Enker (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 150 and 2477)

In 1958, Beryl Rowland wrote a meticulous refutation of the then-current assertion that Chaucer could not have understood Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because of its strange dialect.She examined all the words found in the poem but not in Chaucer's writings, categorized them according to language of origin and semantic field, and searched them out in other Middle English texts and in dictionaries of Middle English and Medieval French.Her aim was to determine their comprehensibility to a Londoner with Chaucer's background and experience.As for enker, she thought its meaning was unknowable, and that 'Chaucer's translation.. would have been as good as anyone else's.' 1 Derek Brewer in 1997 confidently declared his admiration for 'the poet's literally brilliant invention of enker grene for the colour of the complexion of Gawain's challenger.The power of the greenness lies partly in the unusual adjective, of Norse derivation, enker, "vivid."There is nothing sickly or undernourished about the greenness of the Green Knight'. 2 There had been no new lexicographical discoveries to justify Brewer's certainty about the etymology and the meaning of enker, but during the intervening forty years the general attitude toward the Knight's appearance had been greatly changed.Critics and translators had reinterpreted his colour in a much more extravagant form-a process which continues to have its effects on scholars and amateurs alike.This may be seen most clearly by comparing a sequence of translations of line 147, 'For wonder of his hwe men hade'.