BY WAY OF introduction, I would like to look again at one of the most well-known words in the alliterative Morte Arthure. In the proem, just when the poet turns from the Almighty to his earthly listeners, he gives this indication of his subject matter:

In apposition to the ‘elders’ are their deeds, which the poet calls ‘awke’, in Edmund Brock's gloss ‘perverse and contrary’, in Krishna's ‘strange, perverse’. It is a rare usage, but Malory's employment of the word in his ‘Tristram’ section is instructive: ‘And therewithal sir Trystrames strode unto hym and toke his lady from him, and with an awke stroke he smote of hir hede clene’. In his glossary to Vinaver's edition, G. L. Brooke supplies ‘back-handed’ for awke, and for awkewarde (at 230:10, also describing a sword-stroke) ‘with a backward stroke’. ‘Awke dedys’, then, according to the alliterative poem's argument, play out over the total genealogy of the elders in question, which genealogy, we should recall, is not only Arthurian, but, as indicated in the poem's concluding lines, also Trojan: