In his latest book, Eastern Kentucky University Professor Emeritus Ordelle Hill provides a close study of the late 14th-Century poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” about the adventures of a knight from King Arthur’s Round Table.

“Looking Westward: Poetry, Landscape, and Politics in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’” published by the University of Delaware Press, examines the poetry, landscape, and politics of late 13th- and 14th-Century Wales and the Welsh March and the region’s influence on the poet’s vision.

While not denying the extensive influence of continental writers on this Arthurian romance, Hill asserts one should not ignore the western influences at hand: the Welsh alliterative poets and the prominent Welsh March aristocratic writer Henry Grosmont, the western landscape specifically identified on Gawain’s journey, and the historical personages whose presence was so great in Wales and the March that they cannot be overlooked in the Arthurian fiction of the time.

His study of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” was assisted by a $30,000 research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2000. That same year, Hill took a sabbatical from EKU to travel abroad for hands-on research.

Hill, who taught in the Department of English at EKU from 1966 to 2002, holds degrees from Augustana College in South Dakota, Auburn University and the University of Illinois. His book, “The Manor, The Plowman, and the Shepherd: Agrarian Themes and Imagery in Late Medieval and Early English Renaissance Literature,” was published in 1992. For 10 years, he served as editor of the Southeastern Medieval Association proceedings journal, “Medieval Perspectives.”