A Romance of England and Wales: ‘Logres’ in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This chapter details the representation of England and Wales in the late fourteenth-century north-west Midlands poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Flood suggests that the Welsh affinities of the poem’s geography are not (as has elsewhere been argued) suggestive of a direct Welsh source influence on the poem, but rather are indicative of the mediation of Welsh historical material within the English tradition through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia regum Britanniae. It explores the significance of Marcher geographies and spatial perceptions for our understanding of the poem, arguing for the March as a cultural centre rather than a periphery.