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been a number of other equally plausible areas of the country
suggested. Nothing is known about the 'Gawain' poet. The poem
survives in a single manuscript (now held in the British Library,
Cotton Nero A.x) without any context. The distinctive dialect of
the medieval text indicates its provenance as being somewhere in
the North-West Midlands of England and having come from the end of
the fourteenth century. Due to its subject, content and genre
affiliation, it is generally assumed that the 'Gawain' poet wrote
the poems for the provincial minor gentry, and perhaps even for the
more noble fringes of King Richard II's court. Thus, the medieval
readers would have been accustomed to the aristocratic conventions
that are depicted in the poem, the traditional genre motifs that
are used throughout, and possibly the terrain and landscape that is
described.
While a degree of poetic licence is used by the animator, he has
also looked at the evidence within the text that suggests a
possible time and place of setting. This evidence might be the
landscape descriptions that suit the Derbyshire location, or the
sense of 'romantic' medieval shapes and colours in the poem's
medieval descriptions of courtly life and behavioural conventions.
The animator also has to look for evidence that suggests the
identity of the poet and the identity of the intended audience.
Once the evidence within the poem has been examined, there is still
room for personal interpretation of this evidence. These are the
kind of questions of authenticity that the scriptwriter, animator,
composer and producer all have to ask.
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