Representing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
This site is intended to serve as a research hub concerned with historic and contemporary creative responses to the late medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In particular visual representations that have accompanied various translations and other media which take the poem as subject matter, extend its themes and/or assert intertextual links. It also serves to support an academic text of the same name by providing a platform for the works discussed, please see the ‘About’ section for more details.
News
24/09/2026: The paper 'Time, Horror, and Iconoclasm: Creative Responses to SGGK' is published in Etudes Médiévales Anglaises, 106. pp. 465-514 (access the text here).
04/03/2026: The Illustrator Alé Mercado is included in the illustration section of the website (see here).
14/02/2026: The essay 'Perception is a Spike Turned Inward: Reflecting on Contemporary Events through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' is published in Arthuriana's 'The So What' the text is inspired by two paintings, Green Knight’s Head (Point of no Return) (2024); and Attendants dressing and armouring Gawain. The essay can be read here open access :)
08/11/2025: This site and its text is featured as suggested reading by The Guild of Medievalist Makers, which is a newly formed organisation for academic and academic-adjacent creatives, dedicated to furthering creative-critical practice in the humanities (see here).
24-26/06/2025: Dr. Michael Eden presents the plenary at The Middle Ages in the Modern World MAMO conference (24-26 June 2025) the paper is titled 'Gawain is Not a Hero? Tensions Between the Heroic and the Complex Subject in Representations of Sir Gawain in Art' which includes the artwork Sighs Softly on Slopes and Shadows (2025).
12/02/2025: Dr. Michael Eden speaks at the Interdisciplinary Seminar on Medievalism at the University of London regarding this project and his art practice in the presentation 'Failed Seriousness and a Subject Worth Fighting For: Representing Sir Gawain' (see here). In recognition of this invitation from The Institute of Historical Research in Bloomsbury a new work, 'Gawain Between Two Deaths' (2025) was created (see here).
20/01/2025: The Illustrator Emily Cheeseman is included in the illustration section of the website (see here).
19/12/2024: The illustrator David Balade is the latest creative to add their work to the website (see here).
21-22/11/2024: The website, and essay, Representing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is the subject of a paper called 'Time, Horror, and Iconoclasm' by Dr. Michael Eden at the conference 'Tradition and Innovation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' at University of Lorraine in Nancy (France).
24/07/2024: The essay Representing: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is published by the journal Arthuriana (see here) and archived at project MUSE (see here). The essay is also archived at the University of Arts London research depository (see here). If you are unable to access the text and would like a pre-formatted copy please email Michael Eden at: m.h.eden@fashion.arts.ac.uk
24/05/2024: Film maker and writer Adam Scovell, is the latest creative to add artworks for the project (see here).
10/07/2023: A related text by Michael Eden titled 'The Reproachful Head of the Green Knight: Exploring the eerie, liminality, deep time and duration in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’' published in the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, Volume 16, Issue Making Monsters (Jun 2023, p. 55 - 80) discusses sculpture and painting related to the poem (see here).
08/07/2023: An extended version of the Film/TV section of this website is published in Trebuchet Magazine titled 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on Screen: Reflections on The Green Knight, organic power and the feminine in fantasy settings' bringing this content to a wider audience (see here).
12/02/2023: Artist Geraint Evans is the latest contemporary painter to produce work for Representing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (see here).
14/08/2022: This page (see here) at the RA on a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by John Ormerod Greenwood (1956) exists because of my research and correspondence with their archive and library teams. The page links to this online research hub Representing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where the artwork by Roy Morgan from the translation can be seen. The RA attribute the anonymous poem to Hugh Mascy, although this is part of the introduction in that translation it has since been questioned and there is consensus that we still don’t know who the poet was. There are however a number of scholars who do attribute the poem to Mascy, for example see Kooper, E. (1982). THE CASE OF THE ENCODED AUTHOR: John Massey in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 83(2), 158–168. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43343444.
20/07/2022: The entry on Roy Morgan on this site (see here) and at the RA archive (see here) is improved as a result of correspondence with Adam Waterton (librarian).
05/07/2022: From the 8th of July to the 13th of July 2022 Michael Eden is showing three paintings in the exhibition 'Verdant' curated by Camilla Brown for Middlesex University (see here). Those paintings are from the series 'Woodwose' inspired by references to the medieval wild-man of the same name in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
17/06/2022: Representing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (this website) is listed at the Camelot Project see Gawain's character description page here and the section regarding websites with Arthurian content here. The Camelot Project sponsored by the University of Rochester was created by Alan Lupack and Tepa Lupack and was started in 1995 as a database of Arthurian texts, images, bibliographies, and basic information.
13/06/2022: Representing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (this website) listed on University of Arts London Research online, see here.
11/06/2022: Representing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (this website) contributes to the biography of artist Herbert Cole (1867-1930), see here.