THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

castle and explains that Gawain has received an exact punishment for his failure to render the girdle up to his host.
The whole affair has been a plot against Arthur and the Round Table magically contrived by Morgan le Fay. Despite
such explanations, Gawain is distraught at the exposure of his fallibility and condemns his lapse in a torrent of self
disgust. It is only in the generous, knightly world of Camelot that his imperfection can finally be excused as human
folly, not condemned as a crime against chivalry.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight identifies Gawain’s quest as a trial not of his valour (which remains undoubted)
but of his chastity. But the morality
[p. 45]
explored throughout the poem is not merely sexual. In his poem the Gawain-poet offers a series of contrasts which
help to call into question not just the value of knighthood but the idea of value itself. He allows an already oldfashioned
chivalric, gentlemanly ideal, in which personal integrity is linked to feudal and communal loyalties, to coexist
with what can be seen as a mercantile notion of barter and exchange (merchants, and Lord Mayors of London in
particular, were already beginning to rise to the dignity of knighthood). He suggests that the codes of Christian
chivalry can help define the true path of human advance towards spiritual integrity. Gawain is required to attempt to
live up to the symbolic pentangle that he bears on his shield, a mysterious Solomonic emblem of perfection. It is
drawn as one unending line, an ‘endless knot’ of five intersecting points which are interpreted within the narrative as
standing for the five wits, the five fingers, the five wounds of Christ, the five joys of Mary, and the fivefold practice of
generosity, fellowship, cleanness, courtesy, and pity. When Gawain slips, his fault lies in accepting a girdle, a broken
line but one that can be joined end to end to make a circle. It is the token of his fear and of his loss of fidelity to the
codes he holds most dear. It is, however, in this act of failure that Gawain discovers his fullest humanity and the truest
test of his knightly integrity. When he is ultimately received back into the fellowship of another emblem of perfection,
the Round Table, his fellow-knights join him in wearing the green girdle not simply as a sign of shame, but as a
public avowal of the ‘renoun of Þe Rounde Table’. In the manuscript the poem triumphantly ends with a statement of
the motto of the new Order of the Garter: ‘Shame to him who thinks evil of it’. The humble garter, we recall, like the
practical girdle, can be fastened into the shape of a circle and both can be elevated by the knights that wear them into
a sign of honour.
The high ideals of Christian knighthood, human lapses from uprightness, and the suggestive power of numbers are
all to some degree reflected in the other poems ascribed to the Gawain-poet. Patience is largely taken up with a
somewhat idiosyncratic retelling of the story of Jonah, the prophet himself being associated not with the divine virtue
of patience but with its contrary, human impatience. Jonah accepts nothing with equanimity, neither God’s checks nor
signs of God’s mercy. When the Almighty forgives the people of Nineveh, his chosen prophet is vexed enough to
reproach him for his excess of ‘cortaysye’, the tolerant generosity which the fourteenth century would most readily
have associated with Arthurian ideals of knightly conduct. The poet takes a decidedly different view of divine
providence in Cleanness, an exploration of three defective societies described in the Old Testament as having justly
provoked the wrath and indignation of God. Where Jonah bemoans the proffered chance of repentance at Nineveh, the
narrator of Cleanness sees punishment as the proper reward for the sacrilegious and ‘unnatural’ defilement of God’s
image evident in the time of Noah, at Sodom, and in Belshazzar’s Babylon.
[p. 46]
Pearl is at once a more delicate, compassionate and, to many twentieth-century readers, sympathetic work of art. It
purports to describe the dream of a distraught father, bereaved of his 2-year-old daughter, who seeks for her in the
image of a pearl. The poem’s subject may well be gently shaped around a punning reference to the common medieval
name Margaret (Latin, margarita, a pearl); it certainly makes play with Christ’s parable of the pearl of great price,
itself a cipher for the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 13: 46). At the opening of the poem, the narrator seeks for his lost
gem (‘so smal, so smoÞe’) in an arbour (perhaps at the site of her grave) in the ‘high season’ of August (the month in
which the feast of the heavenly Assumption of the Virgin Mary is celebrated). He falls asleep on the mound and is
granted a dream of a land bright with imperishable jewels, a land recognizably that of the vision of St John (who saw
each of the twelve gates of the heavenly Jerusalem as formed from a pearl). The white-clad maiden the dreamer meets
is barely recognizable; she is glorious but he is struck both by hesitancy and by wonder. The two then engage in a
dialogue in which the pearl-maiden both reproaches the dreamer’s tendency to disbelief and carefully answers his
often dazed questions. She, it emerges, is now a bride of Christ and, like all other saints, is now through God’s
‘courtesy’ a monarch in heaven (‘So fare we all wyth luf and lyste | To kyng and quene by cortaysye’). When asked
why she, who was too young to know even the simplest of the Church’s prayers on earth, can now be a queen, she
replies by repeating Christ’s parable of the vineyard in which all workers are treated equally. With each answer the
dreamer’s own rapture seems to increase and he finally plunges into the stream that separates his transformed