This anonymous Middle English poem of the late fourteenth century, a central work in the Arthurian group, is an important example of the tradition known as the "alliterative revival" and is one of a group of poems having Sir Gawain as hero. Its metrical form is the most intricate in Middle English Romance, including rhyme, alliteration, and stanza-linking. The stanza consists of nine long alliterative lines rhyming ababababc and a "wheel" of four shorter lines rhyming dddc.
In this first critical edition based on all four extant manuscripts, Robert J. Gates has contributed careful commentary with extensive critical apparatus. He attempts to reconstruct original readings that have been lost in one or more of the manuscripts. His glossary, however, uses words from the variant readings as well as those accepted in the edited text.
Using the editorial methods developed by George Kane in his edition of
Piers Plowman
, Gates gives abundant new evidence of the usefulness of these methods. He believes that the edition shows that written poems could be formulaic and that scribes often substituted readings consisting of formulaic whole or half lines.