ABSTRACT
The Awntyrs survives in four manuscript copies and has been edited no less than twelve times, the Avowing is found only in the Ireland Blackburne Manuscript and has only lately become available in a scholarly edition. It has been the fate of The Avowing of King Arthur to be overshadowed by another Northern Middle English romances of a similar, indeed a confusable, name: The Awntyrs of Arthur. When Hanna speaks of ‘crude execution’, he presumably has in mind the poet’s rather rough handling (to judge from the surviving copy) of his sixteen-line tail-rhyme stanza—a metrical form which the Avowing shares with two other Northern romances of the time, Sir Perceval of Galles and Sir Degrevant. Spearing has given a good account of the structure of the Awntyrs, comparing it to a diptych. Nothing is known about the immediate sources of The Avowing of Arthur, but it is clear that the materials of its two parts have quite different origins.
