Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Its Allusions to French Prose Romances

GAWAIN’S FAMILY AND FRIENDS: SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT AND ITS ALLUSIONS TO FRENCH PROSE ROMANCES EDWARD DONALD KENNEDY The work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life when it is realized, and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader — though this in turn is acted upon by the different patterns of the text. The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence, and this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader .... As the reader uses the various perspectives offered him by the text in order to relate the patterns … to one another, he sets the work in motion, and this very process results ultimately in the awakening of responses within himself …. A literary text must therefore be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader’s imagination in the task of working things out for himself, for reading is only a pleasure when it is active and creative …. [T]he written text imposes certain limits on its unwritten implications in order to prevent these from becoming too blurred and hazy, but at the same time these implications, worked out by the reader’s imagination, set the given situation against a background which endows it with far greater significance than it might have seemed to possess on its own.1 Although Wolfgang Iser refers in the passage above to the way readers respond to a novel, what he says could be applicable to the way a medieval audience would have responded to an Arthurian romance that was read to them. Each member of the audience might 1 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, Baltimore, 1974, 274-76. 144 Edward Donald Kennedy have been expected to respond differently to the allusions in the text and these would depend upon the familiarity that the individuals in the audience had with other Arthurian romances. In the late fourteenth- century English metrical romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which focuses upon the adventures of a single knight, brief allusions to other characters from the Arthurian world make its audience aware of the society in which the knight moves and of his relationships with others and reminds them of the blood ties and bonds of fellowship that were important in medieval romances.2 In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, moreover, the pentangle that Gawain wears on his shield, a symbol representing trouth, the Middle English word often translated as “honour”, “fidelity”, or “integrity”, forces us to think of such relationships, as does one of the points of the pentangle, which represents the social virtues fraunchyse (generosity), felaʒschyp (love of fellow men), clannes (purity), cortaysye, and pité (compassion) (SGGK, 651-54). Like Chrétien de Troyes, the Gawain-poet alludes to a number of characters from the Arthurian world outside of this particular romance, characters whose names at least would have been known to an audience that had heard or read other English and French Arthurian romances and that are indicators of Gawain’s social relationships. The reactions of the members of the audience to these names would depend, just as it does to modern readers, upon their familiarity with other Arthurian literature and upon their knowledge of the intertextual relationship of this romance to its predecessors, and it would thus vary among individuals in the audience. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight would in all likelihood have been intended for two groups: one would consist of those who, unable to understand French, knew only English Arthurian literature; and the other would consist of those who knew French romances as well. The reactions of the first group would have been quite different from the reactions of listeners who knew French romances, particularly those who knew the prose romances of the Vulgate cycle and the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal. Just as Chrétien lists characters like Dodinal, Tristan, and Girflet without explaining who they were but apparently assuming that the names would recall other tales in oral circulation, or just as the Beowulf-poet similarly alludes briefly to characters from Germanic 2 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, eds J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd ed. by Norman Davis, Oxford, 1967 (referred to as SGGK, followed by line numbers). .

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