Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, includes Pearl and Sir Orfeo

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Translations into modern English of three medieval English poems — Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, which are placed here — were performed by J. R. R. Tolkien for poetry lovers and for the purposes of his own studies. His son Christopher Tolkien prepared them for publication together with the comments after the translator’s death. Sir Gawain is a chivalric romance, a fairy tale for adults, full of life and colours. Pearl is an elegy on the death of a child, a poem imbued with a sense of great personal loss. Both of these poems by an unknown author were written around 1400 in alliterative verse. Sir Orfeo belongs to an earlier and different tradition. In the Ukrainian translation, Olena O’Lear rendered English alliteration according to the same principles used in her translations of the Old English heroic epic Beowulf, two of Tolkien’s poems from The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun and his unfinished poem The Fall of Arthur. So now the Ukrainian reader has the opportunity to get acquainted with the courtly poetry of educated medieval Englishmen.