Simon Armitage has translated a number of medieval poems into modern English, including “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” “The Death of King Arthur” (an anonymous work, not Malory’s long prose ...

Fragments from a sexed-up medieval poem, which researchers are calling the “50 Shades of Grey” of its day, were just rediscovered after more than 700 years. The manuscript pages dating from sometime ...

An MIT professor discovered that the Pearl Manuscript from the 1300s has more to it than just four unconnected medieval poems. Professor Arthur Bahr found that along with the tale “Sir Gawain and the ...

Two years ago, MIT professor of literature Arthur Bahr had one of the best days of his life. Sitting in the British Library, he was allowed to page through the Pearl-Manuscript, a singular bound ...

The poem involves a woman who is having a debate with her apparently opinionated vulva about which of the two is more attractive to men. Reading time 3 minutes The surprising discovery of a fragment ...

In a moment of distraction from the laborious work of marking an “enormous pile of examination papers”, J.R.R. Tolkien flipped to a blank page on a student essay and scribbled, “in a hole in the ...