Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. John R. R. Tolkien

The translations into modern English of the three medieval English poems included here—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Pearl, and Sir Orpheus—were made by J. R. R. Tolkien for poetry lovers and for his own studies.

They were prepared for publication, along with comments, after the writer's death by his son Christopher Tolkien. Sir Gawain is a chivalric romance, a charming fairy tale for adults, full of life and color. The Pearl is an elegy on the death of a child, a poem imbued with a sense of great personal loss.

Both of these poems by an unknown author were written around 1400 in alliterative verse. Sir Orpheus belongs to an earlier and different tradition.

In the Ukrainian translation, Olena O’Lear recreated English alliteration using the same principles that were used in her translations of the Old English heroic epic Beowulf, two poems by Tolkien from the book The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, and his unfinished poem The Fall of Arthur.

So now the Ukrainian reader has the opportunity to get acquainted with the courtly poetry of educated medieval Englishmen.