Date and Composition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

• written in Middle English, probably sometime between 1375-1400
• probable written in England's northwest Midlands judging by the poem's conservative style
  • alliterative long-line poetry
    • incorporates stanzas of irregular length made up of unrhymed, alliterating lines which are followed a bob-and-wheel stanza of five rhyming lines
• author is unknown but is often referred to as "The Gawain Poet" or "The Pearl Poet" after one of the other works that appears in the manuscript with Sir Gawain
• appears in only one manuscript, formerly British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x Art.3
  • The other works in this ms. are Pearl, Patience, and Purity (a.k.a. Cleanness).
• considered "the greatest of the Arthurian romances produced in England" (Longman 193).

The Internal Structure(s) of Sir Gawain

• The poem can be seen as a single unit:
  • begins and ends with description of Troy
  • can be "read" forward or backward (generally speaking)--starts with Troy, moves to Arthur's court, then progresses through the tale of Gawain's adventure with the Green Knight (when read from beginning to end we see the actual events transpire and then hear Gawain's recounting of them; end to beginning, we hear of the events through Gawain's account and then see them as they actually happened.)
• We can also see the poem as a series of opposing forces, character sets, and locales:
  • Camelot vs. Bercilak's world
    • Arthur's power sphere (male-oriented) vs. Morgan le Fay's power sphere (female-oriented)
    • antipathy between 2 "queens"--Morgan le Fay and Guenevere
    • youthful innocence (Arthur and his knights, games, and frivolity) vs. worldly age (Morgan as old woman, lust and deceit)
  • magical power vs. mortal willpower and intellect
  • loyalty to knightly honor (lord/host) vs. loyalty to self
    • personal honor vs. carnal desire
    • self-preservation vs. cowardice
    • oath vs. need
    • host/guest obligation vs. courtly love obligations
    • host/guest obligation vs. obligation to self
  • secular feast vs. sacred feast (eucharist)
  • matriarchal vs. patriarchal power
• The 4 fits (or sections of the poem in the manuscript) roughly correlate with the 4 seasons.
• Plus, scholars interested in numerological symbolism have seen the 5 points of Gawain's pentangle reflected, not only in Gawain's 5 virtues, but in significant multiples of 5 that appear in the line numbers of the poem:
  • The narrative of Gawain's adventure ends and poet returns to Troy at line 2525.
  • After line 2525, there are 5 more lines, which bring us to
  • line 2530, whose total number (2+5+3+0) is 10, a divine number in medieval numerology.

Links to Gawain sites of interest

Return to King Arthur and the Matter of Britain

| 373 Syllabus | 373 Assignments | 373 Links | E-Mail Instructor | Homepage |