There’s an interesting new forthcoming book for those interested in the language of Sir Gawain, and also for those seeking to place the Gawain-poet geographically via the dialect.

Back in 2013 Richard Dance published his fine and detailed study titled “”Tor for to telle“: Words Derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight“, to be found in the volume Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066-1520): Sources and Analysis. My heart sank when I learned this was from a AHRC-funded project, but on reading it I was pleased to find that Dance’s work proved a magnificent exception to the rule.

In this Dance found that…

“One could hardly, therefore, describe the Norse-derived words at this ‘fundamental’ end of the lexical spectrum as unusually deeply embedded within the author’s language; and, for all their interest in terms of the Gawain-poet’s stylistic strategies, their evidence does not justify searching for his home in parts of England reckoned to be especially densely settled by Scandinavian speakers”.

In a 2014 paper for the British Academy he mentioned that a… “full etymological analysis of the words derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain will appear in a future
publication”.

Now Amazon brings a date for this future publication. Dance’s full book Words Derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Etymological Survey will weigh in at chunky 256 pages. Published by Wiley-Blackwell, the book is set to appear on 7th June 2019.