Which medieval poem did J.R.R. Tolkien edit with E.V. Gordon in a landmark 1925 edition?

J.R.R. Tolkien edited Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V. Gordon in a landmark 1925 edition.

The poem is a Middle English Arthurian romance about Sir Gawain, who accepts a supernatural challenge from the Green Knight. Tolkien and Gordon’s scholarly edition helped make the poem more accessible to students and established an important reference point for modern study of its language and literature.

Tolkien’s expertise in Old and Middle English shaped both his academic career and his imaginative writing. The poem’s combination of heroic testing, moral uncertainty, landscape, and supernatural danger resonates with themes found throughout his fiction, although Sir Gawain is not a story set in Middle-earth.

The poem is often confused with Beowulf because Tolkien also wrote influential scholarship on that Old English epic. However, Beowulf is an earlier Old English poem, while Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a Middle English work preserved in a later medieval manuscript.