hunts and one can appreciate the excitement of the participants. At the end of the hunt the deer/boar is butchered and one feels the importance of meat to the people in those days; animals were slaughtered at the beginning of winter and the meat salted. For most of the year one would be lucky to be eating salted meat. A fresh juicy steak with plenty of fat would have been really mouth watering.The poem also contains accounts of the knight being robed and having his armour put on. One can appreciate how important a knight's appearance was. The clothes and armour would represent more money than an ordinary person could earn in a lifetime.A marvellous poem.