Quale letto per Sir Gawain? Trasformazioni del meraviglioso nella letteratura inglese del medioevo

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most ambiguous texts of Middle English literature, will be here analyzed from the perspective of its author’s approach to the marvelous. The paper aims at showing the way the anonymous author presents the scenes where, according to literary conventions, the supernatural is at work, and reshapes the marvelous and the fantastic elements by placing them in a sort of realistic frame. This kind of marginality of the supernatural can be seen in the so-called “temptation episodes” that happen upon a bed. The paper argues that the author employs, as a starting point, the traditional adventure of the lit merveille, that appears in many works of different literary traditions dealing with Gawain, deprives the scene of its marvelous nature and transforms the adventure into a fight where the Lady of the Castle seems to be more dangerous than the weapons and the ferocious lion which elsewhere attack Gawain on the marvelous bed.