User:KSantana11/Sir Gawain and The Green Knight (Kristin)

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The language used in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been linked through linguistic studies to dialects originating in the Cheshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire area of northwest England. Considering the identity of the poet remains unknown, scholars have debated possible candidates in relation to the sociopolitical environment of Cheshire in the 1400s. The scribe's dialect has been noted to be different from the poet's. While the poet's dialect places Gawain in the area of Staffordshire, the scribe's differing dialect suggests that the analysis of the poem's regional identity could be influenced by the collision of the dialects. Dialect data suggests the possibility that the dialect in the poem, in its entirety, is not accurate. Some of the language could have been borrowed or influenced by other dialect areas in England, as evidenced through studies of rhyming patterns and alliteration, which challenge the veracity of the dialect argument. The language may instead be dialectally heterogenous, and not locally reserved to only the Cheshire area. However, the Cheshire area is still widely believed to be the setting the poet wrote the poem in.

Scholar Ralph Elliott has studied topographical vocabulary in order to focus on the location of The Green Chapel in the poem, which Elliott believes to be Ludchurch, in the hillsides above Staffordshire. He compares Sir Gawain's itinerary to the journey that monks routinely took from Dieulacres Abbey, Staffordshire to the Welsh border and back. Gawain's route, according to Malcom Andrew and Ronald Waldron, follows the North Wales road along the coast of the Irish Sea and through Conway, Bangor, Rhuddlan, Flint and Abergele. But author Robert Barrett suggests that Gawain possibly took a sharp right turn during his journey, as described in the text, and was not traveling in a straight line towards the northwest, but turned east, back toward England. Other scholars have focused on themes of the poem to locate areas portrayed in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Bennett-Bowers hypothesis, developed by Michael Bennett and John Bowers, highlights that the poem is concentrated on the meeting between two different communities, which are separated by their distinctive cultures and geographies. Bennet focuses on the political situation of the time, and takes into consideration the regional context of Richard II's deposition in 1399, which detailed a pathway through uncharted areas until the coast of Wales was visible, comparing the descriptions of this geography with that of the journey taken by Gawain. Further, studies of the political landscape by other scholars, such as J.R. Hulbert and Patricia Clare Ingham, emphasize the possible depiction of the English north vs. the south (Wales), where Wales' position as England's imperial project at the time can reflect the area where Bertilak's castle is located, and Camelot is portrayed as the imperial center. Ingham argues that Gawain's route shares similarities with Gerald of Wales' depiction of a path to Wales. Moreover, Ingham underlines how Gawain encounters dragons, trolls and giants in the woods, and that this could be compared to a colonizer's perspective of wild territories; through the lens of colonial discourse, Camelot is depicted as powerful and organized, while the landscape of the Wirral peninsula that Gawain crosses in his search for The Green Chapel, is chaotic and untamed. The otherness of Wirral also stands in sharp contrast to the knightly portrayal of Gawain. The Wirral area was known for its lawlessness, wildness and lordship, where wealthy lords, like Bertilak, owned large estates. Wirral was engaged with Wales in both cultural and colonial aspects, but was not a direct depiction. The poet's descriptions of the areas Gawain travels through can therefore be connected to the Cheshire area in various ways.