A MICROACCENT FROM 600 YEARS AGO.

A MICROACCENT FROM 600 YEARS AGO. Ted Hughes not only took the title poem of his 1967 book WODWO from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but he also translated parts of “Sir Gawain” in 1997. One of the reasons that “Sir Gawain” may have appealed to Hughes—aside from the fact that it is a great, great poem—is that the poem was written in about 1375 in a localized dialect, much farther removed from standard English than is the language of THE CANTERBURY TALES. Tom Shippey (in an essay collected in ROOTS AND BRANCHES) says that “the modern descendants of the Gawain-poet’s dialect are among the least-regarded and lowest-status dialects of modern England.” I posted earlier on how a linguist was able to identify within a block the home in the Bronx where my friend Dick Weisfelder grew up. Shippey says that philologists can identify — within one hundred yards— a location for the Gawain poet, who wrote over 600 years ago.