In this ecocritical and animal studies reading of the anonymous fourteenth-century
poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1375–1400), I focus on
what the poem divulges about medieval attitudes toward hunting animals for sport.
Studies that focus on the blurring of conceptual, cognitive, and ethical distinctions
between animals and humans in medieval literature invite consideration of that
blurring as it is found in the triple hunt scenes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
My argument is that the triple hunt scenes confront the problem of truth (trawþe) in
the context of animal sports as well as in the context of the games in which Bertilak
invites Gawain and the court of Camelot to participate. In elaborating on the given
content, I also note the thematic and conceptual overlaps among Bertilak, Gawain,
and the fox, a tripling that scholars have overlooked in their focus on the parallels
between Gawain and the deer, boar, and fox. I rely on scholarly studies by such key
figures in animal studies and medieval studies as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Susan
Crane and such key figures in ecocriticism and medieval studies as Gillian Rudd and
Corinne J. Saunders in my focus on animal hunting in medieval Britain. In addition,
I refer to several modern translations of the poem: two recent translations by W.
S. Merwin and Simon Armitage and three older and canonical translations by J.
R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, Marie Borroff, and Brian Stone.

EB00000002791K

Available

• An animal studies and ecocritical reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight