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Introduction
Like most medieval literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight participates in several important literary traditions that its original audience would have instantly recognized. One can read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as simply a rollicking tale of adventure and magic or, alternatively, as a lesson in moral growth. However, understanding some of the literary and cultural background that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight draws upon can provide modern readers with a fuller view of the poem's meaning.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight belongs to a literary genre known as romance. As it refers to medieval literature, the word "romance" does not mean a love story. Originally, the word was applied to the popular tales written in Romance languages, particularly French. In this sense, a romance is a tale of adventure involving knights on a quest. Elements of fantasy and magic are always present: There may be dragons or monsters to battle, mysterious places to visit, or peculiar spells or curses to be broken. Damsels in distress frequently appear in the plot as victims to be rescued or as initiators of the quest. Typically, the romance story begins at a noble court, where the knights receive a challenge before setting out on a journey to accomplish their task. The knights travel far from home, encountering terrible hardships and doing battle with their enemies before achieving their goal and returning to the court to tell their stories. Every romance includes basic set pieces, such as the arming of the hero and the recitation of the names of famous knights. The romance genre was so formulaic and so universally familiar that by the Gawain -poet's time, it had long since become clichéd. Chaucer, for example, was able to do a spot-on parody of the genre in his ridiculous Tale of Sir Thopas, part of the Canterbury Tales. Clichéd or not, the romance remained popular for centuries before finally reaching its logical end in Miguel de Cervantes's romance spoof/homage Don Quixote, first published in 1605.
The most fertile field of the romance genre was the Arthurian romance. The legendary King Arthur, his court at Camelot, and his Knights of the Round Table are almost as familiar today as they would have been in the Gawain -poet's time. Although the tales were usually set in England (or Logres, a legendary pre-England), Arthurian romances were produced all over Europe. The masters of the genre were the French. The reputation of Sir Gawain reflects the political tension between the English and the French. Although Gawain is portrayed positively in the early the French tradition, in later French tales, Gawain becomes a womanizer, a confirmed sinner, and even a villain. By contrast, in English Arthurian tales, Gawain is almost always upheld as the paragon of knightly virtue, and in a sense, he becomes a specifically English model of the ideal knight. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight affirms this tradition.
Closely related to the romance tradition were two idealized standards of behavior: chivalry and courtly love. Broadly speaking, chivalry, derived from the old French term for a soldier mounted on horseback, was a knight's code of conduct. There was no single set of chivalric rules, but the existence of popular medieval chivalric handbooks testifies that chivalry was a well-known concept. Knights formed a distinct segment of medieval society. Most knights belonged to the nobility, if only because a knight's equipment — horses, weapons, armor — required considerable resources to fund. The ideals of chivalry were an attempt to channel the knight's potential into socially acceptable channels. The Gawain -poet touches on many of these ideals in his description of Gawain's character: Knights were expected to be brave, loyal, and honorable; to protect the weak; to behave nobly toward women; to display piety and respect for the Church; and to show the highest prowess in combat. The conflict of these high ideals with a knight's basic task — efficiently killing his enemies — is obvious, and this conflict became more strained as chivalry became more Christianized.
A knight's behavior toward women, at least in the romance tradition, was governed by another standard known as courtly love. Medieval writers did not necessarily use that term, but it is a convenient modern label for an idea that appears frequently in medieval literature. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poet's term for it is "courtesy." Scholars have debated whether courtly love was a social reality or purely a literary fiction, but in either case, it was a pervasive and influential notion. The courtly lover was a man (often a knight) who devoted himself to the service of his beloved lady, making himself her servant; if he was a knight, all of his brave deeds were dedicated to his lady. Marriage to others was not a barrier to such love affairs, which were to be kept secret, with clandestine meetings and messages between the lovers relayed by go-betweens. The lovers usually exchanged gifts or favors, normally a personal item such as a ring, glove, or girdle, all of which appear in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. True lovers became faint or sick with the strength of their love; sleeplessness, lack of appetite, and jealousy were all symptoms of true love. A lover was expected to have fine manners and display perfect gentility. As with chivalry, the tension between courtly love and Christian morality was unavoidable. Much of the courtly love tradition assumed that the lovers would consummate their relationship sexually, regardless of whether they were married. A more Christianized version of courtly love placed the lover in courteous but decidedly chaste service to his beloved. Like chivalry, courtly love may have been more of an ideal than an actual practice, but that did not lessen its cultural importance.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight cannot, therefore, be called a straightforward romance. It makes use of most of the conventions and ideals of the Arthurian romance, yet also points out its contradictions and failings. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not an anti-romance, however, nor is it a parody, despite its lightness and good humor. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight manages to highlight the weakest points of the chivalric tradition while still appreciating everything that makes chivalry so attractive, especially its uncompromising devotion to the highest ideals, even if those ideals are not necessarily attainable.
The Structure of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
In the manuscript, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is divided into four sections by large decorated capital letters that appear at line 1, line 491 (the start of Gawain's year of waiting), line 1,126 (beginning of the first hunt), and line 1,998 (the dawn of New Year's Day). Many older translations refer to these sections as "Fitts" or "Fytts," using a Middle English term for the divisions of a poem. Although the four-part division is useful, it ignores other markers in the manuscript and other logical breaks in the poem.
A simple outline of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is as follows:
Many critics have observed that the plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is symmetrical. This symmetry is most obvious in the book-ending of the tale with the legend of Troy, and the fact that the action begins and ends at Camelot. Another obvious symmetry is between the courts of Camelot and Hautdesert; the two courts, their lavish Christmas feasts, and Gawain's place of honor in them are like mirror images. In addition, many parallel characters and themes within the plot invite comparison or contrast: Arthur and the Green Knight, Arthur and Morgan, Bertilak and the Green Knight, the Lady and Morgan, the natural and the artificial, death and renewal, Gawain's arming at his departure from Camelot and his disarming at his arrival in Hautdesert (and his subsequent re-arming as he leaves for the Green Chapel), Gawain's dealing of the blow and his acceptance of it. The three hunts are also regular and balanced, following exactly the same pattern each day.
However, you can also think of the structure of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as circular. The cycle of the year passes; the action begins in winter, completes the seasons, and returns to winter. Gawain goes out from Camelot on his journey but returns to the place he began. The cycles of history also frame the poem, in the passing of empires from Troy to Rome to Arthurian Britain, and from there to the poet's own England. This pattern of circular motion, of going out and coming back, of failure and recovery, is at the basis of the poem's action.
Symbolism
One of the most characteristic features of medieval literature is the richness and variety of the symbols it uses. Sometimes, these symbols are easy to recognize and interpret. Gawain's pentangle emblem is an obvious symbol, and the poet actually steps forward to explain its significance for the audience, bringing the narrative to a halt in order to do so. Other symbols have meanings that will still be familiar even to modern readers. It is not particularly difficult to see how the fox may symbolize cunning and treachery, or how the deer may stand for fear or shyness. But in other cases, the meaning is not so easy to pin down: What about Gawain's armor, or the birds that decorate both knights' garments? Readers may not even feel certain that a particular item is symbolic at all.
Medieval thinkers believed that everything in the physical and natural world reflected the mind of God, the creator, and that by reading the significance of these symbols, human beings could come closer to understanding God. Thus, the entire world was filled with symbolic meaning. Moreover, medieval intellectual tradition did not limit a symbol to one meaning; instead, medieval thinkers derived multiple and sometimes quite diverse meanings for the symbols they found.
Many modern critics have been determined to read all medieval literary works as straightforward allegories, in which everything is a symbol and every symbol has an easily identifiable meaning. Some medieval literature does fall neatly into this category. But Sir Gawain and the Green Knight stubbornly resists being reduced to such a simple formula. In fact, one of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight's most prominent features is its ambiguity. This ambiguity reflects one of its most important messages: Things are not always as they seem, and only human pride leads us to imagine that we can understand and control everything around us. The poet presents a beautiful but flawed world, in which good and bad are always mixed together, impossible to separate completely. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight's symbolic richness — a sometimes frustrating richness — is a representation in miniature of this diverse and mixed world. _______________________________________________(from the Cliff’s Notes on SGGK)__
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