#I'd just make a million spelling mistakes and ruin the whole purpose of the exercise

[the-busy-ghost]

I love comparing different literature in slightly different dialects/languages from the same rough time period, even though I know approximately nothing about linguistics and very little about literary analysis

For example, the below texts, the first three from the last quarter of the fourteenth century and the fourth from the early fifteenth.

So you have the beginning of John Barbour’s “The Brus”. Barbour was probably resident in Aberdeenshire in the north-east of Scotland and his poem may have been prepared for a Scottish courtly audience c.1375:

Then quite a bit further south you have the magnificent alliterative work Gawain and the Green Knight, anonymous but written in the dialect of the north west Midlands of England and dated sometime c.1375-1400. Please ignore the scorings and silly notes of my younger self.

Then the opening verses of “Troilus and Criseyde”, composed in the 1380s by Geoffrey Chaucer, who hailed from Kent in the south-east of England and was possibly writing for an English courtly audience:

Then lastly, the “Kingis Quair”, which was probably written in the 1420s or 1430s and therefore is considerably later than the other three but I’m including here as it is alleged to have been written by James I of Scotland, who, however, had spent his formative years in a prison in England, so there’s a rather unique voice:

To be fair I know it’s no good comparing printed versions really- not only are some of the earliest manuscripts of these poems considerably later than their composition date (and the language of the scribe may have been different to that of the author) but each editor of a modern printed edition has their own conventions (for example the editor of “The Brus” removed most of the yoghs and thorns and replaced them with modern ‘y’ and ‘th’). Not to mention each poet is constrained by their material- not least the Gawain poet, who has to meet the demands of that rich alliterative verse.

But I still find it’s a fun exercise for a novice like me, picking through the poems and finding similar words and phrases and seeing where they differ in spelling or meaning.

Also I would like to eat the words of Gawain and the Green Knight with a spoon