Customer Reviews

Awntyrs Off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne: A Critical Edition (Haney Foundation Series, No. 5)

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OK, first. The title means 'The Adventures of Arthur at the Tarn Wadling'. The content is a narrative poem of stunning beauty, artistry, and immediacy, in an extremely intricate form that both rhymes and alliterates, with accentual meter--that is, a meter that counts the strongly stressed syllables in a line, not all the syllables. There are fifty-five stanzas, each about as long as a sonnet (not that the stanzas are like sonnets in form; they're not). Pronounced with a vanishingly short final 'e', the verse sings.

The editor has carefully compared four different versions of the poem, given in different manuscripts, and combined them to produce a hypothetical version of the original. It's annotated so that the reader can tell what the variant readings are in the various manuscripts.

There are two stories in the poem, both of which take place while Arthur and his knights are hunting in the forests near the tarn. In the first, Gawaine and Guinevere encounter a ghost; the story is brief, vivid, and striking. In the second, Gawaine jousts with Sir Galeron over disputed lands. The fight, too, is vivid. I cannot recall such immediacy of description in any other author's works.

The catch: it's in Middle English, in a dialect rather less clear than Chaucer's. Unless you're familiar with Middle English, you'll spend a lot of time in the glossary. It's worth it. It's perhaps the best narrative poetry I've ever read: aside from being a fascinating and splendid verse form, the unknown author knew how to move a story along in vivid images.