1. The poetic style of Sir Gawain:

1.1 Alliteration: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is part of a poetic movement often called the Alliterative Revival. It is called alliterative because the verse form requires either three or four syllables in each line to alliterate, as in the opening line of Sir Gawain:

            When the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy  (1)

This example shows that consonants alliterate with identical consonants and consonant groups. Vowels may alliterate with any other vowels and with <h>. Alliterative poetry is usually unrhymed, and there is no fixed number of syllables per line. However, each line has four strong stresses that reflect the natural speech patterns of English. In the example above, the stress falls on the alliterating syllables and on "Troy."

The Alliterative Revival is called a revival because it reasserts a traditional English poetic style (and earlier, Germanic, since English originated as a Germanic dialect spoken by the Angles and the Saxons, who conquered Britain in the 5th century). We can see this poetic style in poems such as Beowulf. In the 14th century, Middle English (i.e., English of the years 1100-1500) poets brought out numerous poems using an alliterative line that was somewhat longer than the one used by earlier English poets. To read more about the texts, audience, and historical circumstances of the Revival, click here.  To read more about the poet of Sir Gawain, click here.

1.2 As Sir Gawain illustrates, alliterative lines could also be combined with rhymed lines. Usually, when Middle English poets did this they combined a 13-line alliterative stanza with a short one-stress "bob" and a rhymed quatrain called a "wheel." (The terms are modern--we don't know what Middle English poets called them.) The Gawain poet uses a bob and a wheel at the end of each stanza, but in contrast to other alliterative poets his alliterative stanzas have a variable number of lines.

2. Some difficulties we encounter in reading:

2.1 Words used in slightly (or very) strained senses, in order to meet the demands of alliteration: Since each line must have several alliterating syllables, the poet sometimes wrenches words out of their ordinary senses, as in this line:

            Wild warblings and lively awakened a noise  (119)

2.2 Archaic words, and words used in archaic senses: Partly this is due to the age of the poem (the language has changed a bit since 1400 and Borroff often uses the same words as the poet, except in Modern English spelling). Partly this is due to the poet’s deliberate use of words that were old-fashioned even in his day. For example, in--

            This handsel had Arthur of adventures first thing  (491)

--"handsel" here is a New Year's gift.  In the same line, the poet uses "first thing" to mean "at the beginning," as an adverb of time that we would express with a prepositional phrase. The poet's form exists now only in certain almost formulaic phrases, such as "first thing in the morning."

2.3 Nevertheless, the poet is careful in his choice of words, and it is possible to detect tone in the narrative and in the speeches of the characters. In this line, Gawain's servant is speaking very familiarly and informally when he says "Here's your helmet on your head and your spear in your hand, / Just ride ..." but this informality is appropriate at the moment, because the servant has been trying to dissuade Gawain from going to the Green Chapel. His tone contains both resignation (because Gawain won't give up) and rebuke (for the same reason):

Here's your helmet on your head, and your spear in your hand --
Just ride down this road alongside yon rock
‘Til you're brought to the bottom of a wild valley ... (2145)

2.4 Poetic, archaic word order: In varying degrees, this is fairly common throughout Sir Gawain. Partly this is done to accommodate alliteration, and partly it’s done because it’s traditional poetic diction. The general practice is to put verbs and adjectives at the end of a clause or phrase. For example:

            Sheer falls the rain in showers that warm (506) [verb before subject]
            (compare with Modern English prose: The rain falls sheer ....)

2.5 Loose, "run-on" statements: Medieval poets, especially in the alliterative tradition, pile phrases and clauses one on another to make what to our eyes is sometimes a run-on sentence. Partly this is because they lived before the modern rules of grammar were settled. But partly it is because they practice an ancient, paratactic (noun form: parataxis) style of writing in which meaning is accomplished by adding information either with or without the use of conjunctions (e.g., "and"). In contrast, we cultivate a hypotactic (noun form: hypotaxis) style that uses subordination (e.g., clauses joined with subordinating conjunctions such as "that," "which," "although," etc.). Here is a simple example:

Though such words were scarce when they went to their seats,
Now are they stocked with stern work: staff-full are their hands. (493-4)

[“staff-full” = literally, filled with a staff, meaning both that they have a major task before them and (because of the image of an axe-handle, which got them into this in the first place) that the task will involve weapons.]

In this example, "staff-full are their hands" refers to the subject "they" in the previous line. Here is a more complex and typical example that uses the same grammatical construction as the previous example, but several times running:            

When they had washed, they went to their seats,
The best knight always above, as to them seemed best.
Queen Guenivere, so gay, was set in the middle,
Arranged on the artful [ dere ] dais, adorned all around,
Fine sendal round about, a canopy above her
Of proven Toulouse, and tapestries of Tharsian
That were embroidered and set with the best gems
Of proven price that money could buy,
          those days. (72-80)

["always above" = in the highest seat; “sendal” = a kind of thin, rich silk; “ Toulouse ” = rich, red fabric originally from Toulouse, France; “Tharsian” = silk from Tharsia, which is either the region around Tarsus in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) or Turkestan in Central Asia.]

In this example, "fine sendal round about" and "a canopy above her ... " are parallel to "adorned all around" and "arranged on the artful dais" stand in parallel to the clause "they went to their seats," all modifying "Guenivere .. was set in the middle.

2.6 Switching tenses: Unlike modern poets, the Gawain poet does not narrate the action consistently in the past tense. He often switches from past to present tense, even within the same sentence, as in this passage from Part I, where the first verb is in the past tense and the rest in the present:

Another noise quite new quickly drew near,
Which would let him have leave for taking his meal;
For scarcely had the music been brought to an end,
And the first course to the court been courteously served,
When there hales in at the hall door an awesome maître ,
One of the biggest on earth in measure of height. (132-7)

["let him" i.e., Arthur; maître = Fr ‘master, lord,'; MS mayster]