Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Discovering the OriginsIt is very common for ancient and medieval works to be passed down to modern readers without the identity of the original writer. Although the novel known as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is anonymous, there are many clues that can help us understand who the writer might have been and where he might have lived. When seeking to understand the circumstances under which a piece of medieval writing was produced, scholars first examine the manuscripts in which the text is preserved. We can learn a lot just from the way it was written and produced. In the case of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it is preserved in a single manuscript, meaning the only reason we know this story is because somehow a single copy of the story survived from the Middle Ages into the modern period. The fact that only one manuscript exists suggests that this story was probably not the equivalent of a medieval bestseller (compare that to Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales survives in nearly 90 complete and partial manuscripts, and thus qualifies as a major medieval English success) . The single manuscript Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a small book without much decoration (it has some not very nice drawings), and contains three other short poems written in the same verse form which are probably by the same author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , but which deal with religious themes. By nature, the books were very expensive to make: all the pages come from thinly scraped skins of cows or sheep. But since the manuscript appears to have been made rather modestly, scholars assume that the book was made for so...... half of the paper......-poet, both acceptable names for this author) is considered as important a writer today as William Langland, author of the profoundly influential Piers Plowman, and Geoffrey Chaucer, author of the famous Canterbury Tales. The time period in which this poem was written is considered the late Middle Ages; At this time in England, the English language is emerging as the language of politics, government, popular religious writing, and literature. By the early Middle Ages, the fate of the English language in England was less certain; the Latin used by the church and the French used by the Norman invaders threatened to suppress English. In the 14th century, however, English speakers became educated English writers, and thus began to write and read in their native language (although they also often read and wrote in French and Latin).).