A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

J A Burrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429594106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1965, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an interpretation of the most important poem in Middle English literature, the only fourteenth century work which can stand beside Chaucer. The book examines the poem's conventions and purposes in a critical analysis and provides a useful and insightful introduction to 'Sir Gawain'. It will be of interest to students and academics studying the poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

IV

THE FOURTH FITT

I

THE ACTION OF THE FOURTH FITT divides into three parts: the journey to the Green Chapel, the encounter with the Green Knight, and the return to Camelot. I shall discuss these in turn, beginning with the journey.

The fitt opens some time before dawn on New Year’s Day. There is a snowstorm, and indoors the hero lies awake in his lamplit chamber, listening to the wind and the crowings of the cock:

Þe werbelande wynde wapped fro þe hyƷe,

And drof vche dale ful of dryftes ful grete.

Þe leude lystened ful wel þat leƷ in his bedde,

ÞaƷ he lowkeƷ his liddeƷ, ful lyttel he slepes;

Bi vch kok þat crue he knwe wel þe steuen. (2004–8)

This passage marks the limits, in one direction, of the poet’s realism. Nowhere else does he go further in evoking what it would really feel like to be on a quest like Gawain’s—wakefulness, a heightened sense of the hostility of the external world, a pressing awareness of time. The state of mind is wonderfully conveyed. Here as in his evocation of the corresponding bodily sensations (‘Ner slayn wyth þe slete he sleped in his yrnes’), the poet gives much more than we expect, or normally get, from a romance—or indeed from any narrative genre before the novel. The solitary-earnest (mental, physical and moral) of his poem is not simply gestured at, with talk of fear, hardship and remorse—it is entered into. Or entered into up to a point—for the realism is not unqualified by other interests. In the present passage the poet is interested, certainly, in what it would really feel like; but he is also interested in what it would look like—a very different matter—in the picturesque effect of a snowstorm before dawn, a chamber and a lamp. One must take account, too, of the touch of symbolism in the crowing cock. This bird is traditionally emblematic of spiritual alertness—waking men from the ‘sleep’ of the world. It is associated with the coming of the Last Judgment, and also (through the story of Peter denying Christ) with the oncoming of penance after sin.¹ These associations are in keeping, we shall see, with the poet’s idea of the ensuing day as a day of judgment and penance for Gawain. The cock, like much else in this last and finest fitt, belongs not only in the literal but also in the symbolic action, and makes a striking and, it seems, effortlessly appropriate contribution to each.

Here and elsewhere, then, the poet enters into backstage experiences of hardship and fear, and makes us (up to a point) feel what they feel like. But it is characteristic of him that, having done so, he withdraws and, as it were, corrects the effect. Just as the nightmare on the morning of New Year’s Eve gave way abruptly to the entry of the lady, so here Gawain’s solitary fears are forgotten once he calls for his ‘chamberlain’ and starts donning his armour. There is no real continuity in either case: the Gawain who examines his armour for rust and praises Gryngolet’s condition is not continuous with the Gawain who lies in bed listening to the cock. He could be, of course—it is not a question of implausibility; but he isn’t. The poet goes, perhaps, as far as he could go with available techniques—to evoke ‘what it would really feel like’ being very much a matter of techniques.

When we turn to consider the arming itself (ll. 2013–43), the public, ceremonial action which follows the private vigil, we again need to think of technique—this time, the author’s favourite technique of repetitiÓn-with-variation. Very obviously, the fourth fitt is here repeating the second, just as the third fitt so often repeats itself. First there are the ‘cloþeƷ’ (the doublet and ‘capados’ specified in ll. 571–3), then the ‘oþer harnays’, the body-armour (specified in ll. 574–85), then the coat-armour, with the pentangle embroidered on it, worn over the mail (compare 1. 586), then the sword belted round the hips (compare ll. 588–9). This brings us, in the second fitt, to the end of a stanza and of the first stage of Gawain’s preparations. Having belted on his sword, he goes off to hear Mass ‘offred and honoured at þe heƷe auter’ (593). In the fourth fitt, however, there is an extra item—the lady’s girdle, which Gawain puts on after the sword, wrapping it twice round his waist over the ‘ryol red cloþc’ of the coat-armour.

In the poet’s introduction of this new item, one thing is particularly noticeable—his efforts to bring it into juxtaposition with the pentangle. This was not altogether easy. It was the pentangle on the shield which was described at such length in the second fitt; but in the order of a knight’s departure, which the poet is scrupulous to observe, the shield does not come until the very end—after he has mounted his horse, and therefore long after Gawain could reasonably be shown putting on the girdle. So the poet makes nothing of the shield on this occasion (it is just mentioned in 1. 2061), and turns his attention to the coat-armour, which is also, as was customary, decorated with the ‘conysaunce’ of its bearer, the pentangle (1. 2026, cp. 637). Here he is able, with a little syntactic ingenuity, to bring the pentangle up against the girdle, despite the sword which, in the order of events, still comes between them:

Whyle þe wlonkest wedes he warp on hymseluen—

His cote wyth þe conysaunce of þe clere werkeƷ

Ennurned vpon veluet, vertuus stoneƷ

Aboute beten and bounden, enbrauded semeƷ,

And fayre furred withinne wyth fayre pelures—

Ʒet laft he not þe lace, þe ladieƷ gifte,

Þat forgat not Gawayn for gode of hymseluen.

Bi he hade belted þe bronde vpon his balƷe hauncheƷ,

Þenn dressed he his drurye double hym aboute. (2025–33)

The pentangle, which occupied such a commanding position in the first arming scene, is here subordinated both rhetorically and grammatically (‘whyle’ has something like its modern concessive force) to the ‘lace’ It is almost as if the latter has taken the pentangle’s place:

Þe gordel of þt grene silke þat gay wel bisemed,

Vpon þat ryol red eloþe þat ryche watƷ to sehe we. (2035–6)

In the first arming it was the pentangle that ‘bisemed þt segge semlyly fayre’, and the pentangle that was ‘schapen … ryally wyth red golde vpon rede gowleƷ’. Gawain’s colour-scheme has become more complicated: gold and green, not just gold, on red.

It is worth noticing how the poet sets out to direct our moral feelings at this point. He does not encourage any rigorous condemnation of the hero. Indeed it is here that he introduces the first of his three already-mentioned apologies:

Bot wered not þis ilk wyƷe for wele þis gordel,

For pryde of þe pendaunteƷ, þaƷ polyst þay were,

And þaƷ þe glyterande golde glent vpon endeƷ,

But for to sauen hymself, when suffer hym byhoued. (2037–40)

Gawain’s motive for wearing the girdle (and, by inference, his motive for concealing it from the host) is at least not a contemptible one—churlish covetousness (‘for wele’) or womanish vanity (‘for pryde’).² He is concerned to ‘sauen hymself’, and this, the poet implies, is understandable enough—particularly when one recalls the unnerving character of the impending danger, ‘to byde bale withoute dabate of bronde hym to were / oþer knyffe’ On the other hand, the poet does not adopt a merely indulgent attitude towards his hero, either here or anywhere else in the fourth fitt. Consider the lines already quoted:

Ʒet laft he not þt lace, þt ladieƷ gifte,

Þat forgat not Gawayn for gode of hymseluen.

The repetition ‘Ʒet laft not… þat forgat not’ is obviously damaging—it asks to be delivered almost contemptuously—and so, a little less obviously, is the phrase ‘for gode of hymseluen’. It suggests (as ‘to sauen hymself’, in its context, does not) the traditional idea of amor sui, the source of sin.³ Such a suggestion implies, of course, an attitude quite distinct from that expressed in the ensuing apology; but the poet makes no attempt to reconcile these opposites. For the moment he simply leaves the reader with them: Gawain’s conduct is ‘understandable’ and it is sinful. It is the business not of this passage but of the rest of the poem to articulate these two attitudes, to reconcile them as they should be reconciled, without either indulgence or rigour.

Once Gawain has donned the girdle he is ready, and he makes his way out into the castle court, where he finds his horse waiting:

Thenne watƷ Gryngolet grayþe, þat gret watƷ and huge. (2047)

The first half of this line is almost identical with a half-line which occurs at the corresponding point in the first arming (‘Bi þat watƷ Gryngolet grayth’, 1. 597); and this repetition serves to draw attention to another significant variation between the two scenes. On the first occasion Gawain, having donned his armour, hears Mass before going out to Gryngolet; on the present occasion he does not. The omission is striking. Gawain, as I have already noticed, is distinguished in the romances for his eagerness to hear Mass (the chief motive for his prayer on Christmas Eve); and the Perlesvaus says that he never left a ‘hostel’ without hearing Mass first, if he could.⁴ It seems particularly od...