From Romance to Ritual: Jessie L. Weston's Gawain

Summary

Behind Romance, lies Folk-lore, behind Folk-lore lie the fragments of forgotten Faiths: the outward expression has changed, but the essential elements remain the same.

Jessie L. Weston

Jessie L. Weston at the Fin-de-Siècle

Jessie Laidlay Weston (1850-–1928), an oft-maligned figure of controversy, is best known for her influential study that blended folklore and Arthurian myth, From Ritual to Romance (1920). Weston was also an active scholar, prolific translator, and popularizer of Arthurian texts. Her translations and other studies have received little modern scholarly attention, yet they reveal across their entirety a coherent medievalizing project that sought to shift popular opinion about many of the keystones of Arthurian studies. This project became centered on one of the most debated figures in Arthurian romance: Sir Gawain. The purpose of this article is to draw the focus away from From Ritual to Romance, and back to Weston's earlier works in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth: the studies with which she made her scholarly reputation. By examining Weston's popularizing translations alongside her more scholarly works, it will use her fascination with Sir Gawain to consider how she sought to reinterpret the literature of the Middle Ages, and to promote a particular vision of the legendary past.