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

One of the earliest great stories of English literature after ?Beowulf?, ?Sir Gawain? is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that " helps] liberate ?Gawain ?from academia" (?Sunday Telegraph?).

“Morpurgo's dramatic telling captures the vitality of the tale as well as its beauty and mystery.” — Booklist (starred review) Welcome to a medieval world full of sword fights and shape-shifting, monsters and magic, and timeless characters both gallant and wonderfully human. Written anonymously in the fourteenth century, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is retold in its entirety by Michael Morpurgo in a lively and accessible narration that captures all the tale’s drama and humor. Vivid illustrations by the celebrated Michael Foreman infuse this classic tale with dragons, swords, and medieval pageantry.

Three masterpieces of medieval poetry, translated by the author of The Lord of the Rings—including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poem that inspired the major motion picture The Green Knight Comparable to the works of Chaucer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo weave a bright tapestry of stories from a remote age of chivalry and wizards, knights and holy quests—but unlike The Canterbury Tales, the name of the poet who wrote them is lost to time. Masterfully translated from the original Middle English by J.R.R. Tolkien, the language of these great poems comes to life for modern readers. At the center of this collection is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a tale as lush and dark as England’s medieval forests. Mixing romance and adventure, Sir Gawain follows King Arthur’s most noble knight on an adventure of epic enchantment, temptation, and destiny.

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, PEARL, AND SIR ORFEO THREE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH POEMS, WITH TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN It’s Christmas at Camelot and King Arthur won’t begin to feast until he has witnessed a marvel of chivalry. A mysterious knight, green from head to toe, rides in and brings the court’s wait to an end with an implausible challenge to the Round Table: he will allow any of the knights to strike him once, with a battle-axe no less, on the condition that he is allowed to return the blow a year hence. Arthur’s brave favorite for the challenge is Sir Gawain… Accompanying Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in this book are Sir Orfeo, a medieval version of the story of Orpheus and Euridice, a love so strong that it overcame death, and Pearl, the moving tale of a man in a graveyard mourning his baby daughter, lost like a pearl that slipped through his fingers. Worn out by grief, he falls asleep and dreams of meeting her in a bejewelled fantasy world. Interpreted in a form designed to appeal to the general reader, J.R.R. Tolkien’s vivid translations of these classic poems represent the complete rhyme and alliterative schemes of the originals. This beautifully decorated text includes as a bonus the complete text of Tolkien’s acclaimed lecture on Sir Gawain.

Presents the prose translation of the Old English epic that Tolkien created as a young man, along with selections from lectures on the poem he gave later in life and a story and poetry he wrote in the style of folklore on the poem's themes.