Mary, Unmindful of Her Knight: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Traditions of Sexual...

Mary, Unmindful of Her Knight: <em xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SirGawain and the Green Knight and the Traditions of Sexual Hospitality

Lawrence Warner

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Volume 35, 2013, pp. 263-287 (Article)

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Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013):263–87� 2013 The New Chaucer Society

Mary, Unmindful of Her Knight: SirGawain and the Green Knight and the

Traditions of Sexual Hospitality

Lawrence WarnerKing’s College London

On the third morning of his visit to Bertilak’s castle,Gawain is subjected to one final attempt at seduction by his host’s wife,followed by her more successful offer of the green lace. Nestled betweenthese episodes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are a few lines thathave generated what T. A. Shippey calls ‘‘perhaps the most subtle andinfluential theory of the poem’s intentions, that it is designed to leadthe knight up to a moral crux, a clash of values, in which he is obligedto abandon either his social courtesy or his individual honour—choosingthe former.’’1 The lady has urged Gawain so insistently, ‘‘depresed hymso 3ikke,’’ that he must either accept her advances or discourteouslyrefuse (1766–72):

4ay lanced wordes gode,Much wele 3en watz 3erinne;Gret perile bitwene hem stod,Nif Mare of hir kny9t mynne.

1 T. A. Shippey, ‘‘The Uses of Chivalry: ‘Erec’ and ‘Gawain,’ ’’ MLR 66 (1971):241–50 (246–47). He cites the theory’s appearance in Jan Solomon, ‘‘The Lesson of SirGawain’’ (1963), repr. in Critical Studies of ‘‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’’ ed. DonaldR. Howard and Christian K. Zacher (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,1968), 267–78; and the work of A. C. Spearing, who for instance says that it is ‘‘undeni-able’’ that the poet here clearly identifies the nature of the hero’s dilemma: ‘‘he musteither accept her love (thereby breaking the pentangle at the point of clannesse) or refuseit lodly, offensively (thereby breaking it at the point of cortaysye)’’: The ‘‘Gawain’’-Poet: ACritical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 205. The assumptionthat succumbing to the lady would amount to a failure of cortaysye retains its near-absolute power: see, e.g., Mark Miller, ‘‘The Ends of Excitement in Sir Gawain and theGreen Knight: Teleology, Ethics, and the Death Drive,’’ SAC 32 (2010): 215–56, esp.237, 244.

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STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER

For 3at prynces of pris depresed hym so 3ikke,Nurned hym so ne9e 3e 3red, 3at nede hym bihovedO3er lach 3er hir luf, o3er lodly refuse.2

But if the point here is to underscore Gawain’s moral crux, it is difficultto account for the Virgin Mary’s intervention to save him from greatperil. For one thing, it suggests that the action that matters is notGawain’s at all, but hers; for another, such an intervention, even if itmerely supports her knight in his choice, shows that he faces no decisionwhatever: rather, he ‘‘must avoid her advances,’’ full stop.3 Such prob-lems have produced a competing theory of the poem’s intentions, onethat if anything strikes me as much more influential than the one men-tioned above, given that, whatever line 1772 might say, no one reallybelieves that Gawain seriously considers accepting the lady’s love. Thistheory, that the Virgin’s knight must reject the lady at all costs, findssupport in any number of additional indicators, both within the poem(the Green Knight’s revelation that ‘‘fautlest’’ Gawain has passed thetest manifest in the lady’s advances [2363]) and external to it: ‘‘Courtlyromances underwrite a law of hospitality which anthropologists haveobserved to be as universal as the prohibition of incest: any usurpation ofthe host’s role by the guest is taboo,’’4 and ‘‘medieval moral theology recog-nized that it would be an offence against God to infringe a husband’srights over his wife’s body.’’5

2 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd ed.,rev. Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). All quotations are from this edi-tion unless otherwise stated. In quoting all Middle English I normalize i/j, u/v, andterminal 9/z.

3 Solomon, ‘‘The Lesson of Sir Gawain,’’ 269. Solomon and most other critics thusredefine the moral crux so that it is not the one identified in 1771–72 but instead onewhereby, ‘‘[a]lthough he must avoid her advances, he would do so while still preservinghis courtesy.’’ See also J. A. Burrow: it ‘‘is taken for granted’’ that ‘‘he should notcommit adultery’’ (A Reading of ‘‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’’ [London: Routledgeand Kegan Paul, 1965], 96); and R. W. Hanning: ‘‘As a moral knight, Gawain mustresist this temptation’’ (review of Ad Putter, ‘‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’’ andFrench Arthurian Romance [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), MP 95 [1998]: 367–70[369]). Among critics I have encountered, Putter is alone in saying, as an aside, thatGawain’s ‘‘tact ultimately keeps all options open, including the choice to ‘lach 3er hirluf ’ ’’ (137); but the rest of his book undermines this sentiment: see next note, and139–48.

4 Putter, French Arthurian Romance, 140 (emphasis his), citing in support of his pointJulian Pitt-Rivers, ‘‘The Law of Hospitality,’’ in The Fate of Shechem; or, The Politics ofSex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1977), 94–112.

5 P. J. C. Field, ‘‘A Rereading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’’ SP 68 (1971):255–69 (267).

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MARY, UNMINDFUL OF HER KNIGHT

This battle of theories—Gawain faces a decision in which everythingis at stake/he faces no decision at all—is the product of the presentationof the lines as above: all editors since at least 1864 construe MS mare(1769) as Mary, usually presented as Mare,6 and all but one since 1922emend MS prynce in the next line to prynces.7 I will argue here that bothtextual decisions are wrong, and that as a result, we have fundamentallymisunderstood the hero’s dilemma. My proposal is that the text—bothas the author intended and as medieval readers, including those of Brit-ish Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, would have understood it—in factsays something much closer to the manuscript’s rendering:

Gret perile bitwene hem stod,Nif mare of hir kny9t [he] mynne.

For 3at prynce of pris depresed hym so 3ikke,Nurned hym so ne9e 3e 3red, 3at nede hym bihovedO3er lach 3er hir luf, [or] lodly refuse.

[Great peril would have stood between them, if he were not thinking more ofher knight: for that prince of price subjugated his spirit so insistently. . . .]

In sum, readers need to decide which account of the scribe’s work ismore likely: that he misspelled two very important, stressed nouns, mareand prynce, which determine the meaning of the whole passage andmuch of the poem more broadly, or that he omitted a small word in anunstressed position in 1769, most likely he, necessary for the straightfor-ward meter of the wheels. (The other small change, in brackets, should

6 Richard Morris presents the term as mare, but his plot summary indicates his inter-pretation: ‘‘Had not Mary thought of her knight, he would have been in great peril’’(Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight: An Alliterative Romance-Poem, ed. Richard Morris,EETS o.s. 4 [London: EETS, 1864], xv). Frederic Madden’s diplomatic edition, SyrGawayne: A Collection of Ancient Romance-Poems (London: Bannatyne Club, 1839), neitherglosses nor defines the term.

7 The emendation was proposed by Oliver Farrar Emerson, ‘‘Notes on Sir Gawainand the Green Knight,’’ JEGP 21 (1922): 363–410 (397–98), and first adopted in SirGawain and the Green Knight, ed. Israel Gollancz, intro. Mabel Day and Mary S. Ser-jeantson, EETS o.s. 210 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 122. MS prynce isretained only in The ‘‘Pearl’’ Poems: An Omnibus Edition, ed. William Vantuono, Vol. 2,‘‘Patience’’ and ‘‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’’ (New York: Garland, 1984), 327,following Ian Robinson, Chaucer and the English Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1972), 231–32. Robinson’s approach is also endorsed by W. A. Daven-port, ‘‘The Word Norne and the Temptation of Sir Gawain,’’ NM 78 (1977): 256–63(260). I discuss some of these claims, and the difficulty of the alternatives, below.

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not produce any such dilemma.8) Three other major differences betweenthis and the received version do not register orthographically: the ren-dering of MS stod (1768) not as the preterite but as the subjunctive, andmy interpretations of the precise senses of the terms depresed and lodly.

While this construction is much more faithful to the manuscript text,its strength lies not in its relative conservatism, which I do not see as aninherent virtue, but in its application of our knowledge of the poem’slanguage, prosody, grammar, plot, and literary milieu to the text. Inthat milieu, the ‘‘Imperious Host’’ will assault or even kill any guestwho does not follow to the letter his commands, however contrary toChristian norms, and the benevolent host offers his wife to his guest asa sign of respect and good will. Gawain has good reason to accept thepossibility that line 1772 does accurately reflect the situation: while sexwith the lady would in most circumstances be a grave violation, as thetheologians, anthropologists, and indeed he himself would agree, it isequally possible that in the moral world of Hautdesert any refusal of heroffers, no matter how gracious, might be lodly, horrible. In the face ofhis host’s subjugation of his spirit, and absent any support from theBlessed Virgin Mary, Gawain is not so much righteous as impotent.

‘‘Nif mare of hir kny9t mynne’’

Over the past generation or so of criticism of the poem, the VirginMary’s intervention has become a signal event, demonstrating her cen-trality to Gawain’s adventure. Countering her absence from John Bur-row’s A Reading of ‘‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’’ of 1965, T. P.Dunning remarked that ‘‘the poet has given her a definite place in thepoem; and it is perhaps sometimes forgotten that not even today woulda man brought up in the Catholic tradition of Sir Gawain find it in theleast odd to place himself seriously under her protection’’ to preserve his

8 The alteration of o7er � or amounts to a variant spelling of the identical term, achange necessary so as to normalize the b-verse, which needs a single long dip. See HoytN. Duggan, ‘‘Libertine Scribes and Maidenly Editors: Meditations on Textual Criticismand Metrics,’’ in English Historical Metrics, ed. C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 219–37 (224), on the basis of a rule estab-lished by Karl Luick, ‘‘Die englische Stabreimzeile im XIV., XV., und XVI.Jahrhundert,’’ Anglia 11 (1889): 392–443, 553–618; Thomas Cable, The English Allit-erative Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 91–99; andHoyt N. Duggan, ‘‘The Shape of the B-Verse in Middle English Alliterative Poetry,’’Speculum 61 (1986): 564–92.

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chastity.9 According to David Lawton, the implication that ‘‘Mary looksafter Gawain constantly throughout his quest and saves his life in spiteof his spiritual infidelity’’ as in 1769 shows that the poem exemplifies,rather than contradicts, the alliterative tradition’s emphasis on pen-ance.10 And Geraldine Heng says that the Virgin’s intervention ‘‘as-sumes a strategic discursive shape and significance in this text,’’ showingher to be ‘‘a jealous mistress calling back ‘hir kny@t’ from the brink oferotic surrender to another woman.’’11

To be sure, the poet underscores Gawain’s devotion to the VirginMary on a number of occasions early in the poem, especially as he armshimself for his journey to the Green Chapel: ‘‘he had 3e inore half of hisschelde hir ymage depaynted, / 4at quen he blusched 3erto his beldenever payred’’ (649–50). Whether she rewards that devotion, though,is a different matter, one that the mode of criticism surveyed aboverarely confronts. Norman Davis finds it perverse that ‘‘Mary, 3at ismyldest moder so dere’’ (754) answers her knight’s prayer for shelterwith ‘‘the appearance of the very castle in which he is to undergo sosevere a temptation that he would probably succumb to it withoutMary’s protection,’’ and judges her role to be one of the few incoheren-cies in a poem that otherwise ‘‘approaches [a perfectly completed struc-ture] more nearly than any other of its kind in Middle English.’’12

Others have elaborated the point: the problem identified by Davis hasan effect on the reader, says Andrea Hopkins, ‘‘quite the reverse of thereassurance which the romance reader expects to receive from suchremarks’’ as the narrator’s in 1769, for ‘‘Gawain ought by rights to be

9 T. P. Dunning, review of Burrow, A Reading, RES 18 (1967): 58–60 (59). For arecent celebration of Dunning’s approach to the Virgin see Michael W. Twomey,‘‘ ‘Hadet with an aluisch mon’ and ‘britned to no9t’: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,Death, and the Devil,’’ in The Arthurian Way of Death: The English Tradition, ed. KarenCherewatuk and K. S. Whetter (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009), 73–93 (73 n. 1).

10 David A. Lawton, ‘‘The Unity of Middle English Alliterative Poetry,’’ Speculum 58(1983): 72–94 (91). Such a focus on the appropriateness of Mary’s appearance is foundas well in Vantuono, The ‘‘Pearl’’ Poems, 327; and Helen Cooper, in Sir Gawain and theGreen Knight, trans. Keith Harrison, intro. and notes by Cooper (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1998), 102.

11 Geraldine Heng, ‘‘Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’’PMLA 106 (1991): 500–514 (510 n. 9, 502).

12 Sir Gawain, xxi. The castle’s status ‘‘as epitomizing that insidious substitution ofappearance for reality which is the chief evil in Christian myth’’ has also been taken asan indication that Gawain is simply wrong in assuming his prayer has been answered:‘‘if Mary had to rescue him from great peril inside the castle she would not have workedwonders to get him there.’’ T. McAlindon, ‘‘Magic, Fate, and Providence in MedievalNarrative and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’’ RES 16 (1965): 121–39 (137).

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thinking of Mary, not Mary of Gawain’’: Dunning misses this basicpoint about the responsibilities of a man who has placed himself seri-ously under her protection.13 In no other text does Mary intervene onbehalf of a devotee who fails to notice her help, to give thanks, or tochange his behavior on its account.14 Finally, there is the problem that,as Thomas Knott says, ‘‘the interference of the Virgin would spoil thewhole crucial part of the test, and seems inconceivable from such anartist as our poet.’’15

Knott is alone among those who catalogue the problems with Mary’srole in denying it to her at all, proposing instead that MS mare is adialectal variant of ‘‘more.’’16 Given, though, that his premise mightnot be universally granted—and Lawton sees it as a symptom of the‘‘extraordinary resistance, common in modern criticism, to the poem’splot’’17—my own defense of MS mare will focus on the linguistic prob-lems with the received text, whose presentation of the term as Mareamounts to a ‘‘semi-substantive emendation,’’ the treatment of the

13 Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knights: A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 211. Readers must also wonder why she interveneshere, but neither when the lady offers the lace a few moments later, nor when Gawainfaces the Green Knight, nor on his return to court. On the first of these points seeDavenport, ‘‘The Word Norne,’’ 260, and Catherine S. Cox, ‘‘Genesis and Gender in SirGawain and the Green Knight,’’ ChauR 35 (2001): 378–90 (380); on the latter two, seeCooper’s comments in Sir Gawain, trans. Harrison, xxvii–xxviii.

14 ‘‘There is a narrative precedent for the Virgin’s intervening in a situation where aknight vowed to her is in danger of compromising his allegiance to her and his chastity,in the miracle story type known as ‘Mary and the bridegroom,’ where the Virgin appearson the wedding night to claim the bridegroom as her own’’: Phillipa Hardman,‘‘Gawain’s Practice of Piety in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’’ MÆ 68 (1999): 247–67(255), citing John Herolt, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, trans. C. C. Swinton Bland(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1928), 45–47. See Bland’s introduction, xvi–xviii. Yet the point of such miracle stories is the sinner’s acknowledgment of the Virgin’sguardianship upon her demand that he choose between his earthly beloved and herheavenly charms, a situation absent from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For another,more distant analogue, see McAlindon, ‘‘Magic,’’ 132.

15 Thomas A. Knott, ‘‘The Text of Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight,’’ MLN 30(1915): 102–8 (107).

16 Ibid. Neither of the two editors who have hinted that the term might mean some-thing other than Mary covers the issue satisfactorily. Vantuono gives Knott’s renderingof the line, but not his reasons (The ‘‘Pearl’’ Poems, 327), and Davis grants the force ofKnott’s claim regarding the inappropriateness of her intervention (Sir Gawain, 121),but mentions neither Knott’s other reasons nor his solution. Paul F. Reichardt citesGollancz’s retention of Mar(y)e, despite Knott’s objection, as something of a heroic‘‘example of the mature Gollancz’s editorial method’’: ‘‘Sir Israel Gollancz and the Edi-torial History of the Pearl Manuscript,’’ PLL 31 (1995): 145–63 (159–60). In factGollancz does not mention Knott’s review.

17 Lawton, ‘‘Unity,’’ 91.

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‘‘accidentals’’ of spelling or capitalization that creates, rather than sim-ply clarifying, the term’s meaning.18 The most obvious difficulty Knottidentifies with this rendering remains unanswered: the evidence that thescribe of the text in Cotton Nero A.x did not take mare to be Mary atall. Everywhere else in the manuscript her name appears with a �y�despite the fact that, unlike the occurrence in 1769, the referent wouldhave been clear even without that letter.19 By contrast (though Knottdoes not mention it), Pearl, 145, ‘‘More and more, and 9et wel mare,’’rhyming with fare (147), provides unassailable proof that both poet andscribe allowed mare as an acceptable variant of more.

Knott’s point about the spelling of Mary is in keeping with the con-ventions of the manuscript’s poems. While Norman Davis claims that‘‘etymological /i/ in final unstressed position is often written e’’ inGawain, of the nine terms he presents this way, four, including MS mare(1769), are at least as likely to be entirely different terms.20 Of these,the strongest support for his claim is the adjective in the phrase meremantile (153), which Davis, in large part because of the parallel merymantyle (1736), derives from OE myrige, ‘‘handsome.’’21 Yet the editorsof the Middle English Dictionary take the term at 153 to be mere � OEmære, ‘‘splendid,’’22 and even if both spellings in 153 and 1736 represent

18 Fredson Bowers, ‘‘The Problem of Semi-Substantive Variants: An Example fromthe Shakespeare–Fletcher Henry VIII,’’ SB 43 (1990): 80–95. The failure of semi-substantives to be recorded in editions ‘‘despite their importance,’’ he points out, ‘‘stiflesthe reader’s awareness of their presence’’ (89 n. 1). See note 16 for a rare acknowledg-ment that Mar(y)e is an emendation.

19 Knott, ‘‘Text,’’ 107. She appears at Pearl, 383, 425; Gawain, 737, 754, 1263,1268, 1942, 2140. The rendering Mare in 1769 results in an instance of synklisis, thefusion of e (i.e., unstressed etymological /i/) into the schwa in of so as to form a singlesyllable (Bernhard ten Brink, The Language and Meter of Chaucer, 2nd ed., rev. FriedrichKluge, trans. M. Bentinck Smith [New York: Macmillan, 1901], 181–84). Yet in theabsence of diacritics, readers have no way of knowing to read the line that way ratherthan as an instance of the more usual elision. Everywhere else in Cotton Nero A.x thepresence of synklisis is confirmed by either context or spelling, as in ‘‘Bot Crystes mersyand Mary and Jon’’ (Pearl, 383). Quotations are from Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1953).

20 Sir Gawain, 133. (Note that the presentation of OFr -e is not at issue here.)21 Ibid., 80, citing the usage one also finds in MED, s.v. miri(e. Davis was anticipated

on this by Marie Borroff, ‘‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’’: A Stylistic and MetricalStudy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 240 n. 53; see 86–88 on the range ofmeanings of ‘‘merry.’’

22 MED, s.v. mer(e (adj.[1]), def. 2(c). Likewise, the OED says sore (1987) derives fromOE sar, ‘‘afflicted with sorrow or grief,’’ s.v. sore (adj.[1]), def. 11(b), rather than � OEsarig, s.v. sorry (adj.). Neither dictionary cites sore (1826)—and 1987’s use is not in theMED—but as Emerson observes, ‘‘It seems more likely that [sore (1826)] is the adjectivesore as in 1987’’ than that it derives from sargian (‘‘Notes,’’ 398); Gollancz, too, directs

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the identical term, it is just as likely that the latter is a scribal error forauthorial mere as that the former is a reflex of mery. In assessing themanuscript’s approach to this spelling we thus need to focus on the 5such terms that without question present unstressed final /i/ at leastonce as �e�: bale (1333), bode (357), heve (289), lade (1810), and tule(568). These make up about 4.4 percent of the 113 or so candidates forsuch spelling, mostly adverbs.23 By comparison, of the 55 or so termswith etymological medial /a/ (one of which, of course, is more � OEmara) not in rhyme position, about 8, 14.5 percent, are spelled thus onat least one occasion.24 The manuscript thus presents /a/ as �a�, whichis what I take mare to instantiate, about three times as often as it pres-ents terminal unstressed /i/ as �e�.

Knott did not notice the most convincing evidence that MS marecannot refer to the Virgin: the presence of what I take to be a manifesterror near the end of 1769, whose only viable emendation—the additionof he as penultimate term—necessitates its rendering as ‘‘more.’’ Theissue is the deductive meter of the wheels, in Kristin Lynn Cole’s descrip-tion, according to which ‘‘the metrical rhythm, once established, trumpsthe rhythm of natural language; the rhythm is knowable and predict-able in each line.’’ Here it is a ‘‘regular alternation of syllables,’’ stressedand unstressed, with one, two, or occasionally three offbeats, but never

readers to 1987 in his note to 1826: Sir Gawain, 123. And the MED derives worthe(559) from OE weor7, ‘‘highborn, noble,’’ s.v. worth (adj.), def. 3(a), rather than s.v.worthi (adj.) � OE wir7ig.

23 In arriving at these figures and those for /a/, I relied on a careful reading of Davis’sglossary in conjunction with consultation of Barnet Kottler and Alan M. Markman, AConcordance to Five Middle English Poems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,1966) or, for terms not fully concorded there (e.g., so), the online version of Davis’sedition at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/gawain, part of the Middle English Compen-dium of the University of Michigan. Here I do not include adverbs ending in -lych, sincethat spelling seems purposeful: see Ad Putter, Judith Jefferson, and Myra Stokes, Studiesin the Metre of Alliterative Verse (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languagesand Literature, 2007), 101–17. Chapters of that book are cited by their authors: allthree in this case (Chap. 2), Putter and Stokes (Chap. 1), or Jefferson and Putter (therest).

24 The others are bade (1699), bate (1461), bra7 (1909), knawen (348, 633), la7e(2507), rawez (513), snawe (956, 2003, 2088, 2315). These 11 appearances make forabout 2.3 percent of the 487 total (about 200 of which are no or so, inflating the sample).Some of these are discussed in Sir Gawain, ed. Gollancz, xliii; and Ad Putter and MyraStokes, ‘‘The Linguistic Atlas and the Dialect of the Gawain Poems,’’ JEGP 106 (2007):468–91 (477, in their discussion of Linguistic Profile 26, item 47). Such usages as hame(1534), rhyming with game (1532) in the wheel, or especially Pearl, 145 as discussedabove, show beyond doubt this feature is characteristic of the poet’s language, but areof little help with our instance in that they are the products of prosodic constraints.

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zero, before or after the median stress of the line.25 Hence Israel Gol-lancz’s judgment that ‘‘a word has been omitted between ‘kny9t’ and‘mynne,’ ’’26 prompting him to print ‘‘Nif Mar[y]e of hir kny9t [con]mynne’’: ‘‘great peril stood between them, if Mary did not consider herknight.’’

This solution at least addresses the problem, unlike any other edition,but it also runs up against the point, as Oliver Farrar Emerson noted in1921, that stod (1768) ‘‘is subjunctive and should be stode in rime withthe plural adjective gode of line 1766.’’27 This necessitates mynne remain-ing in the subjunctive: ‘‘great peril would have stood between them, if[X] were not thinking of her knight.’’ The poet does frequently mix tenses

25 Kristin Lynn Cole, ‘‘Rum, Ram, Ruf, and Rym: Middle English AlliterativeMeters,’’ Ph.D. diss. (University of Texas, 2007), 122, 126. On this point see also Bor-roff, ‘‘Sir Gawain,’’ 159; and, with regard to Pearl, Duggan, ‘‘Libertine Scribes,’’ 228.Borroff finds only eight lines in the wheels with clashing stress (she does not include1769), all of which, she says, are readily explicable by attending to the etymologicalfinal -e present in these words. Regarding one other instance, ‘‘4e kny9t wel 3at tyde’’(736; see Borroff, ‘‘Sir Gawain,’’ 160), ‘‘Both the iambics and the alliteration normal tothe bob-and-wheel lines indicate emendation to wy@e,’’ as Putter and Stokes remark(Studies, 19 n. 4; also Jefferson and Putter, ibid., 130 n. 33). As Borroff comments,there can be no spelling of kny@t as kny@te in 736, or, we can add, in 1769.

26 Sir Gawain, ed. Gollancz, 122, note to line 1769. The only other possibility, which,presumably, all other editors have assumed, is that 1769 scans ‘‘Nif Mare of hir kny9tmynne.’’ While Cole’s point that deductive meter trumps natural rhythm is apposite,that applies only if we already know what the authorial line is. In this case, the resultsare much too strained, not least because they necessitate both the presentation of mareas a semi-substantive (see above, note 18) and another major emendation in the nextline, discussed below. Those issues aside, in the face of so simple a fix as Gollancz’s it isdubious instead to scan the line so that its purpose is precisely to disrupt the reader’sexpectations: Mary protects a knight who is hers, not the lady’s. Since the meter of thewheels differs greatly from that of the alliterative long lines, it does not help much topoint out that the term kny@t’s fifty appearances in the long lines are nearly alwaysstressed (pace Jefferson and Putter, Studies, 160, 203), line 2154 providing the onlyunequivocal instance of its metrical demotion, while the term hir is unstressed in allforty-four of its appearances there. We should instead look to these terms’ appearancesin the wheels other than 1766–69, in which all sixteen instances of kny@t are stressed,and seven of the eight of hir are unstressed, the sole exception to the norm using thatterm as a noun, not an adjectival possessive: ‘‘He granted hir ful sone’’ (1289). Forthese figures I relied on Kottler and Markman, Concordance, s.vv. knight and hir (thelatter in the appendix of partially concorded terms, though an online search reveals onlyone appearance, in 1200, not in their list).

27 Oliver Farrar Emerson, ‘‘Imperfect Lines in ‘Pearl’ and the Rimed Parts of ‘SirGawain and the Green Knight,’ ’’ MP 19 (1921): 131–41 (137; see also 139). A bob-and-wheel with very similar rhymes, in which the presentation of final -e accords withhow I believe it was pronounced (see below, note 29), is 1946–51: ‘‘ ‘As 9e haf 3ry9tme here 3ro, suche 3re cosses / so gode.’ / ‘Ino9,’ quo3 Sir Gawayn, / ‘I 3onk yow, bi3e rode,’ / And how 3e fox watz slayn / He tolde hym as 3ay stode.’’ But we need nottoo strictly take this orthographical feature as an accurate representation of pronuncia-tion; see note 30.

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for poetic effect, but not moods.28 An earlier generation believed thatwith a few exceptions ‘‘-e is not to be sounded at all’’ at line ends in thewheels of Gawain, ‘‘even when it is present in both words of a rhymingpair,’’ but recent discoveries show that not to be the case.29 Indeed, inmy presentation I retain MS stod on the basis that ‘‘a particular scribe’sspelling at a particular place need not and does not represent pronuncia-tion in a phonetic manner,’’ and that the poet ‘‘himself need not havespelled in such a way as to indicate his regular syllabification,’’ as Ste-phen Barney writes about a parallel situation in Piers Plowman.30 Thus I

28 On the frequent ‘‘shifting between past and present,’’ which is indeed manifestedin our passage regardless of line 1769’s mood, see Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘‘Sir Gawainand the Green Knight: An Appraisal,’’ PMLA 76 (1961): 7–19 (18). The only objectionto this proposal I have encountered, Vantuono’s remark that ‘‘Gollancz needlesslyinserted con ‘did’ before mynne to make the tenses agree’’ (The ‘‘Pearl’’ Poems, 327),betrays a misunderstanding of the reason for the emendation. When the poet wentsubjunctive, he stayed there: see, e.g., 343–47, 1218–21, and discussion by RudigerZimmermann, ‘‘Verbal Syntax and Style in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’’ ES 54(1973): 533–43 (540–41). The poet does mix moods at 285–86: ‘‘If any so hardy in3is hous holdez hymselven, / Be so bolde in his blod, brayn in hys hede,’’ in which ‘‘subj.holde would deprive the b-verse of the obligatory long dip (final -e being subject toelision)’’ (Putter and Stokes, Studies, 44 n. 79); otherwise it seems almost certain thatthat verb would have been in the subjunctive. See also Sir Gawain, 146; and Tauno F.Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax, Part I: Parts of Speech (Helsinki: Neophilologique,1960), 460.

29 Borroff, ‘‘Sir Gawain,’’ 157; she rejects Luick’s conclusion ‘‘that -e was to besounded in the rhymes of the wheels when present in both rhyming words’’ (citing ‘‘Dieenglische Stabreimzeile’’) and Emerson’s proposed emendation at 261–62 n. 24. She ofcourse has to allow to 7e / so7e (413, 415) and wa7e / ta 7e (2355, 2357). For a detailedcritique of the assumptions driving Borroff ’s claim, see Cole, ‘‘Rum, Ram, Ruf, andRym,’’ 124–26; see also Georges Bourcier, ‘‘Quelques remarques sur les rimes de SirGawain and the Green Knight,’’ Etudes anglaises 47 (1994): 132–46 (142–43). Borroff ’sbelief was in part based on her sense that the long line could conclude with a stressedsyllable, but that can no longer be maintained, which means neither can her claim aboutthe wheels. See, among others, Cable, English Alliterative Tradition, 74–76, 91–94;Putter and Stokes, Studies, 19–71; Nicolay Yakovlev, ‘‘Prosodic Restrictions on the ShortDip in Late Middle English Alliterative Verse,’’ YLS 23 (2009): 217–42; and Yakovlev,‘‘On Final -e in the B-Verses of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’’ in Approaches to theMetres of Alliterative Verse, ed. Jefferson and Putter (Leeds: University of Leeds School ofEnglish, 2009), 135–57, which concludes: ‘‘as far as metrical evidence goes, -e was notoptional: it was required’’ (150).

30 Stephen A. Barney, ‘‘A Revised Edition of the C Text,’’ YLS 23 (2009): 265–88(280). Words calling for final -e on grammatical or metrical grounds but that appearwithout it in the copy text for Piers Plowman C—e.g., scribz or all where meter demandsthe pronunciation scribez or alle—are in fact ‘‘disyllabic, properly so in the words’ histor-ies and in their representation elsewhere in the manuscripts,’’ he advises, ‘‘but only in a‘normalized’ edition should their forms be altered.’’ As such, I do not add the -e in anumber of quotations below where it can be assumed to be in effect. On scribes’ habitof obscuring grammatically necessary final -e, see Emerson, ‘‘Imperfect Lines,’’ passim;and Hoyt N. Duggan, ‘‘Final ‘-e’ and the Rhythmic Structure of the B-Verse in Middle

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am calling not for an emendation, but for a revised rendering, on thebasis of new knowledge about the status of terminal final -e in Gawain,of that term: a verb in the subjunctive mood, pronounced with twosyllables so as to rhyme with gode, which means that Gollancz’s presen-tation of the verb as a preterite in the indicative mood cannot stand.

Knott’s focus was on the problems with plot and spelling, not meterand grammar, in line 1769. Still, his final proposal, even if presented asan afterthought, points to a solution to all of these problems: ‘‘If it beobjected that mynnen is not used in M. E. in the sense ‘come to mind,’ itmay be answered that mare may be a fusion of mare he.’’31 The suggestionseems to be that the line ought to read: ‘‘If not more [he] of her knightwere thinking,’’ where ‘‘he’’ is Gawain, and ‘‘her knight,’’ the host, arendering that, according to Davis, ‘‘requires too much straining of lan-guage to be acceptable.’’32 I agree, but there is no straining if he appearswhere the line needs an unstressed syllable other than Gollancz’s con:‘‘Nif mare of hir kny9t [he] mynne,’’ ‘‘Great peril would have stoodbetween them, / If he were not thinking more of her knight.’’

English Alliterative Poetry,’’ MP 86 (1988): 119–45 (134), and ‘‘The End of the Line,’’in Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre, ed. J. A. Burrowand Duggan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 67–79 (73, 77).

31 Knott, ‘‘Text,’’ 107 (italics added for clarity), attributing the suggestion to J. R.Hulbert. Davenport, too, suggests that he is a viable alternative to his preferred hym,favoring the latter over the former ‘‘because impersonal construction with mynne moreoften uses of, and because an impersonal construction better fits an authorial commentwhich is designed to make the reader conscious of the ambiguities of the situation’’(‘‘The Word Norne,’’ 263). The latter reason begs the question and responds more toDavenport’s own interests in ambiguity than to what the poem is saying here (see note35), but neither does the former stand up to scrutiny. Both the OED and MED haveentries for the impersonal of minne only in the first person; see OED, s.v. min (v.[2]), def.1; MED, s.v. minnen (v.[1]), def. 1(e). Its only appearance in the Cotton Nero poems isCleanness, line 25, ‘‘Me mynez on one amonge o3er, as Ma3ew recordez.’’ Citations arefrom Cleanness, ed. J. J. Anderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977).

32 Sir Gawain, 121. Emerson finds this proposal ‘‘less effective’’ than Gollancz’s ren-dering (‘‘Notes,’’ 397), and Davenport deems ‘‘not very likely’’ the assumption ‘‘thatthe subject he is implied in the present subjunctive mynne’’ (‘‘The Word Norne,’’ 263).Any objection that ‘‘knight’’ would better fit Gawain, who is often called by that term,than Bertilak, who is consistently called ‘‘lord,’’ would not hold up: the host goes byover a dozen terms, including kny@t (1581, 1936, 1938; noted as well by Davenport,‘‘The Word Norne,’’ 263). As Larry D. Benson observes, the Gawain-poet ‘‘uses a largervocabulary for Gawain in but two stanzas (vv. 536–89) than Chaucer uses for any ofhis characters in the whole of The Knight’s Tale; in these few lines Gawain is lede, 7atientyle, kny@t, Wawan, mon, sege, and wy@e’’: Art and Tradition in ‘‘Sir Gawain and theGreen Knight’’ (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 128. Bensonremarks that our poet ‘‘needs a vocabulary of words and phrases and a ready stock ofsyntactic patterns that will fit his meter, and he has little concern with the very fineshades of meaning important in written verse’’ (136).

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The Prince of Price and the Subjugated Knight

Nearly all recent editors have emended MS ‘‘For 3at prynce of prisdepresed hym so 3ikke’’ (1770) to ‘‘For 3at prynces of pris . . . ,’’ onthe grounds, as Gollancz says, that it ‘‘is demanded by the sense of thelines.’’33 Yet this is true only if Mary has to save her knight in the previ-ous lines, which is no longer a secure assumption. Indeed the focus isentirely on Gawain’s relationship with the host both there, as I haveargued, and in the following lines, no argument needed, where Gawaincared ‘‘more for his meschef 9if he schulde make synne, / And be traytorto 3at tolke 3at 3at telde a9t’’ (1774–75). On the grounds of sense, theonly one on which the emendation has ever been justified, there is nolonger any warrant for the emendation prynces.34

The received interpretation of 1768–72 also relies on the unnecessaryattribution of senses to two words that, in light of the restorations of MSmare and prynce, can now be returned to meanings with much strongerhistorical foundation. Editors unanimously gloss depresed (1770) as some-thing like ‘‘to urge, press hard,’’ but both the OED (s.v. depress, 1b) and

33 Sir Gawain, ed. Gollancz, 122. See above, note 7. He also says it ‘‘is exemplifiedby Wars of Alex. 5099, ‘3is princes of pris’ ’’; but the MS phrase is attested elsewhere inGawain itself, in the plural (2396–98): ‘‘Sir Gawayn, 9e maye / 4enk upon 3is ilke3repe, 3er 3ou forth 3ryngez / Among prynces of prys.’’ As noted above regarding theuse of kny@t for Bertilak (note 32), there is no problem with assigning the appellationprynce to Gawain. See Benson, Art and Tradition, 134, on ‘‘prynces of pris.’’

34 The issue of line 1770’s meter, though, is another matter. While the emendationto prynces has never been justified on metrical grounds, some readers might note that itscreation of the two dips for 7at and -ces of corrects the lack either of two long dips or ofan extra-long dip (four or more unstressed syllables) in the a-verse, one of which, soJudith Jefferson and Ad Putter argue, is necessary (Studies, 222–32). But the price ofthis solution is the reversal of the MS line’s meaning and the need to keep lines 1766–69ungrammatical. A simple alternative, for those who would seek one, would be the addi-tion of the two-syllable filler word ilke before prynce. We find this construction through-out Cotton Nero A.x, as in line 2397 (see note 33). ‘‘To welcum 3is ilk wy9’’ (Gawain,819), and ‘‘4at 3at ilk proper prynce’’ (Cleanness, 195); see Emerson, ‘‘Imperfect Lines,’’135, and especially Jefferson and Putter, 248 n. 88, 250–51, who point out that theterm is disyllabic for the poet regardless of whether it appears with an -e (see also note30). It seems to me much likelier that a scribe would omit this filler term than a single,determining letter at the end of a word. In Troilus and Criseyde, for instance, in which ofcourse each term in a line is metrically necessary, seven scribes omitted six appearancesof ilke: see Troilus and Criseyde, ed. B. A. Windeatt (New York: Longman, 1984), textualapparatus at III.507, 1193, 1314, 1394; IV.26; and V.1103. In any case, others mightreject the existence of any such rules for the a-verse; Duggan identifies many ‘‘probablyauthentic’’ a-verses with no strong dips: ‘‘Extended A-Verses in Middle English Allitera-tive Poetry,’’ in Medieval English Measures: Studies in Metre and Versification, ed. RuthKennedy, Parergon, special issue n.s. 18.1 (2000): 53–76 (73).

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MED (s.v. depressen (v.), def. 4) support this meaning with this occur-rence alone. Meanings whose relevance is now more apparent, andwhich are much better attested, are ‘‘to conquer, subjugate’’ as in line 6(Aeneas ‘‘depreced provinces’’), and, more appropriate still, ‘‘To over-come spiritually, drag down; overcome (the mind, reason, virtue).’’35

Second is lodly (1772), which the received account of Gawain’s supposedmoral crux renders as ‘‘offensively,’’ that is, ‘‘no longer courteously,’’unlike his rejections so far. Yet there are no hints that his skills in thatarea will abandon him, and nor do they in the following lines.36 In anycase, such a definition of the term is difficult to square with the mean-ings attested by the MED, s.v. lothli (adv.). The closest is 2(b), ‘‘in anugly way, loathsomely, disgustingly,’’ but that refers to such horrors asthe stinking that comes from the flesh, ‘‘a sakke ipudrid ful wi3 drit andding 3at stinki3 lolich and is blakke’’—a disgusting, physical connota-tion hardly in line with the unpleasant social situations that Gawainsupposedly is attempting to avoid.37 Line 1772’s lodly makes best sense

35 MED, s.v. depressen, 2(a) and 3(a), respectively. See also 2(c), ‘‘to drive out, exclude,’’citing Pearl, 777–78, ‘‘And 3ou con alle 3o dere out dryf / And fro 3at maryag al o3erdepres.’’ Meaning 3(a)’s earliest attested appearance is c. 1425–50: see Brian C. VanderVeen, ‘‘The Vitae of Bodleian Library MS Douce 114,’’ Ph.D. diss. (University of Not-tingham, 2007), 77 on that manuscript’s date. Other support for this definition is foundin the hero’s status as ‘‘in drowping depe’’ and ‘‘in dre9 droupyng of dreme’’ as the morn-ing dawns (1748, 1750). Although editors usually gloss this term as ‘‘torpor, troubledsleep,’’ it in fact denotes a hanging down, a dragging down: OED, s.v. drooping, vbl. n.The term derives from ON drupa, ‘‘to droop, to hang the head’’: see OED, s.v. droop,etymology. Robinson takes the hym after depresed as reflexive, reading: ‘‘that prince ofworth was freeing himself so completely, was offering himself so near the point of noreturn,’’ from OFr despriser, as in line 1219 (Chaucer and the English Tradition, 228, 232;see also Davenport, ‘‘The Word Norne,’’ 261, and Vantuono, The ‘‘Pearl’’ Poems, 327),which Derek Pearsall characterizes as ‘‘so strained . . . as to be quite unacceptable’’:‘‘Correspondence,’’ Durham University Journal 37 (1976): 228–30 (229).

36 A point also made by Shippey, ‘‘The Uses of Chivalry,’’ 249; Robinson, Chaucer andthe English Tradition, 231–32; D. S. Brewer, ‘‘Courtesy and the Gawain-Poet,’’ in Pat-terns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C. S. Lewis, ed. John Lawlor (London:Edward Arnold, 1966), 54–85 (76); and Burrow, A Reading, 101. Geraldine Heng, bycontrast, has it that Gawain ‘‘brutally tells the Lady that he neither has, nor will con-sider having, a mistress (1788–91),’’ which she calls an ‘‘attitude of uncivil, churlishintransigence’’; but she takes this behavior to be a continuation, not a break: ‘‘in trutha part of Gawain’s pleasure throughout the seduction episodes consists precisely ininflicting a quotient of unpleasure upon the Lady’’ (‘‘A Woman Wants: The Lady,Gawain, and the Forms of Seduction,’’ Yale Journal of Criticism 5 [1992]: 101–34 [106]).

37 This, one of the MED’s citations, is from a text in London, British Library, MSHarley 913, called The Grace of God there, and ‘‘A Sarmon’’ in Early English Poems andLives of the Saints, ed. F. J. Furnivall (Berlin: Asher, 1862), 2. The other MED definitionsare: 1(a), ‘‘fiercely, angrily’’; 1(b), ‘‘grievously, harshly, frightfully’’; 1(c), ‘‘with dishonor,with indignity’’: 2(a), ‘‘in a cowardly way, basely’’; 2(c), ‘‘wickedly’’; 3(a), ‘‘with abhor-rence, with contempt’’; 3(b), ‘‘unwillingly, reluctantly.’’ In referring to the avoidance of

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as a sentence adverb, in which it is not the manner of refusal, but theact itself, that would be horrible.38 The line says that he must eitheraccept her love, or refuse it, an act that would be dishonorable, base,loathsome, wicked, one in which he would be most reluctant toengage—far more than merely socially offensive.

Among the reasons this whole episode has lent itself to interpreta-tions as only a drama of Gawain’s need to resist the lady has been theassumption that the two terms that mean ‘‘tempt’’—assaien, in ‘‘I sendehir to asay 3e’’ (2362), and fonden, in ‘‘hym frayned 3at fre, and fondethym ofte’’ (1549)—denote that term’s definition as ‘‘to allure or inciteto evil with the prospect of some pleasure or advantage’’ (OED, s.v. tempt[v.], def. 4[a]). Yet that is not the case, for in Gawain these terms referto the testing of one’s character or qualities.39 We should not forget ‘‘thesimple fact that Gawain does not know he is being tested,’’ and that

unpleasant social situations I have in mind Ad Putter’s proposal that Gawain does trans-gress the mandates of courtesy, not by anything he does or says, but by allowing thelady to force the issue when she wonders whether he has ‘‘a lemman, a lever, 3at yowlykez better’’ (1782): ‘‘if the purpose of courtesy is to avoid unpleasant situations, thenGawain has indeed fallen short of this ideal’’ (French Arthurian Romance, 139). The gram-mar of the episode, though, makes quite clear that Gawain’s concern about a lodlyrefusal arises from what has happened in the previous lines, not the subsequent ones:‘‘Great peril stood between them: for that princess of price urged him on so consistentlythat he either had to accept her advances or lodly refuse.’’

38 Another obvious example occurs when the lady ‘‘biso9t hym, for hir sake, disceverhit never, / Bot to lelly layne fro hir lorde’’ (1862–63): the poet is not saying that it isthe way in which Gawain conceals the lace that matters, but the fact of it, which isfaithful. See Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax, 315 on sentence adverbs. This notionmay seem jarring to American readers who, tutored by the Schoolhouse Rock cartoonseries, may believe that adverbs modify only verbs, other adverbs, or adjectives. Yetneither do Cotton Nero A.x’s other appearances of lodly do any of these things: defini-tion 3(a) above, ‘‘with abhorrence, with contempt,’’ cites both Gawain’s profession ofhorror at the head of the boar (‘‘4enne hondeled 3ay 3e hoge hed, 3e hende mon hitpraysed, / And let lodly 3erat 3e lorde for to here’’ [1633–34]), and Cleanness, 1090, inwhich the Christ child ‘‘ful lodly . . . hated’’ all those who belonged to wickedness.

39 Here, MED, s.v. assaien, 2a, citing 2362 (see also 2456–57: ‘‘Ho wayned me upon3is wyse to your wynne halle / For to assay 3e surquidre’’); the definitions for bothfonden (lines 291, 565, 986, 1549) in the MED and tempt in the OED (defs. 1 and 2) arenearly equivalent. Heng objects to the conventional description of the bedroom scenes‘‘as episodes of ‘temptation’ ’’ on the grounds that ‘‘ ‘temptation’ is a word that inevita-bly brings to mind an originary scenario of temptation, sin, and fall, and ‘temptress’recalls the original female sinner accused of engineering primal catastrophe for man’’(‘‘A Woman Wants,’’ 101–2). I am sympathetic insofar as critics’ use of the term‘‘tempt’’ denotes their assumption that the lady is testing something related to Gawain’ssexual purity, or that she incites him to pleasurable evil, but there is no escaping thefact that Bertilak explicitly says he sent her to tempt—that is, to test—Gawain.

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neither does the audience,40 but whatever the test’s object, it is not clearat this stage of the poem that rejection of the lady is the key to passing.

Gawain, the Imperious Host, and the

Traditions of Sexual Hospitality

A main plank of the belief that Gawain must refuse the lady’s advances,Mary’s intervention, has vanished, or at least been shown to rest on veryshaky ground. Another plank, the supposed universal law of hospitality,according to which any usurpation of the host’s role by the guest istaboo, is also much weaker than its advocates have acknowledged. Theanthropologist cited to support that idea, Julian Pitt-Rivers, in factobserves:

To attempt to sleep with the host’s wife or to refuse to do so may either ofthem be infractions of a code of hospitality, but be it noted that the cessationof the conjugal role always depends upon the host’s will, like the precedencewhich he cedes. His wife’s favours are always his to dispose of as he wishes.41

And this basic truth—that the host is always in command—underwritesa major strand of the romance tradition whereby a guest, especially ifhis name is Gawain, must submit to the host even to the point of accept-ing the offer of his wife’s favors. ‘‘Maidens, widows, and hosts’ daughtersmay be fair game for the wandering knight,’’ says Ad Putter, ‘‘but inthe long history of Gawain’s love-life there is not a single affair with thehost’s wife,’’ which he takes to be explained by a supposed taboo onsuch behavior, but in fact the point about Gawain is true only on atechnicality.42 He would most happily sleep with his host’s wife—solong as the host approves, and especially, and necessarily, if the hostcommands.

This is exactly what happens in Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle:

40 Gordon M. Shedd, ‘‘Knight in Tarnished Armour: The Meaning of Sir Gawainand the Green Knight,’’ MLR 62 (1967): 3–13 (5), continuing: ‘‘Unfortunately, criticalinterpretations of the poem have largely ignored this crucial truth about the Tempta-tion, and in concentrating on the superficial aspects of difference between the two trials,have often read the second part of the poem as a chastity test.’’ And as Marjory Rigbysays, ‘‘neither the audience nor the hero knows what the lady is about’’: ‘‘Sir Gawainand the Green Knight and the Vulgate Lancelot,’’ MLR 78 (1983): 257–66 (264).

41 Pitt-Rivers, ‘‘The Law of Hospitality,’’ 109. See above, note 4.42 Putter, French Arthurian Romance, 139–40.

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‘‘Go take my wyfe in 3i armus tweyne / And kys her in my sy9te,’’bellows the carl (455–56), a command that Gawain, ignoring any stric-tures of medieval moral theology or universal taboos, obeys with alacrity(461–65):

To the bede he went full sone,Fast and that good spede.

For softnis of 3at ladys sydeMade Gawen do his wyll that tyde,

Therof 3e carle toke hede.43

If he disobeys he faces extinction. Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle isnot alone in featuring such an odd episode. In two closely related Italiancanzoni, one of which features Gawain, the other of which the commandthat the guest get in bed with the host’s wife, the guest survives byallowing the host to command him; and in the Old French Chevalier al’epee, yet another Gawain romance of the late twelfth century, the heromust obey all his host’s orders to make it through the night, though inthis case he must get in bed not with the host’s wife but rather hisdaughter, who, confusingly, then tells him that any attempt to have sexwill result in his death by a magic sword: ‘‘the host is not actingsquarely,’’ as George Lyman Kittredge complains. ‘‘Gawain has everyreason to make the damsel his amie. It is really disobedience not to doso.’’44

Such narratives exploit two interrelated motifs: the Imperious Host,who might command his guest to do all sorts of odd things; and ‘‘sexualhospitality,’’ the host’s offer of his wife (sometimes transmuted into adaughter) to an honored guest. The first of these dramatizes a featureof the medieval moral code that was crucial in societies in which anystranger might pose a mortal threat. To demonstrate his harmlessness,as Pitt-Rivers remarks, the guest ‘‘must at least understand the conven-tions which relate to hospitality and which define the behaviour

43 This is the Porkington MS, Version A, in Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle: In TwoVersions, ed. Auvo Kurvinen (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1951), except thatI act on Kurvinen’s proposed emendation (which she does not herself print) of MS 465:‘‘Therof toke 3e carle goode hede’’ (185).

44 George Lyman Kittredge, A Study of ‘‘Gawain and the Green Knight’’ (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1916), 91 (Chevalier a l’epee), 93 (Italian canzoni). The carl ofCarlisle likewise offers Gawain his daughter as a substitute for his wife and as rewardfor obeying his commands.

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expected of him.’’45 If the Gawain of the Carl of Carlisle has learned thiswell—and kissing the wife is but one of many tests he undergoes alongthe way—it is in part because he and the other knights of the RoundTable have so often encountered ‘‘the custom of the castle,’’ which com-prises those ‘‘rituals and traditions of the community of strangers intowhich the knight errant is received at one or another stage of his chival-ric quest.’’46 The assumption that Gawain cannot under any circum-stance succumb to the lady makes for an impoverished story bycomparison to the one in which he needs to determine the custom ofHautdesert. ‘‘Foul customs raise the problem of a knight’s need to knowwhat is morally correct before he can act in a way that is right,’’ asCharles Ross says. The knights of romances, and the audience of SirGawain and the Green Knight, must ‘‘admit the possibility that variouskinds of behavior recognized to be wrong or repugnant by other canonsof moral judgment (religion, reason, nature) may be sanctioned by thecustom of some community.’’47

Malory’s episode of the Weeping Castle brings into the open the issuethat so bewilders the guest of Hautdesert. When Tristram and Isoldetake repose in a castle, only to be imprisoned for no apparent reason, aknight explains the situation:

this is the olde custom of this castell, that whan a knyght commyth here hemuste nedis fyght with oure lorde, and he that is the wayker muste lose hishede. And whan that is done, if his lady that he bryngyth be fowler than isoure lordys wyff, she muste lose hir hede. And yf she be fayrer preved than ysoure lady, than shall the lady of this castell lose her hede.48

A knight taking refuge in a castle, a beheading game, a contest in whichthe beauty of the lord’s wife is at issue: all this sounds very familiar, justas Tristram’s characterization of this as ‘‘a foule custom and a shamfullcustom’’ seems so well to express what must be Gawain’s unspokenresponse to the possibility that the lady constitutes a gift or command

45 Pitt-Rivers, ‘‘The Law of Hospitality,’’ 97.46 Charles Ross, The Custom of the Castle: From Malory to Macbeth (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1997), 5.47 Ibid., 11 (emphasis Ross’s).48 The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 3rd ed., rev. P. J. C. Field, 3

vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 1:413 (fol. 170r of the Winchester MS; equiva-lent to 8.25 in Caxton). This is the subject of Chapter 1 of Ross, The Custom of the Castle.

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by the host.49 Lacking such explicit commands as those given by thecarl to his namesake, and absent any elucidation of the custom of thecastle by any of its denizens as is available to Tristram, the hero ofGawain wonders what to do.

A host’s testing of guests via the particular, and peculiar, commandto get in bed with his wife clearly calls upon the separate motif of sexualhospitality. Viewers of The Big Chill are familiar with this (though thatfilm reverses the gender roles), and Thomas Murner’s satire Die Geuch-mat, printed in 1519, refers to the husband’s offer of his wife to anhonored guest as a custom of the Dutch.50 Auvo Kurvinen believes thatthe pre-1200 Latin originals behind the Carl of Carlisle group includedsuch an offer, which was consummated. The later vernacular narratives,by assigning what she takes to have been the wife’s role in earlier ver-sions of the story to the daughter, as in the Chevalier a l’epee and theCarl of Carlisle (where she is Gawain’s reward for yielding to the host’scommands), ‘‘eliminated the odious feature of a husband acting as thepander of his wife.’’51 And it is true enough that in these poems, asPutter remarks, the sex does not happen. ‘‘Uhen Gawen wolde do 3eprevey far, / Then seyd 3e carle, ‘Whoo ther. / That game I 3e forbede’ ’’(466–68).52 But neither the invocation nor this suppression could occur

49 Malory, Works, 1:413.50 The original of the Dutch text is: ‘‘es ist in dem niderlandt ouch der bruch so der

wyrt ein lieben gast hat das er im syn frow zulegt uff guten glouben.’’ Thomas Murner,Die Geuchmat zu straff allen wybschen mannen (Basel, 1519), sig. e.iiir, digitized imageavailable at http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/�db/0002/bsb00025698/image…41.This could be in jest of course, but if so it relies for its effect on the assumption that theaudience knows the motif in the first place.

51 Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, ed. Kurvinen, 101. James T. Bratcher has founda Mexican analogue that ‘‘may furnish a link between the [sic] The Carl of Carlisle andthe lost exemplum source Kurvinen proposed’’: ‘‘A Mexican Analogue of The Carl ofCarlisle,’’ ChauR 37 (2003): 286–92 (291). The absence of any daughter in Sir Gawainand the Green Knight is all the more striking, and only underscores the importance read-ers would have placed on the wife’s status as site of Gawain’s erotic energies. This isparticularly true insofar as Bertilak is a ‘‘literary vavasour,’’ that provincial, elderly,simple, and wise man who hosts questing knights, and who always—except in thispoem—provides a daughter. See Hanneke Wirtjes, ‘‘Bertilak de Hautdesert and theLiterary Vavasour,’’ ES 65 (1984): 291–301 (297 on the absence of a daughter). Evenreaders of Cleanness, we might note, would recognize this hospitable imperative: Lotpiously pimps his daughters to the Sodomites as replacements for his guests, who areangels rather than questing knights.

52 Again, Kurvinen, in Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, 185, suggests a viableemendation (MS wolde have doun � wolde do, ‘‘wanted [to do], nearly [did]’’) that shedoes not herself adopt. To my mind Putter misses the point of the Carl of Carlisle andthese other stories: ‘‘The Carl demonstrates the rule of romance that, while the host’s

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absent the audience’s familiarity with this alarming motif. A parallelcase is the biblical account of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, whichsimilarly calls on its audience’s knowledge of the practice of a ‘‘primi-tive’’ custom, in this case child sacrifice rather than wife-sharing, inorder to critique it and to reaffirm more conventional mores.53

The carl’s guest, though, is of course not privy to such narrative strat-egies anyway, and in the moment in which he wishes to complete theact—to do 7e prevey far—he cannot know that the host will intervene,any more than the hero of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can know onthe third morning how his own adventures in the castle and at theGreen Chapel will work out. In the meantime no supposed taboo willkeep him from fulfilling his desires. He stops instead because of a newcommand from the carl, whose wishes, or at least expression of them,have changed. For this Gawain, the prospect of sex with his host’s wife,precisely because it is transgressive by conventional norms, is to be takenseriously: if it were business as usual, he would not be showing his sub-mission to the host’s lordship.

In an important essay on the state of Gawain studies, Morton Bloom-field suggested long ago that ‘‘the temptation theme might be consid-ered part of the benevolent (or imperious) host theme and best studiedas such.’’54 Yet very few have followed up on the idea,55 preferring therest to claim such things as that the temptation theme ‘‘must be sharplydistinguished from that class of stories in which a visiting hero receivesthe favors of his host’s wife,’’ as if the hospitality theme were in effectonly when the host is physically present.56 Yet the Carl of Carlisle and its

wife is taboo, the guest can sleep with the host’s daughter, since in doing so he will notarrogate to himself the functions of the host’’ (French Arthurian Romance, 140 n. 44).

53 See discussion by Omri Boehm, ‘‘Child Sacrifice, Ethical Responsibility and theExistence of the People of Israel,’’ Vetus Testamentum 54 (2004): 145–56.

54 Bloomfield, ‘‘Sir Gawain,’’ 12.55 The only examples I know of are Shedd, ‘‘Knight in Tarnished Armour,’’ 6 n. 1;

and two studies by W. R. J. Barron: ‘‘Trawthe’’ and Treason: The Sin of Gawain Reconsid-ered. A Thematic Study of ‘‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’’ (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1980), 44–47, and, more directly, ‘‘Chretien and the Gawain-poet:Master and Pupil or Twin Temperaments?,’’ in The Legacy of Chretien de Troyes, ed. NorrisJ. Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby, Vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), 255–84(263).

56 Kittredge, Study, 78, a sense repeated in Sir Gawain, xix. Putter devotes separatechapters to ‘‘The Temptation Scenes’’ and ‘‘The Convention of Hospitality,’’ the latterof which notes Gawain’s similarity with other romances in featuring ‘‘threats posed by ahostess whose sense of hospitality slides across into amorous concerns’’ (French ArthurianRomance, 92), as if the lady were not under the host’s lordship. Likewise, while Jonathan

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peers provide enough reason to grant its plausibility, especially as criticshave mined them for the sources of the ‘‘temptation’’ plot since at least1916.57 And the poem itself is suffused with hints that such a phenome-non lies just below the surface of Gawain’s adventure. Right away, thepoet describes both the host and the world over which he is lord interms that readers of the Imperious Host stories will quickly recognize.From its earliest description, this castle has more in common with thehome of the carl of Carlisle than with Camelot. Gawain’s reaction to hisfirst sight of the lady (943–45),

Ho watz 3e fayrest in felle, of flesche and of lyre,And of compas and colour and costes, of alle o3er,And wener 3en Wenore, as 3e wy9e 3o9t,

for instance, recalls the equivalent situation in the Carl of Carlisle(403–8):

A cher was fette for syr Gawene,That worthy knyn9t of Bryttayne,

Befor 3e carllus wyfe was he sett.So moche his love was on her ly9tOf all 3e soper he ne my9t

Nodyr drynke nor ette.58

In both cases the Imperious Host exploits Gawain’s erotic impression-ability by establishing rules of conduct for his guests that, if broken,bring about punishment even to the death, as one Gawain knows fromthe start and the other will learn on New Year’s Day.

Gawain continually acknowledges the foundation of these rules—thehost’s authority over all matters in his own household—and quiteappropriately so, according to the conventions of his society and that of

Nicholls says that Gawain is happy to assent to the lady’s request for a kiss ‘‘partlybecause he must not disobey his hostess,’’ he treats the knight’s encounters with thelady as if they were wholly separate from, and in tension with, his responsibilities to his(real) host: her entry into his bedroom ‘‘should be considered as improper,’’ and in lines1770–75 ‘‘Gawain is in most danger of forgetting his obligation to Bertilak’’: The Mat-ter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtesy Books and the ‘‘Gawain’’-Poet (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer,1985), 134, 136, 137.

57 Kittredge, Study, 85–99, with fuller treatment of the Carl at 257–73.58 Both poets are appealing to type, for as B. J. Whiting observes, in the French

tradition Gawain always ‘‘offered his love generously and spontaneously.’’ ‘‘Gawain: HisReputation, His Courtesy and His Appearance in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale,’’ MS 9 (1947):189–234 (197).

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the poem’s audience. He replies to the lord’s words of thanks to hisguest for gracing his household at the Christmas festivities (1038–41):

Al 3e honour is your awen—3e he9e kyng yow 9elde!And I am wy9e at your wylle to worch youre hest,As I am halden 3erto, in hy9e and in lo9e,

bi ri9t.

Gawain had been itching to depart, but at the point when he learns ofthe Green Chapel’s proximity, as Jonathan Nicholls observes, ‘‘Bertilak’sspeech takes on an authoritative tone, with words and phrases thatimply necessity or command’’: ‘‘Now leng 3e byhoves’’ (1068), ‘‘Dowel-lez’’ (1075), and ‘‘!e schal lenge in your lofte’’ (1096). ‘‘In the face ofthis,’’ as Nicholls concludes, ‘‘Gawain can only express his willingnessto stay’’: ‘‘I schal at your wylle / Dowelle, and ellez do quat 9e demen’’(1081–82), and ‘‘ ‘Bi God,’ quo3 Gawayn 3e gode, ‘I grant 3ertylle, /And 3at yow lyst for to layke, lef hit me 3ynkes’ ’’ (1110–11).59

If such passages on their own might seem to contribute generally tothe poem’s theme of hospitality, others place the host’s governance withregard to the lady’s status in the castle more securely in the ImperiousHost tradition. Indeed the nature of the host’s lordship becomes a pointof debate between the lady and Gawain. Propriety dictates that theguest seek the lord’s permission to approach her on the first day(970–74):

When Gawayn gly9t on 3at gay, 3at graciously loked,Wyth leve la9t of 3e lorde he lent hem a9aynes;4e alder he haylses, heldande ful lowe,4e loveloker he lappez a lyttel in armez,He kysses hir comlyly, and kny9tly he melez.

‘‘With leave taken of the lord’’: Gawain recognizes her to be his host’spossession. ‘‘Hence he claymed, in the sense of ‘put forward a claim,’ to

59 Nicholls, Matter of Courtesy, 131. John Scattergood says that in being ‘‘persuadedto tarry at Hautdesert for longer than he had originally intended’’ Gawain exhibits‘‘hints of moral weakness’’—here, acedia: ‘‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Sinsof the Flesh’’ (1981), reprinted in The Lost Tradition: Essays on Middle English AlliterativePoetry (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 100–124 (105); but Nicholls points out thatthis approach, although ‘‘well-argued,’’ ‘‘takes no account of the obligations Gawainmust feel to Bertilak’’ (note 47).

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make himself known to her,’’ as David Mills observes in his analysis ofthe poem’s temptation scenes.60

In the seating arrangements for the ensuing Christmas feast, J. A.Burrow finds traces of the ‘‘primitive ‘act of fraternization’—the sharedor lent wife,’’ since the host ‘‘concedes to Gawain his right to share hiswife’s dishes, and himself sits down with Morgan’’: ‘‘Gawan and 3e gayburde togeder 3ay seten, / Even inmyddez, as 3e messe metely come’’(1003–4).61 In the wake of this episode, it would only be reasonable tosee the weak and even insulting explanation for the host’s commandthat his guest remain at home—Gawain’s long travels mean he needsmore sustenance and sleep (1093–95)—as a cover story for his offer ofthe favors of his wife, ‘‘3at wyth yow schal sitte / And comfort yow withcompayny’’ (1098–99). Having cited these episodes plus a third (‘‘whenGawain sits at supper once more ‘3e lady bisyde’ ’’ [1657]) as traces ofthe tradition of sexual hospitality, Burrow still says that it ‘‘is taken forgranted’’ that Gawain should not commit adultery.62

Yet the hero and audience have good reason to continue to thinkotherwise. The lord’s status as adjudicator of any claim over his wifereturns to prominence when the lady urges Gawain to clayme, this time‘‘in the sense of ‘demand as his due,’ ’’ as Mills glosses (1489–91):

‘‘!et I kende yow of kyssyng,’’ quo3 3e clere 3enne,‘‘Quere-so countenaunce is cou3e quikly to clayme:4at bicumes uche a kny9t 3at cortaysy uses.’’

Mills has it that, because of the intimate surroundings, quite far fromthe social setting of the meeting for which Gawain had to seek the host’sleave to speak with the lady, ‘‘the husband’s consent is an irrelevance’’according to the lady’s logic.63 More likely, it seems to me, is that shehere suggests that the lord has already given his consent by leavingGawain in her charge during the hunt.

Gawain is not quite willing to surrender the point to her. The hosthas not explicitly offered him her charms, and the lady neither denies

60 David Mills, ‘‘An Analysis of the Temptation Scenes in Sir Gawain and the GreenKnight,’’ JEGP 67 (1968): 612–30 (623).

61 Burrow, A Reading, 96.62 The tests emphasize Gawain’s loyalty, ‘‘the point being not so much that he should

not commit adultery (though that is taken for granted) as that he should not commit itwith his host’s wife’’ (ibid.; see above, note 3).

63 Mills, ‘‘Analysis,’’ 623.

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nor confirms her status as a gift. Instead she exploits the ambiguity(1230–40):

And now 9e ar here, iwysse, and we bot oure one;My lorde and his ledez ar on len3e faren,O3er burnez in her bedde, and my burdez als,4e dor drawen and dit with a derf haspe;And sy3en I have in 3is hous hym 3at al lykez,I schal ware my whyle wel, quyl hit lastez,

with tale.!e ar welcum to my cors,Yowre awen won to wale,Me behovez of fyne forceYour servaunt be, and schale.

Even if we are to confine the lady’s offer of her ‘‘cors’’ to its sexualconnotations, it does not necessarily follow that she is only playing upthe potential of this situation as a fabliau.64 After all, she refers as wellto the absences of the ‘‘o3er burnez’’ of the castle and of her ‘‘burdez,’’her ladies in waiting. Whatever agreements were forged in public cannow be activated in private. She, and her body, are at his service asoffered and, so she suggests, commanded by the lord.

The next morning, the knight still will not activate his clayme overthe lady: now, he says, for fear of rejection. When she hints that shewould not refuse him because he is strong enough to force her anyway,he responds, again, that it is the husband’s prerogative, not hers, to offerher body to him (1498–1500):

‘‘!e, be God,’’ quo3 Gawayn, ‘‘good is your speche,Bot 3rete is un3ryvande in 3ede 3er I lende,And uche gift 3at is geven not with goud wylle.’’

As Mills says, this last line ‘‘cannot refer to a gift from the Lady—a kisswould be bestowed willingly. It refers to the gift by Bertilak of his wife toGawain, a gift unlikely to be given with good will and one which shouldnot be obtained by force.’’65 Such, at least, is one of the interpretations

64 The line could also mean ‘‘I am at your service’’: see ibid., 616–17 and 616 n. 8for discussion and bibliography. On the invocations of the fabliau genre, see Burrow, AReading, 75; and Mills, ‘‘Analysis,’’ 612 n. 2.

65 Mills, ‘‘Analysis,’’ 624 (my emphasis; I also change Bercilak � Bertilak).

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of the situation available to, and, I argue, in effect for Gawain and thosereaders familiar with the generic context of the poem. If this is the case,then no invocation of his status as the Virgin Mary’s chaste knight willsuffice to extricate him from the situation. Doing so would amount to ahorrible violation of the demands of courtesy, a demeaning of the cus-tom of the castle, and a deprivation of the host’s lordship over his ownhouse. And Gawain knows to avoid such transgression at all costs:‘‘ ‘God schylde,’ quo3 3e schalk, ‘3at schal not befalle!’ ’’ (1776).

The other interpretation, equally possible to someone in Gawain’ssituation, is that on which all modern criticism has exclusively focused:that for some reason obscure to him, the lady is either misleading himor is a Potiphar’s Wife who reveals her husband to be an emasculatedcuckold;66 that, either way, the host has not in effect offered him thedelights of her body; and that, whether or not the host is involved,succumbing to her would be a sin. To a knight keenly aware of both,conflicting options, it is an impossible dilemma. Gawain cannot act.Any decisive action he might take, whether to accept or reject her,would place him in great peril insofar as it would manifest his own will,not the host’s. He is ‘‘depressed,’’ beaten down spiritually, by the situa-tion into which his host has manipulated him—which, so I have argued,is exactly what the poet goes on to say in 1768–72.

Toward a Textual Historicism

To make sense of these lines, and, by extension, of a core element of SirGawain and the Green Knight’s identity, we have called on the knowledgeproduced by editing, textual scholarship, prosody, dialectology, gram-mar, lexicography, genre studies, and anthropology. It is a substantialbody of material, representing many of the most exciting advances of

66 On the bedroom scenes as employing the Potiphar’s Wife motif, see Benson, Artand Tradition, 39, also 47–51. See also J. R. Hulbert, ‘‘Syr Gawayn and the Grene Kny@t—Concluded,’’ MP 13 (1916): 689–730 (693); Bloomfield, ‘‘Sir Gawain,’’ 15 n. 35; andCox, ‘‘Genesis and Gender,’’ 381. Dissenting is Kittredge, Study, 78: in the bedroomscenes of Gawain, ‘‘Everything is lacking that makes the story of Potiphar’s Wife whatit is,’’ for the lady ‘‘is not in love with the hero whom she wooes [sic], and has nointention to be false to her lord. Consequently she takes no offence at the hero’s offish-ness and brings no false accusation against him’’ (the context for his remarks at note 56above). If Gawain and the audience do suspect her of playing this role, the main concernis not her ruses but his host’s failure: Potiphar ‘‘hath delivered all things to me,’’ lamentsJoseph, ‘‘and knoweth not what he hath in his own house’’ (Gen. 39:8, Douay-Rheimstranslation).

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the past generation of Middle English scholarship. But a single, arbi-trary fact regarding the textual history of Gawain seems to trump allthis in the minds of many critics, prompting not engagement but sur-render: ‘‘There is only one manuscript, after all,’’ says a recent commen-tator: ‘‘Absent the discovery of some new, authoritative manuscript, thetext is about as determined as it is likely to get.’’67

While such a discovery would be most welcome, it is far from thecase that the text of the poems in Cotton Nero A.x is, or ever was,determined. The fact that my three main proposals would return thetext to the manuscript’s readings—mare, prynce, and a redefined stod—shows that even in a milieu in which conservatism is the default posi-tion, editors and those who accept their decisions have foundindeterminacy. This should not surprise us. When dealing with medie-val poetry, there can be no collapse of ‘‘text’’ and ‘‘poem’’ into a single,untroubled entity. The space in between those categories is where thecontested entity we call ‘‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’’ is to be found.It is the product of the methodologies catalogued above, and of manyothers, the ones perhaps more likely to be represented in mainstreammedieval literary journals, that are no less pressing, if not as frequentlybrought into conversation with the more technical approaches as theymight profitably be. Perhaps the integrative approach I am here advo-cating as a more prominent mode of Middle English literary scholarshipmight be called ‘‘textual historicism’’ or ‘‘textual theoreticism.’’ But itdoes not really need a name, just a refusal to allow the accident that thispoem exists in a single manuscript to foreclose the rigorous attempt toanalyze its textual history, and a willingness to embrace the possibilitythat Sir Gawain and the Green Knight provides the fulcrum of a majorcultural trend in fourteenth-century literature, one in which sexual hos-pitality is no mere savage custom now left behind, but an ethical imper-ative.

67 Arthur Lindley, ‘‘Pinning Gawain Down: The Misediting of Sir Gawain and theGreen Knight,’’ JEGP 96 (1997): 26–42 (26). For a defense of what single-manuscripttexts can reveal to students of the alliterative long line, see Putter, Jefferson, and Stokes,Studies, 8–10.

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