Epic Medieval Literature

There's plenty to go for,

Beowulf seems an obvious choice as well.

Perhaps some of the Nordic sagas as well and don't forget the two Edda stories (the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda).

I'm sure others will offer more.

Dunno if you read Sir Gawain in Middle English (it's not THAT hard), but if you did and you enjoyed the experience, your most logical next step would be the Canterbury Tales. There are some chivalric stories in there, and much else besides.

There's also Malory's Morte D'Arthur. I happened to take a look at it a few weeks ago, but it looks awfully dull. (Chaucer, on the other hand, has an excellent sense of humour.)

If you liked the Roland cycle, perhaps you can try Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (even though that's Renaissance, not "medieval") - there is a very lively English prose translation in the Oxford World's Classics series.

Best of all, though, is one of my top-ten favourite books: DON QUIJOTE, which dealt a death blow to all epic literature, but which is simply great fun to anyone who's ever played at being King Arthur, Ivanhoe, Zorro etc.!

P.S. For a change of perspective, try THE TALE OF THE HEIKE (also translated as TALES OF THE HEIKE), the great 12th century Japanese samurai epic.

No, of course DON Q. isn't medieval, you could say it wipes the floor with all things mediaeval, that's what makes it so great... But Sancho Panza is a direct descendant of all the clever peasants in medieval farce (Boccaccio, Chaucer, the French fabliaux...) and the good Don actually models himself on the great Roland (a.k.a. Orlando)!

Anyhow, if you really want epics, J.R.R. Tolkien himself prepared a version in English of the Nibelung saga, which he saw as the great epic of all "Germanic" peoples. It was published just a few weeks ago, under the title THE LEGEND OF SIGURD AND GUDRUN, and it got a thumbs-up from Tolkien expert Tom Shippey in the Times Literary Supplement.

P.S. If I remember it well, Tolkien knew several Scandinavian languages and he especially loved Finnish (he based Elvish on it) but he was prejudiced against my own mother tongue, Dutch, which he found insipid. So much the worse for him that he never got to read the wonderful medieval Dutch (actually Flemish) animal epic REINAART DE VOS (or VAN DE VOS REYNAERDE)! (Oh well, it was too RECENT for him, anyway - he preferred early medieval stuff.) This Flemish REINAART, which is incredibly entertaining, considerably improves on its French models and served, in turn, as a source for a variety of German versions, the best known of which is probably Goethe's Reineke Fuchs.

My actual surname is Vos ("fox" in Dutch). My old classmates used to call me Fuchs or Fuxi, hence my pseudonym. (We lived about 60 km. from the German border.) So much for today's free lecture!

Edited by fuxi - June 21 2009 at 16:22

Thanks a lot for your suggestions! I haven't read Tolkein's version of Sir Gawain. Sounds interesting, though. I actually purchased a complete edition of the Canterbury Tales, but I haven't really dug into it as of yet. It's so damn big and bulky! It's really more of a show piece. I have a good bit of books to check into now. :)