Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

In The Times, Alan Garner contemplates the Middle English Christmas-time poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, newly translated by Simon Armitage. “The language of Gawain is alive, rooted in its Pennine Land,” he writes, arguing that the English spoken now in Gawain country means that the Middle English language of the poem is only a “small barrier” to those readers. He then offers extracts by himself, Simon Armitage, Bernard O’Donoghue, Ted Hughes and J RR Tolkein for readers to compare.