Official framing text - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca1400)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca1400)

Edition retained

Armitage, Simon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, A New Verse Translation, New York and London, Norton, 2007

(https://wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393060485-sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight-)

Please note: this is the bilingual edition, not the translation alone published by Simon Armitage, also by Norton, in 2021; nor the translation alone by the same author published by Faber & Faber.

The work, 2530 verses long, is presented in a bilingual Middle English and modern English edition. The extraordinarily powerful modern translation is by a poet from the same region as the author of Gawain, who understands and conveys in the most profound and gripping way the importance of orality within the alliterative tradition to which the poem belongs. She does justice to the poetic richness of the work, whose aesthetics are entirely at the service of the subject. In addition to alliteration, the poet uses the “bob-and-wheel” technique - each stanza, of unequal length, composed of alliterated long lines, ends with a very short line marked by a single tonic accent and followed by four short, rhymed and alliterated lines, which constitute a return, a commentary, an ironic pirouette after the narration accomplished in the long lines. Armitage succeeds in restoring the fullness of these devices in a dynamic, vigorous language, whose lexical richness is faithful to that deployed by the original author.

Presentation of the creation

SGGK, a chivalric romance, belongs to the genre of the medieval verse romance, called in English romance; the English term is often used in French in the feminine form or sometimes in the masculine (André Crépin) to designate this category of works. Among these texts, it is without doubt the most well-known and the most admired; an entertaining, intriguing and vibrant work, which plays with opposing pairs to explore and surpass a binary pattern – sentence and solace, play and seriousness, circularity and linearity, norm and transgression, public and private, inside and outside, festive time and ordinary time, deprivation and hospitality, generosity and betrayal...

It is also a foundational work for the eco-critical approach in English-language literature. Simon Armitage describes SGGK as the “first eco-critical poem”. With the mocking figure of the Green Knight – who combines markers of civilisation and savagery, signs of peace and hostility – and Gawain’s winter journey through the Wirral peninsula, the poem explores the relations between human and non-human, otherness, the agonistic relationship of man to a landscape that could point to the sublime but remains embodied in a nature oscillating between control and wildness, between forest and wilderness. Plant, mineral, and animal are described in the most explicit and sharp way, threatening to annihilate the human being, of whom it is no longer certain whether he embodies social order or otherness. The three days of hunting, during which the pursuit of the prey, its killing and dismembering are described in detail, draw a tense, vectorised counterpoint to the chamber hunt, in which Gawain is the prey.

The poem also offers a stylistic and philosophical exploration of impermanence in the face of transcendence: the poetics, based on the play of the closed and the open form, of cycle and rupture, of short and long lines, offers a mirror to the alternation that is the lot of the journey of human life. From the first stanza, which refers to the mythical founding of Britain by Brutus, loyalty and betrayal, joys and catastrophes are announced as inevitable and foreshadow the later tensions. The Beheading Game, a familiar game during Christmas time, becomes, between humour and seriousness, a promise of real decapitation. The final stanza of the poem maintains until the last word this fertile resistance of ambiguity, between Gawain’s victory and defeat, courteous reconciliation and commemoration of his fault.

In fact, more than any other narrative poem evoking Arthurian matter, SGGK puts under tension, through Gawain, Arthur’s nephew and best knight, the unholdable ideal of chivalric values; the conflict between loyalty and courtesy; the impossible absolute embodied by the motif of the pentangle, represented on the outer face of Gawain’s shield and which symbolises, among other things, the interdependence of chivalric virtues. The text stages in a tragicomic way the ironic displacement of the threat, which no longer comes from an external enemy, but from the courtly and erotic temptation within the normally protective space of the castle. Physical and moral courage come into conflict with the desire for survival, cunning with the respect of one’s oath.

This staging of multiple tensions is amplified by a layered and unstable temporality: after the mythical time of the foundation tale comes the linear time of the adventurous narrative. Gawain’s trial – the challenge launched by the Green Knight – ends exactly one year after the latter’s irruption into Arthur’s court; but the social trial of reintegration into the court takes place in an indefinite, ordinary time, which is no longer that of the feast. The rhythm of the seasons could punctuate the four major parts of the poem, which is divided into four fitts, or sections; the reader/listener is rocked by the reassurance of a cyclical natural time associated with liturgical feasts. But the narrator warns against this false certainty: the end, he says, is never the same as the beginning. Human time is indeed linear, and it is towards his death that Gawain is heading.

Death, conceived as a possible and accepted end within the framework of the chivalric code, is nonetheless not the ultimate end: the poem also fits into a theological perspective, which one can identify factually through an adventurous calendar structured by major liturgical feasts (Christmas, All Hallows), but also symbolically during the acme of the poem that is Gawain’s “confession” to the Green Knight in the scene at the Green Chapel. Not a religious confession – the “chapel” has all the features of an inner cave – but a confession all the same by Gawain, who admits having broken his word (since he did not return to Lord Bertilak the protective girdle given to him, Gawain, by Bertilak’s wife). Gawain’s greatest humanity is found in this key moment where he acknowledges his fault, his failure in the virtue of truthe. It is there that Gawain – and through him, potentially, the Arthurian court – accepts human fallibility, and this acceptance is the first step towards Salvation. One of the great questions raised at the end of the poem is that of the moral and religious “advancement” of the court: does this assembly, described as young and inexperienced in the Green Knight’s mockery, progress in the same way as Gawain?

From a poetic technique point of view, SGGK takes part, along with Piers Plowman and the Alliterative Morte Arthure, among others, in the alliterative revival of the late Middle Ages. Its particular cadence, supported by its lexical richness, makes it a text of exceptional poetic expressive power; a text that demands to be spoken – performed – and heard, much more than read silently. The poem is full of theatricality, first presented by the narrator as a lai heard in toun – in town – then punctuated by dialogues that intensify both tragic and comic threads. If the Arthurian court is by definition the place of etiquette and courtly performance, the castle of Hautdesert – the court of Lord Bertilak, where Gawain stops during his journey and which mirrors the Arthurian court – has the elegance of a “table ornament,” but is also a theatre where all characters play a role within the role, deceive, divert, disguise themselves.

Finally, the alliterative technique is not only a matter of poetics: a political reading of the alliterative style as revisited at the end of the Middle Ages shows that it concerns a set of poems marked by historical consciousness, which stage figures of the past deliberately put into dialogue with the medieval present – here the Green Knight, the fairy Morgana, elsewhere Egyptian sorcerers or vanished ancestors. The Green Knight, associated with the sculptural motif of the Green Man, a vaguely threatening legendary pagan figure, is also a provincial lord who lives in the time of the Arthurian court, but on the margins of the kingdom. Visibly exploring the question of who are the true bearers of chivalry, the poem also examines, though more implicitly, the complex and conflicting relations between the royal court – sophisticated but inexperienced, centred on the figure of Arthur/Richard II – and the small conservative nobility of the North West Midlands, increasingly dependent on a career at court at the end of the 14th century.

Film The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021)

The filmic adaptation of the narrative poem is a work in its own right, also of great richness, in no way subservient to the original. Its overall tone, darker both literally and figuratively, does not prevent the emergence of humour. One could say that the film opens perspectives, signals ambiguities that are already present in the original work, but achieves this suspension by other means… while also proposing its own questions.

Thus, for example, Lowery chooses to show an Arthurian court that is old and aging, contrary to the (very) young court portrayed in the poem. In the film, only Gawain is a young knight. This insistence on the decline of the Arthurian order via the weakness of its central figure, Arthur, can refer to other works, literary and filmic (see the last books of Le Morte Darthur by Thomas Malory (1471), or the aesthetic of the final sequences of the film Excalibur by John Boorman (1982)). The representation, on several occasions, of a “Waste Land” also refers to Chrétien de Troyes in the Grail tale, as well as, again, to the film Excalibur – without omitting, in the meantime, the desperate aridity of certain moments of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. The current film does not fail to question the potential for renewal that is hypothesized but above all deeply denied in the characterisation of Gawain. The Green Knight himself, who precisely has nothing “green” or chivalric about him, but everything of a gigantism (Tolkienian perhaps?) made of brown bark, deeply traversed by veins, does not present himself as a voice and way of renewal, but rather of questioning – a collective questioning with regard to the chivalric order, and an individual, ontological one, for Gawain.

To broaden the discussion of the film as a palimpsest, echo chamber or intertext, one must consider not only the specific production context – see in this regard the bibliography dealing with adaptation theory – but also, based on the notion of “collective unconscious” in cinema taken up by Umberto Eco, what Lowery’s film represents as a derivative product with numerous intermedial quotations drawn from other cult films: Excalibur, already mentioned, but also other more recent medievalist films or TV series. Thus, the very dark lighting chosen to represent the medieval period is to be situated within the current trend noticeable in films and series such as The Hollow Crown by Sam Mendes, or The Last Duel by Ridley Scott. This intertextual collage can finally be interpreted in a transmedia sense (see in the bibliography the works of Jenkins), as the film refers to franchises that belong to fantasy (Willow, by Ron Howard), science fiction (the character of Groot from the Marvel Cinematic Universe), as well as medievalism.

The postmodern aesthetic of the film is delightfully diverse, from the use of medieval or medievalising visual markers – paintings hung on walls, title cards with Gothic or Celtic-style inscriptions between sequences – to the open ending, not double but triple – one must in this regard watch the entire film, that is, up to and beyond the end credits. Is this aesthetic fully mastered? One sometimes wonders whether medievalism is conceived as the vehicle of a fully achieved postmodern questioning, or whether it stems from an effect of reality, or even a more superficial documentary effect: in any case, the game is multiple, between the effect of presence of a Middle Ages rendered in a deliberately dark form (darkness, dirt, ambient noises...) and the rewriting of Arthurian stereotypes, both visual and narrative, all within an adaptation that oscillates between realism, magic, and quasi-dreamlike sequences.

The ambiguity inherent in the original work is amplified in the film by effects of duplication, structural ones as in this open ending – or not so much – and in the construction of the character of Bertilak’s wife, played by the same actress as Gawain’s mistress, whose character is a specific addition to the film version. The restricted chromatic range, the rewriting of expected Arthurian places or tropes, the very dark interiors and often oppressive outdoor scenes create effects of deterritorialisation that effectively question the validity of the chivalric code, just as the poem does, but by entirely different means. The notion of choice and commitment, of keeping one’s word – the knight’s individual choice always being tied to its consequences for the entire court – very present in the poem, is taken in the film to a structural level that juxtaposes divergent narrative and temporal layers, analogous to the different paths and journeys taken by the knight, who is depicted as caught, even imprisoned, in a branching of confining possibilities.

The work is thus nourished by intersemioticity; candidates will have ample material to explore this, while beginning more simply with the analysis of the adaptation’s qualities, primarily on the narrative level – structure and temporality in particular – without limiting themselves to that aspect. It is reminded that the wording of the topics, both written and oral, always explicitly indicates the consideration of the film; in the case of a text commentary, openings toward specific aspects of the film will be welcome if justified, without replacing literary analysis.

Claire Vial (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), in collaboration with Sandra Gorgievski (Université de Toulon)

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Short guide to pronunciation and versification - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Pronunciation: A few words on the spellings used in Anderson's Everyman edition

(the basis for Armitage's translation)

Consonants

The word-initial spellings <qu> and <wh> are generally interchangeable when representing the w sound. Indeed, some words written with <qu> are linked by alliteration to others beginning with <w> in the poem. This is simply a graphic variant here, borrowed from more northern dialects overall where the pronunciation was indeed different, although it's not impossible that the choice of <qu> betrays a scribal pronunciation. Quat and quyle should therefore be pronounced like what and whyle. Exceptionally, the text indicates <wh> when the sound is [kw], for whyssynes (quyssynes, ‘cushions’, v. 877).

The <gh> spelling has three pronunciations:

- the semi-consonant [j] (the first yoga sound) in intervocalic position after a front vowel: hyghest, yghen....

- the palatal fricative [ç] (the <ch> of the German pronoun ich) - between a front vowel and a consonant

- the velar fricative [x] (the muted consonant spelled <ch> for the Scottish pronunciation of Loch Ness or the <ch> of the German word ach) - after a back vowel

The initial <v> could be pronounced as a [w] for words of French origin, simply because English speakers then had difficulty pronouncing a

[v] at the beginning of a word, their language having long been limited to [w] or [f] in this position. Thus, in verse 1518, words spelled wenged, walour and voyded produce a [w] alliteration.

<s> and <z>, in <-es> or <-ez> endings, are pronounced identically and are sonorants, and thus realized [z], the sibilant having seen itself at the end of the word in this context.

The [r] was rolled before a vowel and retroflexed before a consonant or at the end of a word.

Vowels

In the vast majority of cases, and unlike modern English, vowels are pronounced as they are written. There are a few exceptions:

The graphic <o> can exceptionally represent the sound [u], as in wonder (v. 18): scribes sometimes replaced <u> with <o> because <u> tended to blend in with other jambed letters, such as <n>, <m>, <v>. The <o> valuing <u> remained until modern times in a few words: wonder, won, son, love, London, etc.

<u> usually represents the [u] sound, but it takes on the value of [y] (the sound of the French <u> de lune) for a few words: scurtez (v. 171) rudeles (v. 857), hult (v. 1595), wruxled (v. 2191), muryly (v. 2295). This is a vestige of Old English, and there is sometimes confusion between this sound and the one noted i, in certain phonological contexts: the rounding of the lips that distinguishes the two sounds tended to disappear.

<i> and <y> are equivalent. Thus, the pronoun I had the value [i:].

Non-mute <e> at the end of a word are indicated in the chosen edition by an acute accent (<é>). Otherwise, it is realized either as a schwa, or as the unreduced front vowel, [i].

Middle English has both long and short vowels. The scribe of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight rarely distinguishes them by spelling, so we often have to rely on the modern pronunciation of the word to see whether it has undergone the Great Vocalic Change and therefore whether its vowel was long. Let's just note that in two-syllable words, the vowel of the first (stressed) syllable is long if the syllable ends in a vowel, short if it ends in a consonant.

The spelling <ou> often corresponds to [u:], as in French (this is the French spelling borrowed by English), but it can also be a diphthong [ou] (see below).

Diphthongs are generally fairly transparent: <ai> corresponded to [aɪ] (today's pronunciation of pronoun I), <oi> to [oɪ] (as today), <au> was pronounced [au] and <ow> or <ou> [ou] (except in cases where it is a [u:], cf. above).

<ew> (or <w>): A <e> is found in the text, or not, between a <w> and a preceding consonant, as in the words n(e)w and h(e)w, which are spelled both ways. In this context of occurrence, the letter <w> indicates the final point of articulation of a complex vowel sound, a diphthong, which starts from a position that the <e> attempts to represent: in the dialect concerned, this diphthong is probably in the process of disappearing, coming closer to the sound [u:], or even regularly occurring that way. The rhyme between hewe (v. 1471) and salue (v. 1473) and the occasional transcription of this sound by <w>, illustrated by drwry (v. 2449), also spelled drury (v. 1517), support this hypothesis.

<w> is in fact occasionally used instead of <u>, valid for the sound [u:].

Versification

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight combines two traditions: that of alliterated poetry, characteristic of Old English but revived in the Middle English period, and that of chanted, rhymed poetry based on the French model.

Each stanza of the poem is made up of two parts: a body of long, alliterated verses of variable number, followed by the bob and wheel (pendeloque and coda/tail), five short, rhymed verses. While both alliterated and rhymed lines have many parallels in Middle English poetry, their combination in this form is an innovation by the author of this poem.

Long verses

Long verses are bipartite, consisting of two hemistiches. Each hemistiche has two metrical accents and a variable number of syllables that are not metrically accented, but which may nevertheless carry a word accent. Although there is no rule, the first hemistich is often longer than the second.

A common alliteration unites the two hemistiches of the same line, according to rules that are much more relaxed than the norm for this type of poetry. In theory, the two accents of the first hemistich and the first accent of the second are on syllables beginning with the same consonant. In practice, sometimes only one accent in the first hemistiche, or both accents in the second hemistiche, carry the alliteration, but there is always at least one alliterating syllable in each hemistiche.

All vowels alliterate together, with the vowel attack (glottal stroke before a vowel at the beginning of a word) functioning in this system as a consonant in its own right; it can alliterate with h, which was very weakened at the time.

Metrical alliteration is sometimes superimposed:

- reinforcement of the main alliteration: the same consonant is found outside the metrical accent, at the initial of syllables bearing a simple word accent, or even unaccented syllables (several cases in the first stanza quoted below, for example the first two lines)

- enriched alliteration, involving two successive phonemes, for the whole verse or just two of the accents (several cases in the first stanza, e.g. the third and fourth lines).

- more rarely, a secondary alliteration on a different consonant (example: And spekez of his passage, / and pertly he sayde) (3rd stanza of Passus II, V. 544).

The rhythm, quite flexible compared to that of rhyming verse, obeys complex constraints that we won't go into here.

Short verses

The bob and wheel that closes the stanza is itself composed of two parts: one verse of a single accent, the bob (the pendulum), and four verses of three accents, the wheel (coda or tail). These verses rhyme according to the ababa pattern. Their rhythm is iambic.

The bob abruptly interrupts the rhythm of the above while pursuing the same idea, hence a surprise effect. The wheel, with its different rhythm, creates a small vignette allowing a particular enhancement. It often happens that his worms are also alliterated, but this alliteration is in no way mandatory.

The first verse of the poem

/ : Cleavage between the two hemispheres

uppercase: syllable with a metric accent

underlined: alliteration

bold: rhyme

‘ : place the metric accent in short verses (place before the accented syllable)

siþen þe Sege and þe asSaut / watz Sesed at Troye,

þe borȝ Brittened and Brent / to Brondeȝ and Askez,

þe Tulk þat þe Trammes / of Tresoun þer Wroȝt

watz Tried for his Tricherie, / þe Trewest on Erthe:

hit watz Ennias þe Athel, / and his hIghe Kynde,

þat siþen dePreced Prouinces, / and Patrounes bicome

Welneȝe of al þe Wele / in þe West Iles.

fro riche Romulus to Rome / Ricchis hym Swyþe,

with gret Bobbaunce þat Burȝe / he Biges vpon Fyrst,

and Neuenes hit his aune Nome, / as hit Now Hat;

Tirius to Tuskan / and Teldes biGynnes,

Langaberde in Lumbardie / Lyftes vp Homes,

and Fer ouer þe French flod / Felix Brutus

on mony Bonkkes ful Brode / Bretayn he Settez

Wyth ‘Wynne, (bob)

where ‘Werre and ‘Wrake and ‘Wonder (début du wheel)

bi ‘Syþez hatz ‘Wont þer’Inne,

and ‘oft Boþe ‘Blysse and ‘Blunder

ful ‘Skete hatz ‘Skyfted ‘Synne.

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Resources: various articles on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Attention, les documents ci-dessous seront mis à jour tout au long de l'année. N'hésitez pas à consulter régulièrement cette rubrique.

Nuances non rendues dans la traduction de Simon Armitage (nouvelle version)

Différences entre le livre et le film

Liens utiles pour l'étude de Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (version 4)

Using the informal 'tu' and the formal 'vous'

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Essays and Studies

éd. André Crépin et Colette Stévanovitch, Paris : AMAES, 1994.

André Crépin, Avant-propos ……………………………………………………..……. p. 1

Colette Stévanovitch, Cycle et rupture dans Sir Gawain and the Green knight …….... p. 5

Juliette Dor, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : d’un temps à l’autre ………………. p. 25

Martine Gamaury, Périple et péripétie dans Sir Gawain and the Green Knight………p. 49

Claire Vial, Fêtes et saisons dans Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ………………..p 61

Gloria Cigman, Gawain and Gawain: the Solitary Self, ………………………………p. 85

Ruth Morse, Signs of Courtesy in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight …………………p. 101

Jean-Paul Debax, Chasse au goupil et valeurs courtoises dans Sir Gauvain et le Chevalier Vert, ………………………………………………………………………….. p. 115

Maria K. Greenwood, Idealised Chivalric Knights – Chaucer’s Knight in the General Prologue to The Canterbury tales and Sir Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight……………………………………………………………………..………….. p. 127

Josseline Bidard, Iris Murdoch et The Green Knight : la quête de vérité……….…… p. 141

Colette Stévanovitch, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, l’état de la critique…….. p. 153 (attention, deux fichier à télécharger)

Autres articles

Dor Juliette, « Le Poète du Gauvain », dans Patrimoine littéraire européen, vol. 5, 1995, Bruxelles, De Boeck Université, pp. 679-88. (reproduit avec l’aimable autorisation de l’éditeur) (PDF)

Simonin, Olivier. 2016. « L’aventure de Hautdesert et les chasses de Bertilak », Bulletin des Anglicistes Médiévistes 89, 83-105. https://www.persee.fr/doc/bamed_0240-8805_2016_num_89_1_1170

Simonin, Olivier. 2016. « Engagements de Gauvain et courtoisie dans Sir Gawain and the Green Knight », Bulletin des Anglicistes Médiévistes 87, 123-144. https://www.persee.fr/doc/bamed_0240-8805_2015_num_87_1_2385

Simonin Olivier, « La figure de la Vierge dans Sire Gauvain et le Chevalier Vert », in La Vierge dans les arts et les littératures du Moyen Âge, éd. Paul Bretel, Michel Adroher et Aymat Catafau, Paris : Honoré Champion, 2017, p. 45-62. (reproduit avec l’aimable autorisation de l’éditeur) (PDF)

Stévanovitch Colette, « Laughter and Courtesy in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight », Q/W/E/R/T/Y, 4 (1994), 23-32 (reproduit avec l’aimable autorisation de l’éditeur). (PDF)

Stévanovitch Colette, « An Interpretation of the Hunting Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight », version remaniée de « Les scènes de chasse dans Sir Gawain and the Green Knight », Etudes Anglaises, 48 (1995), 3-11. (PDF)

Stévanovitch Colette, « The Geographical Setting of the Quest in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight », version remaniée de « La géographie de la quête dans Sir Gawain and the Green Knight », La géographie dans les textes narratifs médiévaux, ed. D. Buschinger et W. Spiewok, coll. Wodan n° 62, Greifswald, 1996, 153-61. (PDF)

Stévanovitch Colette, « Les châteaux dans Sir Gawain and the Green knight », Château et société castrale au Moyen Age : actes du colloque des 7-9 mars 1997, [Rambures], dir. Jean-Marc Pastré, Rouen : Publications de l'Université de Rouen, 1998, pp. 319-332. (version auteur) (PDF)

Stévanovitch Colette, « Grammaire et poésie : l'utilisation des superlatifs dans Sir Gawain and the Green Knight », L'articulation langue-littérature dans les textes médiévaux anglais I, Publications de l'AMAES, collection GRENDEL n° 2, Nancy, 1999, 79-90. (reproduit avec l’aimable autorisation de l’éditeur) (PDF)