Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Discovering the Origins It is very common for ancient and medieval works to be passed down to modern readers without the identity of the original author. Although the novel known as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is anonymous, there are many clues that can help us understand who the writer might have been and where he might have lived. When we try to learn more about the circumstances in which a medieval writing was produced, researchers first turn to the manuscripts in which the text is preserved. We can learn a lot just from the way it was written and made. In the case of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it is preserved in a single manuscript. That is, the only reason we know this story is because somehow only one copy of the story has survived from the Middle Ages to the modern period. The fact that only one manuscript exists suggests that this story was probably not the equivalent of a medieval bestseller (compare with Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales survives in nearly 90 complete manuscripts and partial, and are therefore considered a major English medieval success). The single manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a small book without much decoration (it contains some drawings which are not very good), and it contains three other short poems written in the same verse form which are probably by the same author than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but which focus on religious themes. By nature, books were very expensive to make: all the pages came from finely scraped cow or sheep hides. But because the manuscript appears to have been written in a fairly modest manner, scholars assume the book was made for someone...... middle of paper...... -poet, both of which are nouns acceptable to this author) is considered today as important a writer as William Langland, author of the very influential Piers Plowman, and Geoffrey Chaucer, author of the famous Canterbury Tales. The period in which this poem was written is considered the late Middle Ages; At present in England, the English language is becoming the language of politics, government, popular religious writing, and literature in England. Earlier in the Middle Ages, the fate of the English language in England was less certain; the Latin used by the Church and the French used by the Norman invaders threatened to suppress English. By the 14th century, however, English speakers became educated English writers and thus came to write and read in their native tongue (although they often also read and wrote in French and Latin).).