A Rereading of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"
Author(s): P. J. C. Field
Source: Studies in Philology , Jul., 1971, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Jul., 1971), pp. 255-269
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4173725
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A Rereading of Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight
By P. J. C. FIELD
SIR Gawain and the Green Knight has a secure place among
the best Middle English poems, and the appreciation of it
has recently been enhanced by the publication of a most
persuasive critical interpretation. John Burrow's A Reading of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight is remarkable for leaming, cogency,
and a sensitive response to the text.' But at a crucial point, Burrow's
enthusiasm for his thesis leads him to misread one passage, and hence
to give an account of the rest of the poem in which his responsiveness
to the poetry struggle against his sense of logic. I shall argue that
the poem as it stands compels us to accept a concept which Burrow
rejects, and yet that this paradoxically strengthens his reading as a
whole.
Burrow believes the Sir Gawain is a poem about trawfie: " truth"
in the medieval sense; and about penitence for a breach of trawpe.
His argument, as I understand it, is as follows. The poet's concem
for trawie becomes clear in the first scene. The Green Knight
announces the rules of his disconcerting Christmas game in grave,
rather legalistic language (11. 285-98), makes Gawain rehearse the
terms of agreement, and congratulates him on doing it perfectly.
Then one more condition is added by each party and agreed to by
the other, and the Green Knight again repeats the terms before he
departs. The elaborateness of this and the frequent occurrence of
trawke and its derivatives suggest a quasi-legal agreement which is
'London, I965. The text of the poem I use here is Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkein and E. V. Gordon, rev. N. Davis (Oxford, I968).
255
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256 A Rereading of " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"
no less binding for being extraordinary in content.2 The theme of
trawfie comes to the fore again in Gawain's ceremonial arming before
his quest for the Green Knight. The most important item in the
scene is the pentangle on Gawain's shield (11. 6I9-65). The narrator
explains at some length that the pentangle is a symbol of traw5e,
and that it is appropriate to Gawain because his virtues, religious and
secular, are interconnected like the sides of the pentangle. TrawPe
hiere must be understood in a very broad sense of uprightness and
virtue in general, rather than the restricted sense of the virtue by
which one keeps one's promises. But the widest sense contains a
middle sense of loyalty to people and principles (including implicit
obligations), and the middle sense contains the narrowest sense of
fidelity to one's pledged word. And each of the narrower senses can
be seen as central to the one next wider.3
Burrow accepts in the main R. W. Ackerman's contention that
the pentads associated with the points of the pentangle are conceived
of in terms of penitential doctrine,' and points out that the winter
journey which follows the arming has overtones of the Last Judgement and is seen by both the poet and his hero as penitential, and
that Gawain's first meal at Bertilak's castle is a "penance" both
because the courtesy of his host makes him describe it so, and
technically as the last meal in Advent.
Gawain's pact to exchange winnings with his host, like his previous
agreement, is quasi-legal. It has witnesses and legal terminology
and is formally recorded. The covenant is repeated at the end of the
first day's hunting, and Gawain spontaneously repeats his affirmation
" bi my trawbe " at the end of the second day (1. I638). And Burrow
argues, that on the third day, when Gawain is most tempted to
commit adultery with the lady, he sees the sin he would commit
as that of disloyalty to his host.5 When Gawain, having survived this
and other temptations, succumbs by accepting and promising to keep
2 Burrow, pp. 22-5.
'Pp. 42-6. The same interdependent senses form one of the key clusters of ideas
in Shakespeare's sonnets.
4R. W. Ackerman, " Gawain's Shield: Penitential Doctrine in Gawain and the
Green Knight," Anglia, LXXVI (1958), 254-65.
'Burrow, p. IoO.
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P. J. C. Field 257
the supposedly magic belt, Burrow
his agreement with his host, and argues that we are given four
pointers to show us that this is no trifling breach of etiquette. Firstly,
the pentangle symbolism suggests that Gawain's lapse from trawie
in the narrowest sense of loyalty to a promise is also a breach of the
whole chivalric-Christian complex of virtues, i. e. trawpe in both the
wider senses established by the earlier account of the pentangle. The
other three pointers show Gawain's sense of his own guilt. He goes
to confession immediately after hiding the belt. Burrow shows that
withholding what had been promised was seen at the time as a kind
of theft, that Gawain has no intention of restoring the belt to his
host, and hence argues that his confession is invalid. Furthermore,
Gawain breaks his usual custom and does not go to Mass either on
that day or before leaving for the Green Chapel next morning.
Lastly, his agitated behaviour in the exchange of winnings in the
evening suggests an awareness of guilt.6 The narrator himself clearly
sees Gawain as being at fault, and specifies the motive: not covetousness or vanity but fear for his life (1. 2040). This is not to dismiss
Gawain's lapse, which the poet had earlier pointed out was " for gode
of hymseluen" (1. 203I).
The theme of penance is picked up again in Gawain's encounter
at the Green Chapel. Instead of the expected beheading, he receives
a flesh wound in the neck and some humiliating revelations from
Bertilak (11. 2309-68). Gawain's repentance, as Burrow shows in
detail, takes the form of a kind of confession.7 We see Gawain's
contrition, restitution, acknowledgement of sins, and request for the
imposition of a penance, and Bertilak judging the sin, declaring what
the penance is, and giving a sort of absolution. Gawain accuses him-
self of untrawPe, cowardice, and covetousness; but Bertilak praises
him as "quite the most faultless man that ever trod ground," and
blames him only for a little lack of loyalty, extenuating that because
it was done in fear of his life. Both speakers use technical terms
associated with the sacrament of penance, but not quite the proper
6Pp. io6-iiI, 139fn.
'This is a revised version of his argument in "The Two Confession Scenes in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," MP, LVII (1959), 73-9.
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258 A Rereading of " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"
clerical formulas. Burrow sees that Bertilak, as a layman, has no
power to absolve Gawain from sin. As he says, " it is nonsense . . .
for a pretended, secular confession to 'make good' the inadequacies
of a real, sacramental one," but he argues that because we are in
the world of fiction and because Bertilak, the person offended, has
been satisfied, we can accept both confession and absolution as valid.
But although Gawain may be spiritually sound, he is not yet
healed psychologically. As Burrow shows, Gawain is severe with
himself in his confession, and his reactions afterwards are aggravated
by elements of mortification, revulsion, and wounded pride. His
attack on the wiles of women suggests a man struggling for control.
The same severity and the physical symptoms of shame are apparent
when he confesses his faults again on his return to Arthur's court.
But, Burrow argues, the poet guides us into seeing that Gawain is
forgiven although he has not forgiven himself. For instance, the
narrator in the court-confession echoes the confession to Bertilak and
seems at least in part to agree with Bertilak's more moderate assessment of guilt; the healing of Gawain's wound on the long journey
home is an unobtrusive symbol of spiritual healing; and Gawain's
last words recall a passage in the Psalms declaring that repentant
confession brings forgiveness. These things, Burrow thinks, help us
to overlook the fact that Gawain, not yet having made a valid
sacramental confession, is at the end of the poem still in a state of
mortal sin.9 We are left with a test-story in which the best of men
has failed the test, and although his failure is forgiven, it has been
demonstrated a fortiori that none of us is above the weaknesses of
common humanity.
A bald summary of this nature cannot do justice to Burrow's many
insights into character, mood, and mode, nor to the extent to which
he places Sir Gawain in its medieval context, but it should be evident
that his exposition is a strong one. In emphasizing the virtue of
tra-tvwe, and stressing the sacrament of penance both as a standard of
8 Burrow, pp. I27-34.
9 Pp. I33, 149-55. Burrow ignores the medieval speculations, as found for instance
in the " Book of Penance " added to the Cursor Mundi [ed. R. Morris, EETS, 68
(I878), p. 1486], that provisional confession to a layman might be valid when a
priest could not be had. We may too: there was a priest less than two miles away,
in Bertilak's castle.
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P. J. C. Field 259
judgement and as a means of forgiv
which are not only of the era of Sir
very much present in the poem itsel
one major difficulty. If Gawain has committed a mortal sin by not
handing over the green belt (and another by making a false confession beforehand), on the postulates established by the poem, he is
still in a state of mortal sin at the end.10 Burrow's own argument has
proved beyond doubt that the poet knew well, cared about, and
thought continuously in terms of the sacrament of penance. And
therefore Burrow's reasons for accepting Bertilak's " absolution " are
insufficient. Firstly, he argues that the world of fiction allows some
sleight-of-hand. To which one must reply that Burrow himself has
proved that the world of Sir Gawain is not that kind of fiction.
Penance is taken seriously: sleight-of-hand is confined to replaceable
heads. Secondly, Burrow argues that Bertilak, the person principally
offended, has forgiven Gawain. But the person principally offended
by sin is God. Aquinas demonstrates that a sin against one's neighbor
is primiarily a sin against God,1' and the pentangle implies a similar
view. Yet we do not see Gawain given, or even seeking, divine
forgiveness.
If Gawain had been and remained in mortal sin, this would
seriously affect the end of the poem. In the final tableau, the knights
of the Round Table have all assumed green baldrics like Gawain's
(which inevitably suggests that they were like him), "for ]vat watz
acorded be renoun of le Rounde Table" (1. 25I9). If he, the best
knight of all, stood among them with his green belt reminding us
that he deserved damnation, the line quoted would take on a deeper
irony and the scene a darker and more savage comedy than previous
readers ever knew.
But fortunately for the readers' confidence in their own powers,
the poem shows us that Gawain was not and during the action of
the story never had been in a state of mortal sin. There are three
indications of this, and the poet, as Burrow observes in another context, is enough of a casuist to enjoy the subtleties of the situation.
10Burrow acknowledges this twice (pp. 152, I56).
' Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 72, art.. 4.
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260 A Rereading of " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)"
The first indication is the nature of the poem. It is, among other
things, a test-story,"2 and a test-story is a kind of ideal examination.
Its nature demands that the outcome be proportioned to the candidate's success or failure. Most medieval test-stories have a simple
standard of pass or fail, as is shown when the hero wins the lady or
the Grail, after his less worthy predecessors have been killed or totally
disgraced. Burrow sees that it would make this story trivial if we
did not feel that Bertilak might have killed Gawain if things had
gone worse at the castle.13 But we must surely conclude from the
relatively small punishment which Bertilak as tester inflicts that
Gawain has failed in a relatively small way. In terms of the penitential scale of values of the poem, a mortal sin would have been
punished by a mortal wound. In Rosemary Woolf's succinct equation, the flesh-wound is to vow-breaking as beheading is to adultery.'4
The second indication is in the narrator's account of Gawain's real
confession, a passage which Burrow flatly misreads. Burrow demonstrates that the way in which Gawain hides the belt makes it clear
that he is determined not to hand it over to Bertilak in the evening.
Then he goes instantly to the chapel:
Sypen cheuely to pe chapel choses he Pe waye,
Preuely aproched to a prest, and prayed hym pere
Pat he wolde lyste his lyf and lem hym better
How his sawle schulde be saued when he schuld seye heJen.
Pere he schrof hym schyrly and schewed his mysdedez,
Of pe more and pe mynne, and merci besechez,
And of absolucioun he on Pe segge calles;
And he asoyled hym surely and sette hym so clene
As domezday schulde haf ben dit on Pe mom. (1876-84)
It is evident that Gawain goes into the chapel intending to keep the
belt, and comes out absolved, still intending to keep it. Since there
is no sign that the narrator's account of the absolution is ironic, and
since the author of Sir Gawain is of all Engzlish poets the least likely
12 Burrow, pp. I60-71. Cf. John Eadie, " Morgain la F6e and the Conclusion of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Neophil., LII (I968), 299-304.
"3Burrow, p. 137.
14 Review of Burrow in Crit Q, VIII (I966), 383-4. Cf. the list of penances for
various sins as found in the penitentials: see Medieval Handbooks of Penance, ed.
J. T. McNeill and H. M. Gamer (Columbia University Press, 1936).
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P. J. C. Field 26I
to have been slipshod in his treatme
we must accept that the confession
says, the intention to commit a mortal sin would invalidate the
confession, what Gawain intends to do is not a mortal sin.
But Gawain's breach of trawj,e is a sin. Bertilak and the narrator
both see it as a moral lapse (11. 2366, 2499), and the pentangle
symbolism, the penitential scale of values, and the poem as a whole
would forbid us to create a separate order of non-sinful offences
against the chivalric code, even if broken promises had not a regular
place in treatises on sin. But if Gawain's fault is a non-mortal sin,
it must be a venial sin, which is not obligatory matter for confession."t
We may notice here, that although the intention to commit this small
fault does not invalidate his confession, Gawain cannot of course be
absolved from a sin which he has yet to commit, and repent.
Before going on to the third indication, which is of a less definite
nature, it will be convenient to consider some of the points which
arise from the argument so far. The narrator's emphatic formula " be
more and be minne" raises the question of whether we should think
of Gawain as mentioning the matter of the belt in his confession. It
seems to me that such an interpretation would raise insoluble difficulties. In the first place, we are given no sign of the consequences
which we would have to infer as following such a confession, and
some signs, as we shall see in a moment, of the consequences we
should expect from Gawain's not confessing his intention. We would
be compelled to infer from the fact that Gawain was absolved that
the priest dismissed the matter as venial, yet we do not see Gawain
taking comfort from any such ruling. Secondly, such a supposition
would give the hero a source of strength which would reduce his
isolation while he was being tested, and hence work against the
strategy of the poem as a whole. Thirdly, to make such an assumption
would be to succumb to some extent to the documentary fallacy. The
argument from silence is stronger in literature than in life.'7 Lastly,
Burrow can only argue (pp. IO9-IO) that the poet is here "deadpan" and
" inscrutable."
'As Burrow points out (p. I05, cf. P. I oo n). Cf. "The Book of Penance," p.
I558.
'7 The first two difficulties could be overcome by the supposition that Gawain
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262 A Rereading of " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight "
the phrase is a stock formula, andI we may therefore not press it
to the limit of its literal meaning.'8 It seems, therefore, that we
should think of Gawain as concealing the matter in his confession,
and that we should take " his mysdedez, be more and be mynne ") as
referring to the sins which he has committed in the past. The breaking of his promise about the winnings is intended but not yet
committed.
It may be useful to enlarge here on the distinction between mortal
and venial sin. This is not to prove that Gawain's action was a
venial sin-the measure of punishment and the logic of the confession
scene are conclusive on that point-but to establish the nature of the
act more fully. In mortal sin, according to Aquinas, the soul takes as
its last end something other than what is required by the divine
order; in venial sin, on the other hand, the soul is not radically
reoriented in this way.19 The examples he gives of venial sins are
idle words and excessive laughter. He goes on to show that an act
which in itself is grievous enough to be a mortal sin may be, because
of diminished responsibility in the sinner, only venial. The same
distinctions are seen in operation in John Myrc's Instructions for
Parish Priests."0 Myrc has a long section on the sacrament of
penance, treating first the seven deadly sins and sins against the ten
commandments, and then going on to venial sins. We may notice
that breaking trawfie comes up in both categories.21 Myrc's venial
sins seem to be matters trivial in themselves, or serious things done
accidentally, or neglect of charity where there was no obligation in
justice, or lingering in occasions of temptation. The long specific
list includes passing by churchyards without praying for the dead,
and leaving gates open so that cattle can stray. Myrc goes on to stress
throughout his last section that the confessor should judge the degree
of responsibility of the sinner, as well as the gravity of the act in itself.
Among the factors the priest should take into account as making the
confessed what he intended to do, was told it was venial, and did not believe it; but
this would make the third difficulty insuperable.
8 Sir Gawain, 1. I88I n for further examples.
9 S. T., Ia IIae, q. 88, art. I-2, and qq. 7I-89 passim.
20Ed. E. Peacock, EETS, OS 31 (2nd ed., 1902), pp. 2I-53.
al Pp. 27, 42.
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P. J. C. Field 263
sin less grievous are whether the sinne
the sin was a single lapse rather than
sive rather than premeditated, wheth
fear, and how contrite he is: all of which have some relevance to
Gawain. However, we are readers of Gawain's story and not his
confessors. And it is only necessary for us to realize that Gawain's
fault, committed in the state of mind in which he was at the time,
was of the same degree of seriousness as excessive laughter or letting
the cattle stray.
It may now be clear how we should respond to Burrow's four
arguments, outlined above, that Gawain has committed a mortal sin.
He argues first that Gawain's failure in trawie is a breach of the
whole chivalric-Christian complex of virtues. In this he is right; but
it is possible to commit a small sin against a large virtue, and the
poet has taken some pains to show us that this is what has happened.
Burrow's other points come from Gawain's guilty behavior: Gawain
goes to confession immediately after hiding the belt; does not go
to Mass or communion before he goes off to what may be his death;
and is on edge in the last exchange of winnings. Burrow's observations seem to me both true and subtle, and even more cogent in
conjunction than separately. They have not been squarely faced by
the best-qualified critic of his interpretation of the confession.22 It
is certainly odd that a devout Catholic should go to confession and
then not go to Mass and communion on a day on which he may
expect to die. It suggests that he thinks there is something wrong
with his confession: presumably in this case that he had concealed
his intentions about the belt. And the more firmly one dismisses
Gawain's agitation in the evening as being not guilt but forced gaiety
in the face of death, the more one strengthens the two previous
points, taken together. However, although these observations show
that Gawain feels guilty, they are not conclusive as to the degree of
guilt he feels; and even if they did show that he thought he had
committed a mortal sin, we should still have to accept the poet's
judgment, and Bertilak's, rather than Gawain's. Not only are the
s'Fr. T. P. Dunning, rev. in RES, XVIII (I967-8), 58-60. So also Sir Gawain,
1. i88an.
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264 A Rereading of " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight "
omniscient author and the tester in a test-story more authoritative
than any man on the ordinary level of human life, but no man is
likely to be a trustworthy judge of circumstances extenuating a fault,
at the time he commits it.
Gawain is right in thinking that this action is bad. Venial sin is
evil: absolutely, for a man who wants perfection; for a man who is
near perfection; and for a man who is possibly, if we accept Ackerman's conjecture on the pentangle, habitually free even from venial
sin.23 But none of this makes venial sin into mortal sin.
The third indication that Gawain has committed a venial and not
a mortal sin is to be found in consideration of the intrinsic gravity
of his fault, within the postulates of the poem. Although this third
consideration is less conclusive than the others, it is instructive, has
an important supporting value, and wvas the instinctive basis of many
readers' reaction to the poem-an untechnical response to which
Burrow's Reading was a challenge. On this point it seems to me
that the instinctive response can be shown to be right and Burrow
wrong.
To establish the gravity of the fault, we must first establish the
values against which it will be measured. These are clearly complex:
a point not to be taken for granted in late medieval romance. The
taste of the time approved stories in which a single virtue was tested
to the exclusion of others. In Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, the supreme
demonstration of Griselda's patience comes when she allows her
children to be taken away, as far as she knows, to be murdered; in
Yder, the hero shows his fidelity to the obligations of hospitality, when
his host's wife attempts to seduce him, by kicking her in the stomach;
in Amis and Amiloun, the heroes' friendship makes Amiloun choose
leprosy and poverty rather than desert Amis in an unjust quarrel
and Amis kill his two sons to heal his friend.24 The reader was
expected to admire these things. But in Sir Gawain, fidelity to one
virtue does not excuse a man from the claims of other virtues.
Gawain must, for instance, maintain his courtesy as well as keep faith
23 Note 4 supra.
24The Poetical Works of Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London, I957), E 64586; Yder, ed. Gelzer, Gesellschaft fir Romanische Literatur, Bd. 3I, 11. 370-508;
Amis and Amiloun, ed. M. Leach, EETS, OS 203 (937), pp. 64, 93.
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P. J. C. Field 265
with his host. Even the more restricted
secular ethic are forbidden, as we are rem
Last Judgement pointed out by Burrow
knight" stressed by Fr. Dunning, and the ubiquitous penitential
doctrine. Gawain has obligations to God as well as to men.
This complexity has a further dimension. The Gawain-poet not
only avoids having his values constricted laterally into a single virtue
with its complementary vice; he also avoids having his values compressed horizontally so that all faults and all emotions are on the
same level: a fault to which writers on sin are particularly prone.
Archbishop Thorseby's Layfolk's Catechism and the much-translated
Book of Vices and Virtues, for instance, whether inspired by a hatred
of all sin or a desire to discourage minimalism, or simply because of
their authors' enthusiasm for exhaustive classification, show little of
John Myrc's constant awareness of degrees of culpability.25 But
everything about Sir Gawain, from the subtlety and restraint with
which the discomfiture of Arthur's court is presented in the first
scene, to the explicit assessment of Gawain's lapse by the narrator
(11. 2031, 2040), suggests that the poet was very much aware, not
simply of good and bad, but of better and worse. This much may be
necessary to establish the obvious. Many of the best critics have been
prepared to claim a good deal more for the poet of Sir Gaivain: to
see him as capable of presenting and judging various social conventions, one in contrast with another. Some of Burrow's most rewarding
insights are in this area, as, for instance, when he sees the behavior
of the inhabitants of Bertilak's castle as "reflecting back at Gawain
a slightly distorted pentangle." " Others have felt that the poet is
judging the whole distanced Arthurian world as simultaneously admirable and ridiculous.27 But if we accept as a minimum a strong
interest in a whole lattice of values, extending both horizontally and
25The Layfolks' Catechism, ed. T. F. Simmons and H. E. Nolloth, EETS, OS
I I 8 ( I 90 I ) and The Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. W. N. Francis, EETS, OS 217
(I942). Contrast Aquinas, S. T., Ia IIae, qq. 71-3. Cf. W. A. Pantin, The English
Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 1955), pp. I89-243.
2Burow, p. 63.
- M. W. Bloomfield, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Appraisal,"
PMLA, LXXVI (I96I), 7-19, and Dunning, note 22 supra.
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266 A Rereading of " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"
vertically, we should also expect to find Gawain's sin presented in
such a context as would show us its magnitude.
For this, the immediate context will be more revealing than more
distant comparisons, and the immediate context of the sin Gawain
commits is the sins he is tempted to commit and does not. Although
he says nothing of their conlparative gravity, the most penetrating
comments on these are often Burrow's, as when he notices that
Gawain seems to have difficulty in bringing himself to confess his
sin to Arthur's court.28 But Gawain is put to the test on more
important matters than whether he will tell his friends of his fault;
matters in which he is bound by various obligations. Three of these
stand out: whether Gawain will start on his dangerous quest at all;
whether he will allow himself to be persuaded by his guide to turn
away at the last moment from the Green Chapel; and whether he
will be seduced by the importunities of his host's wife. He is tempted
in some degree by all three.29 He is naturally apprehensive before
the journey; at the Green Chapel he feels no confidence, as D. R.
Howard has pointed out, in the efficacy of the " magic " belt; 30 and
the lady is very desirable. Burrow has shown how she must appear
as an incarnation of life itself to a man shaken by his first sleepless
night after his own imminent death has come home to his imagination.81
For Gawain to have broken off his quest at either point would
have been, like the sin he did commit, a breach of trawie in the
narrowest sense of an explicit promise. The material similarly makes
the difference in gravity easier to perceive. In the first case, Gawain
would have broken a promise freely and seriously given in a matter
known to be of life and death, despite the fact that he had had a long
time to prepare his mind for it. In the second case, he broke a promise
extorted by the obligations of hospitality and made half in jest over a
matter of property, and he succumbed to a sudden surprise attack. He
had in the second case not only the excuse, which Burrow and David
" Burrow, p. 153.
29 LI. 487-90, 532-5; 1766-9; 2126-7.
o D. R. Howard, " Structure and Symmetry in Sir Gawain," Speculum, XXXIX
( I 964), 425-33.
8' Burrow, p. 99.
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P. J. C. Field 267
Farley Hills have pointed out, of fea
excuse of the suddenness of the onslaught. Aquinas argued that in
a man of great excellence, the sins which take him unawares on
account of the weakness of human nature are less grievous than in
ordinary man, because he is less negligent in checking those sins,
which nevertheless human nature does not allow us to escape altogether."3
Of course, Gawain has not merely broken a promise: he has also
committed a kind of theft.34 But this does not seem, in itself, to be
a matter of importance. The narrator and Bertilak ignore it, and there
is no sense that the belt is vital to Bertilak, even when Gawain
supposes it to have magic powers. In the world of the poem, for all
Gawain knows, his host may have a wardrobe full of such things.
The belt is certainly not like the right word to the Grail-king, which
can restore him and his land to health.
But it is the adultery most of all which puts Gawain's lapse in
perspective. Adultery would also be a breach of trawtvpe, though in
the broader sense of honoring implicit obligations. The poet has
something to say on this, which Burrow, carried away by his thesis,
interprets in an uncharacteristically strained way. When the narrator
talks of Gawain's fear lest he should " make synne, And be traytour
to lat tolke bat bat telde a3t" (I774-5), Burrow says that "synne"
is explained, rather than added to, by the phrase which follows it.
In other words, the sin was that of being traitor to Bertilak, and
nothing else. Burrow defends this by saying that we must not think
of the poet as thinking of " sin" in the modem Sunday newspapers'
sense.
This seems to me a misleading half-truth. The truth in it is that
medieval moral theology recognized that it would be an offence
against God to infringe a husband's rights over his wife's body.
Aquinas says that in this aspect the act of adultery is a sin of
covetousness, which is as much the more grievous than theft as a
man loves his wife more than his chattels.35 He also remarks that
" D. Farley Hills, " Gawain's Fault in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," RES,
XIV (I963), 124-31; Burrow, pp. 134-5.
s'S.T., Ia IIae, q. 73, art. io.
"4To the authorities Burrow quotes (p. 139n) one might add The Layfolk's
Catechism, p. 9z.
" S. T., Ia IIae, q. 73, art. 5.
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z68 A Rereading of " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight "
covetousness is an infringement of justice; and Aquinas means by
justitia here very much what the Gawain-poet means by trawfie in
the middle sense. But the false part of Burrow's interpretation is
the implication that Gawain could think of the sin as being no
more than this. Adultery is also an offence by the sinners against
their own bodies, in abandoning the divine law for lust, and an
offence against God directly, as one of the seven deadly sins which
simultaneously breaks two of the ten commandments and violates the
sacrament of matrimony. Burrow's interpretation would only be
acceptable if these latter considerations were negligible in comparison
with the obligations of a guest to his host. This would only be
possible under some kind of secular ethic, and the penitential doctrine
in the poem and the very word "sin " make this impossible here.
Moreover, there is linguistic evidence, as well as moral theology and
psychological probability, to suggest that we should think of the sin
to which Gawain is being tempted as unchastity. Adultery and
fornication were clearly felt, in the middle ages as well as in the
twentieth-century Sunday press, to be in a special way " the " offences
against God. This is shown by the use without qualification of the
verb " sin " in the sense of sexual sin, a sense recorded from the early
thirteenth century.36 It seems, therefore, that we must interpret
Gawain's fear as that of betraying God both directly by unchastity
and indirectly by falsity to Bertilak. Or to put it in another way,
trawpe in the broadest sense of virtue and uprightness includes,
among other things, chastity and trawfie in the middle sense of
faithfulness to obligations to other men, and adultery is a violation
of both.
By the standards of penitential doctrine, adultery was a very
serious matter. Aquinas said that it is always a mortal sin.37 On
the other hand, breaking a vow was at least a more obscure one: in
The Book of Vices and Virtues it found a small place as the fifth
subdivision of the sixth division of the second part of the seventh
head of The Beast. And as we have seen above, it could be thought
of as less culpable: either mortal or venial, according to its circumS. OED, " sin," v i c.
37 S. T., Ia Ilae, q. 72, art. 5.
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P. J. C. Field 269
stances. We must conclude that breaking a secular promise over a
possibly trivial matter in extenuating circumstances is a much less
serious fault than committing adultery with no such excuse. And by
putting the two temptations in the same scene, the Gawain-poet has
contrived a strong contrast between them. Given his habit of meaningful juxtaposition, this seems to put Gawain's lapse into perspective,
and to place it firmly as a venial sin.
If this analysis holds, it confirms Burrow's exposition of the earlier
parts of the poem in terms of trawpe and penitence. It also shows
the care with which the poet presented in the same terms the crucial
third temptation and the confession to which it leads. Moreover, our
analysis can reconcile the inconsistencies forced on Burrow by his
reading of the last part of the poem. From the exchange of winnings
on, Gawain is seen to have sinned, and is not seen to be forgiven.
Although his own argument fails to prove it, we can see that Burrow
is right in feeling that Gawain's state is not one of mortal sin: a state
which would destroy the integration proper to the end of comedy,
make most improper on the poem's scale of values the admiration
which all the impartial and qualified judges feel for Gawain, and
undercut our response to the final tableau. On the other hand,
Gawain, though in a state of grace, is still in a sense marked by sin,33
and this explains the emphasis on forgiveness which Burrow rightly
discerns in the last scenes of Sir Gawain, and which would not be
explained by any interpretation which wrote off Gawain's lapse as
negligible. Gawain's lapse is real but minor: he has won but he has
not triumphed. Yet his achievement is substantial enough for
Arthur's court to take the sign of what Gawain thinks is his shame as
their badge of honor.39 Their humility lets them see that no man
among them could be sure in such a test of gaining so much and
losing so little. And the court to which Gawain returns must be
taken as giving the judgement of humanity.
University College of North Wales
88 The precise sense is explained by Aquinas in S. T., Ia IIae, q. 89, art. I.
"'Burrow sees (p. I58) that it would be monstrous for the court to assume a
sign of damnation, and is compelled to argue against the text (1. 2519) that they
attempt to give the belt a new meaning.
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