Introduction:

British elements in a literary text in the English language

The relevance of British and Celtic elements to the literature written in the English language has been highlighted by Peter Clemoes: ‘To read Medieval Welsh literature alongside that of Middle English is to understand for oneself the nature of the debt which English literature owes to the Celtic countries for the inspiration of the Arthurian legend.’ Here, I examine the presence of British Arthur and Owein in a Middle English romance, namely in Ywain and Gawain. Chrétien comes into my title because the Middle English Ywain and Gawain is derived by a process of transfer and adaptation from Chrétien's Yvain, and it is of course a critical commonplace that ‘Chrétien's romances draw on already existing materials, notably motifs of Celtic origin assimilated to an essentially Latin culture.’ In Yvain, for example, Chrétien acknowledges that Arthur was ‘li buens rois de Bretaingne’ (the good King of Britain) and locates his court ‘a Carduel an Gales’ (at Carlisle in Wales) – ‘Gales’ here including Strathclyde, the British kingdom of north-west England and south-west Scotland, the ‘Old North’ from a Welsh perspective.

Ywain and Gawain, Owein and Chrétien's Yvain

Among Arthurian narratives in Middle English, Ywain and Gawain has a special position, as it is ‘the only surviving romance in Middle English that was quite certainly translated directly from an original by Chrétien de Troyes’. For all the freedom with which the translator treated his source, as we will see, it is still much closer to Yvain than the other Middle English adaptation of a work by Chrétien, Sir Perceval of Galles, is to Perceval. The reference to Gawain in the title has been explained in terms of the romance's celebration of the close companionship between Ywain and Gawain, as well as by Gawain's appeal for Middle English authors and audiences more generally, culminating in the late-fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Ywain and Gawain is thought to have been composed in the fourteenth century, perhaps between 1325 and 1350, in a ‘Northern [dialect] with some admixture of North-East Midland forms’; it is extant in only one manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Galba E ix, written in a hand ‘belonging to the first quarter of the fifteenth century’.