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The
Linguistic Atlas and the Dialect of the Gawain Poems
by Ad
Putter and Myra Stokes, University of Bristol
In a famous article "A New Approach to Middle English Dialectology," Angus
McIntosh suggested that it was possible to pinpoint the language of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight to a very specific area:
Let us suppose that one takes the trouble to plot on maps as
much as possible of the dialectal information available in localised documents
which come from various parts of S Lancashire, Cheshire, SW Yorkshire,
W Derbyshire, N Staffordshire and N Shropshire. If one then examines the
language of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it eventually becomes
clear that this text, as it stands in MS Cotton Nero A.X., can only fit
with reasonable propriety in a very small area either in SE Cheshire or
just over the border in NE Staffordshire. That is to say, its dialectal
characteristics in their totality are reconcilable with those
of other (localised) texts in this and only in this area. So long as the
surviving text of Gawain is reasonably homogeneous, there is nothing surprising
about this being so.
This article is now ritually cited by scholars who conclude from it that
"the poet's dialect has been authoritatively located . . . in the moorlands
beyond Leek, where north Staffordshire borders on Cheshire and Derbyshire."
But what McIntosh actually wrote falls well short of proving that point.
There is, firstly, the question of whether the poet's own dialect can confidently
be inferred from that of the manuscript. On this issue McIntosh hedges his
bets. On the one hand, he implies a potential distinction between the dialects
of the poet and of the scribe(s) who produced the text "as it stands in
MS Cotton Nero A.X." On the other, the distinction seems merely notional,
for the localization is possible "so long as the surviving text of Gawain
is reasonably homogeneous" (in which case there is no meaningful distinction
to be made or recovered); and that same localization is confirmed, according
to McIntosh, by Ralph Elliott’s “suggestions about the provenance
of the original poem" (n. 12; our italics).
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