The New Year Poem With No Title

The story as it is told

It is Christmas at King Arthur's court, and the feast is at its height when the doors swing open and a giant rides in. He is green, from his clothes to his skin, and he carries an axe. He does not come to fight. He lowers his neck and offers it to the blade.

Someone takes the blow, and the head rolls across the floor. Then the giant gets down, picks up his own head, and rides out of the hall, leaving the court silent behind him.

That is the poem readers have loved since the Middle Ages, in the same breath as Chaucer, and the retellings usually add two more flourishes. The Green Knight, they say, is the pagan Green Man in disguise, and the poem was written for the Order of the Garter.

What we can confirm

One copy, no title, no author. The poem survives in a single manuscript, British Library Cotton MS Nero A X/2, alongside Pearl, Cleanness and Patience. The BL catalogue says one scribe copied the text "between 1375 and 1400" in a dialect of southeast Cheshire or northeast Staffordshire, with the miniatures added around 1400 to 1410. Gawain fills ff. 94v to 130r. The Database of Middle English Romance lists it as a "Unique copy. 2530 lines." No author's name survives; scholars call him the Gawain or Pearl poet.

Misfiled for centuries. Sir Robert Cotton (d. 1631) bound the manuscript together with unrelated items. When Frederic Madden printed the poem in his 1839 collection Syr Gawayne (Bannatyne Club), he said it was "printed for the first time from a manuscript, believed to be unique." He blamed its long "oblivion" on an error that "pervades the Cottonian Catalogues compiled by Smith in 1696, and by Planta in 1802": both lumped four separate poems together as one old English dream poem on religion and morals, and dated it to the fifteenth century. Thomas Warton had seen the volume and quoted other pieces from it but never noticed the Gawain poem. Richard Price, Warton's editor, stumbled on it and announced an edition he never finished.

Even the title is an 1839 invention. Madden describes "the Romance intitled by me Syr Gawayn and the Grene Kny3t." The manuscript gives no title.

A New Year story. The poem's feast at Camelot runs "fiften dayes" over Christmas, and the action begins on New Year's Day: "Wyle nw 3er wat3 so 3ep þat hit wat3 nwe cummen" (l. 60), "while the New Year was so fresh that it was newly come." The court shouts "Nowel" and hands out "3eres 3iftes" (New Year's gifts, l. 67); Morris's sidenote reads "Gifts are demanded and bestowed." In Morris's prose summary the Green Knight tells Gawain "That is enough in New Year," and the bargain sets the return blow for New Year's morning a year later.

A fragile survivor. In 1864 Richard Morris re-edited the poem for the Early English Text Society. He warned that "the manuscript is fast fading" and was glad to spread its text "before the original shall be no longer legible."

The ending and the motto. The court agrees that every knight of the Round Table will wear a bright green baldric for Gawain's sake (ll. 2516 to 2520). Madden notes that at the end of the poem "in a later hand is written 'Hony soit q mal penc[e]'", the motto of the Order of the Garter. Whether the poem has any real connection to the Garter is a long-running scholarly debate. The manuscript proves only that a later reader added the motto.

The facts

• Unique manuscript: BL Cotton MS Nero A X/2, ff. 94v to 130r; copied 1375 to 1400 by one scribe; miniatures c. 1400 to 1410
• 2,530 lines; unique copy
• First printed by Frederic Madden in Syr Gawayne (London: Bannatyne Club, 1839), "printed for the first time"
• The 1696 (Smith) and 1802 (Planta) Cotton catalogues confused it with other poems
• The title was Madden's: "intitled by me"
• The action opens on New Year's Day (l. 60), with New Year's gifts (l. 67)
• Morris (1864): "the manuscript is fast fading"
• "Hony soit q mal pence" added "in a later hand" at the end
• Cotton MS Nero A X was split into two volumes in 1964

Related: What enters the public domain in 2027

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