Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Resumen del libro

This smart new paperback edition contains the fully-reset text of three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for the modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex and honour. It features a beautifully decorated text and includes as a bonus the complete version of Tolkien's acclaimed lecture on Sir Gawain. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are two poems by an unknown author written in about 1400.

Sir Gawain is a romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and colour; but it is also much more than this, being at the same time a powerful moral tale which examines religious and social values. Pearl is apparently an elegy on the death of a child, a poem pervaded with a sense of great personal loss: but, like Gawain it is also a sophisticated and moving debate on much less tangible matters. Sir Orfeo is a slighter romance, belonging to an earlier and different tradition.

It was a special favourite of Tolkien's. The three translations represent the complete rhyme and alliterative schemes of the originals, and are uniquely accompanied with the complete text of Tolkien's acclaimed 1953 W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture that he delivered on Sir Gawain.

Biografía del autor

(Madrid, 1935) es uno de los grandes dibujantes españoles de inspiración literaria. Nombrado miembro de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando en 1998, desde muy joven demostró su enorme talento creativo y con solo 22 años obtuvo la Tercera Medalla de Pintura y Dibujo en la Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes. Becado por la Academia de España en Roma en 1964, desde entonces ha publicado varios libros de arte, ha sido profesor visitante en universidades como la japonesa de Nara y ha ilustrado libros como el poemario de Luis Alberto de Cuenca La mujer y el vampiro (2010), Tatuaje, de Junichiro Tanizaki (2010), Amor y gimnasia, de Edmondo de Amicis (2011) y Gitanjali, del Premio Nobel Rabindranath Tagore (2014) y Pinocho (2014), de Carlo Collodi.