Page:Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Tolkien and Gordon - 1925.djvu/26

xiv tradition; the influence of French idiom as in the expressions cros kryst, for alle lufeȝ ; further, the correspondence with the French analogues is often detailed. On the whole, Kittredge’s assumption of a French original (which we may call g) seems justified.

It is to be observed that no one of the French versions is derived from another, and at least two more lost romances linking their tradition must be assumed. One of these (O) is the work of the poet who first put the story into French, the other (R) was a retelling of O.

The nearest analogue to the adventure of the temptation is the English Carl of Carlisle, composed in the fifteenth century. A parallel episode in the French romance Le Chevalier a l’Epee (E) shows that the Carl too is based on a French original, which was very near to the version of the temptation in g, in which (it is assumed) the two adventures were first combined.

There are two later English versions of the combined plot, namely, The Turk and Gawain (T) and The Green Knight (K). Both are preserved in the Percy Folio Manuscript (written c. ). T is probably a debased form of another romance derived from g. The story of K is almost identical with that of Sir Gawain; the very wording of passages in Sir Gawain is echoed, and details are reproduced which were probably not in the French original (g). K is therefore a condensed form of the English Sir Gawain.

The reconstruction of such literary relations is necessarily uncertain, but if our analyses and