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This lecture is about Fitt 3 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Fitt 3 is considerably longer than
any other fitt in the poem: it’s about 871 lines, and the next longest Fitt is Fitt 2 at 634 lines. Not
only is Fitt 3 the longest episode in the poem, the most extended part of the narrative; it’s also the
most complex and elaborate part of the poem. We don’t just get a straightforward linear narrative
going from A to B to C as in the other sections; instead, we get this quite disorienting alternation
between parallel events. So to start with, let’s get a clear sense of what happens in this fitt, and how
it is structured. Because when you lay it all out in front of you, you start to see that there is a
reasonably consistent pattern to these events.
Gawain arrived at the castle on Christmas Eve, and has been staying at this castle for four nights – it
is the 28th December when Fitt 3 starts. He’s ready to go back into the wilderness to find the Green
Knight. But his host tells him that the Green Knight is very close by, he promises to guide him there
when New Year’s Day comes along; and he persuades Gawain to stay in this castle for another three
days and nights. (This is slightly confusing, because he actually has four days until New Year’s
Day; it’s a small continuity error; the poet likes to arrange things by threes in Fitt 3, so don’t worry
about the chronology too much.) And after those three days, Gawain will get up early in the
morning on New Year’s Day and travel the short journey to the Green Chapel so he can have his
head cut off.
But of course it’s not quite that simple. During these three days, to pass the time, Gawain’s host
proposes a little game. The host will go out hunting each day, and Gawain will stay in bed and rest;
whatever the host catches while he’s out hunting, he will give to Gawain at the end of the day; and
whatever Gawain manages to get while staying at home, he will give to his host at the end of the
day. It doesn’t sound like the best game in the world. It seems like Gawain is going to be burdened
with a lot of dead animals he has no earthly use for; and it’s hard to see what he could possibly win
in the course of the day, given that he’s a guest in this man’s house. Short of stealing his host’s
slippers and then giving them back to him, there’s no clear way for Gawain to actually play this
game.
But here’s what happens: on the first day, the lord of the castle goes out hunting, slaughters a lot of
deer, and gives them to Gawain when he gets back; Gawain is visited by the lord’s wife, gets a kiss
from her, and gives this back to his host. On the second day, the lord kills a wild boar, and gives the
head to Gawain; Gawain gets two kisses from the wife, and gives them back to his host. On the third
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day, the lord kills a fox, and gives its skin to Gawain; Gawain gets three kisses from the wife and a
magical girdle that will protect him from all injury. And he gives the three kisses back to his host.
As you can see from this outline, there are one or two other interesting things that happen here. But
the main thing to notice is that on each day, we get a description of the start of a hunt; then this is
interrupted by a description of what’s happening to Gawain in his bed-chamber, in what are often
called the temptation scenes; then we go back to the hunt and see how it ends. And then the two
strands come together when Gawain and his host meet in the evening to exchange their winnings.
One of the great mysteries of Fitt 3 is the relationship between the hunting scenes and the
temptation scenes. The Gawain-poet has obviously made a conscious decision, not just to describe
the hunts and the temptations one after the other, but to sandwich the temptations in between the
start and the finish of each hunt. That seems to suggest that we shouldn’t just look at these two
strands of the narrative separately, side by side; rather, we should see them as being interlinked,
perhaps not unlike the lines of the Pentangle that overlap and link in with each other. Just as there is
a continuity between the qualities represented by the various points of the Pentangle, so this
structural device suggests that there is some kind of continuity, some meaningful association,
between the hunting scenes and the temptation scenes. The nature of that relationship is what I’m
going to focus on, primarily, in this lecture.
At times, the poem seems to encourage us to think about the relationship between the two strands by
transitioning from one to the other in a suggestive way. For example, at the start of Fitt 3, we see the
beginning of the deer hunt. And then we move from this to Gawain’s bedroom in the course of the
movement from one stanza to another. So here is the wheel, those four short lines, at the end of one
stanza, and then the beginning of the next stanza:
The lord for blysse abloy
Ful oft con lance and light,
And drof that day with joy
Thus to the derk night.
Thus laykes this lord by lynde-wodes eves,
And Gawayn the good mon in gay bed lyes,
Lurkes while the daylyght lemed on the wowes
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Under covertour ful clere, cortayned about. (1174-81)
So the lord is ‘for bliss abloy’, transported with bliss, out of his mind with joy, galloping through
the forest, driving the day to the dark night; and driving it with joy. The lord is playing, he’s having
a wonderful time and the day is passing quickly and pleasantly for him. But then in the second
stanza here, we see the contrast between the lord playing by the edges of the forest and Gawain
lying in his lovely bed. Notice that time isn’t passing quickly for Gawain: this is a good example of
the non-linear narrative technique used in Fitt 3. We’re told about the lord driving the day towards
the dark night, we have this rapid snapshot of almost his entire day; and then we go back in time to
a place where the daylight is just starting to leme, to gleam, on the walls; where Gawain is not
riding in crazed ecstasy through the woods, massacring blameless animals. The lord ‘laykes’, plays;
Gawain ‘lurkes’; he lies resting, he dozes.
Straight away, just from looking at this short transitional passage, we can start to detect some
significant contrasts between the two strands of the narrative. For now, let’s consider three of those
contrasts. Firstly, and most obviously, the lord is outside; Gawain is inside.
Secondly, the lord is active, Gawain is inactive. Now it must be emphasised here that Gawain is
only doing what his host told him to do: the lord says, you stay in bed while I go hunting, you rest.
That’s part of their agreement, and it would be kind of rude for Gawain to go against his host’s
wishes. So he’s not doing anything morally wrong by lounging around in bed all morning, but
nonetheless Gawain, at this point, through no fault of his own, is not at his most impressive. There’s
a big contrast between the Gawain of Fitt 2 who travelled the wilderness in full armour, killing
unspeakable monsters, enduring terrible hardship; and the Gawain of Fitt 3 who snoozes in a
comfortable bed. That contrast between the two versions of Gawain is already quite striking; but by
linking the scene in the bedroom with the lord out hunting in the forest, the poem reinforces this
effect, it makes Gawain’s inactivity, his passivity, really stand out very strongly.
Thirdly, and I think most interestingly, there is a strong contrast between the emotional states of the
lord and Gawain. The lord is ‘for blysse abloy’, abloy means dazzled, transported, ecstatic. And this
is very characteristic for this man, Gawain’s host: he is an amazingly happy, positive person. When
Gawain arrived at his castle, during the Christmas celebrations, when he comes up with the
exchange game, when he’s out hunting, when he’s receiving the kisses; he just can’t shut up about
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how brilliant this all is, what a good time he’s having; and overall, if you wanted to sum this man up
in a single phrase, I think you could say that he loves his life. He seems to relish everything about
life, he’s brimming over with enthusiasm for all the delights that life has to offer: games, parties,
friends, hunting, kissing.
Gawain, at this point in the story, is a different kettle of fish. Notice in this passage the emphasis on
the gay bed, the beautiful sunlight gleaming on the walls, the ‘ful clere’, very beautiful, sheets on
the bed, the bed is cortayned about. Gawain is surrounded by luxury, and you see this again and
again during his stay at the castle, he is practically smothered by every variety of beautiful thing
imaginable. And yet, it is the bed that is gay, not Gawain; what does Gawain do? Gawain ‘lurkes’;
Burrow glosses this as ‘lies comfortably, dozes’, and in this context that is what the word means;
but in Middle English this word could also have more negative connotations; to lurk can mean to lie
in wait, to cower, to move stealthily, to crawl. And as you read through Fitt 3, you see how
appropriate this word is for Gawain. Later on, he does indeed behave quite stealthily and sneakily
when he knows the lady has entered the room, as you may remember from the passage you
translated this week; but more generally, throughout this part of the poem, Gawain is in a sense
lying in wait in that bed; lurking there, waiting for something terrible to happen. He’s not lying
there relaxing, daydreaming about his future – because as far as he knows, he doesn’t have a future.
He’s counting down the days to his death. The narrator tells us this quite explicitly: I don’t have
time to discuss these passages now, unfortunately, but just want to draw your attention to them,
especially the second one here – a really chilling moment. Gawain is dreaming about decapitation,
he’s feeling the ‘buffet’ of the Green Knight’s axe in his sleep – and then he has to wake up and do
more luf-talkyng with his host’s wife.
Now, to be clear, it’s not that Gawain is sullen and sulky during his stay at this castle. He joins in
with the festivities, he laughs and plays, as courtesy demands; but the narrator keeps reminding us
that behind all that polite joviality, Gawain is contemplating his death.
So even thinking about this in a fairly generalised way, it’s clear that there is a lot of mileage in
exploring the effect of juxtaposing and intertwining the hunting and temptation scenes. But now
let’s consider more specifically what actually happens in these two strands of the narrative. The lord
is out hunting animals on his estate; his wife is back at home, trying to persuade Gawain to make
love to her. And again, I’m going to suggest three ways of thinking about the relationship between
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these two actions, but this time we’re dealing with three connections, three similarities, rather than
three contrasts.
Firstly, just as the lord is hunting animals on his estate, so the lady is hunting Gawain back at home.
That’s a fairly obvious connection to make. Secondly, building on that idea, we can think of the lord
as demonstrating his mastery and control over his estate, and over the natural world more generally,
by hunting on it; in a similar way, we might say that the lady demonstrates her mastery over
Gawain, and over the more domestic space of the home, and especially the bedroom. Notice how
the lady invades the space of the bedroom, she doesn’t ask to be let in, she takes control of this
space, just as the lord finds these animals where they live, where they hide in the forest, and hunts
them down. Thirdly, we might even look for correspondences between the animals hunted on each
of the three days and the behaviour of Gawain on each of the three days; especially between the
wily, terrified fox that gets hunted to death on the third day, and the Gawain we see on that day,
who arguably behaves in quite a sneaky, underhand way, and who is motivated, like the fox, by a
fear of death. I’ll say more about that later on.
On that last point, I’m not sure there is a thoroughly convincing way of drawing direct parallels
between the specific hunted animals and Gawain. Yes, Gawain is kind of like the fox on the third
day, but is he really like a deer, or a boar, on the other two days? You might have a think about that
for yourselves. I do think it’s useful to consider how the temptation scenes are like the hunting
scenes; and to think about the association between Gawain and the different animals being hunted…
But drawing a very direct correspondence between these things might be misguided. Here’s my
suggestion about how we could move from these three connections to some kind of overall sense of
the relationship between the hunts and the temptations.
Across the three days, the lord hunts three different types of prey. He hunts all of them with
consummate expertise: he is a perfect hunter, an exemplary hunter if you like. These descriptions
could serve as a useful textbook for young aristocrats who want to improve their hunting skills: this
is how you hunt deer, this is how you hunt a wild boar, this is how you hunt a fox.
And the same is true of the temptation scenes. The lady, too, is a brilliant hunter: or a brilliant
tempter; she is an exemplary persuader, or rhetorician. This is how you tempt someone, how you
seduce them. She is very clever and sophisticated and witty in the way that she tries to manoeuvre
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Gawain into doing what she wants. Just as the lord uses different methods to hunt different animals
on each day, so the lady uses different – often quite subtly different – methods to try and seduce
Gawain on each day, she has a variety of different arguments, different rhetorical strategies, that she
tries out on him. I don’t have time to go through them in detail here, but it’s well worth isolating
those three temptation scenes and trying to trace the progression of the debate in each episode: what
does the lady say; how does Gawain respond; how does the lady respond to that response; and so
on. We’re supposed to feel a tension in these passages quite similar to the tension we feel during the
hunting scenes, because there’s a lot at stake and Gawain, like the hunted animals, is in grave
danger; the narrator tells us this several times. But I do think we’re also supposed to feel an
admiration for the lady’s skill as she tries to trap Gawain, in the same way that we admire the skill
of her husband when he’s out hunting. And just as we can see that the three hunts get progressively
more difficult: it is harder to kill the boar than the deer, and harder to catch the fox than the boar; so
also we can see how the lady is having to work harder to try and catch Gawain, and Gawain is
having to work harder to defend himself.
So just to underline my point here: one effect of interlacing the hunting and temptation scenes is to
suggest an association between the lady’s talents and those of her husband; although they’re
working in different contexts, we feel that they have something in common here.
And I think it would also be fair to say that we admire Gawain’s conduct in these passages, that he
too is a kind of exemplary figure here; perhaps we feel that, just as the boar and the fox put up a
good fight, and present a substantial challenge to the people hunting them, so Gawain is also skilful
and clever enough to make it harder for the lady to trap him. I’ll come back to that issue in a while,
but the point is that throughout Fitt 3 we are in the company of exemplary people and exemplary
behaviour: each of these three characters is brilliant at what they are doing. And I just want you to
sort of hold that idea in your heads for a minute. This is a story about superlatively excellent people.
Not only are the characters themselves excellent, and not only are their skills, their abilities,
associated with each other and related to each other by the intertwining narrative this poem uses –
but in addition to that, we can say that the poet himself is being pretty exemplary as well. When you
were reading Fitt 3, you probably felt quite frustrated by some of the hunting scenes, because they
are swarming with technical vocabulary. The poet describes the process of hunting these animals so
vividly, in such detail, that it’s hard for a modern reader to get a handle on these descriptions;
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almost every word has to be looked up in the glossary. But put yourselves in the place of the
aristocratic medieval audience for whom this poem was probably intended, an audience who would
have had no problem with the dialect, of course; and who would also have known all about these
hunting practices that are being described. By going into so much detail here, the poet is
demonstrating his knowledge, his expertise, on this subject. This perfect hunter, the lord, can hunt
any type of game, and hunt them really well; and the poet describing him therefore shares in that
expertise. Each hunt is described in loving detail by the poet, who knows all the technical terms
associated with hunting deer, dissecting deer, which part of the boar you have to eviscerate in order
to murder it, how precisely you go about hunting a fox and how the fox behaves – and indeed how
the fox feels – when it’s being hunted.
This is one of many ways in which the Gawain-poet establishes his credibility, his authority. Here,
he does that in a way that will appeal specifically to an aristocratic audience, who would regard
hunting as a quintessentially noble, civilised, sophisticated art. When you read that description of
the deer being ripped apart and sliced up and arranged into various heaps of slimy bits, you
probably feel a bit like vomiting, perhaps it all seems a bit barbaric to you. And there is an element
of that here, these passages are about violence and brutality, blood and pain. But you also have to
see hunting as an art, a noble art, to really appreciate what the poet is doing here. And once you get
over the difficulty of the vocabulary and you stop worrying about what every word means, I hope
you’ll see that those passages are breathtakingly good poetry: there is no part of me that would ever
want to hunt animals, but I find these hunting descriptions genuinely gripping and tense, and
beautiful. Again, they are exemplary: expert knowledge, great poetry.
And to go back to the temptation scenes, just as we admire the poet’s skill in describing so
knowledgably and vividly and in such detail the various procedures involved in hunting; so, I think,
we are also supposed to admire his skill in constructing this sophisticated dialogue between Gawain
and the lady. He knows how these kind of noble, cultivated people talk to each other, he can write
authentic extended dialogue between them; and again, it’s not only authentic and clever, it’s also
beautiful.
The characters in the text are exemplary; and the story itself is exemplary; and the way that the two
strands of the narrative in Fitt 3 are woven together, this feature of Fitt 3 that I’ve been focusing on,
this interweaving makes the poet’s achievement even more impressive, but it also melds together all
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the things I’ve been talking about. The various kinds of excellence exhibited by the characters and
by the poem are all associated with each other, as we read Fitt 3.
And the ultimate effect of this, I think, is that the poem comes to seem like a poem that is centrally
about excellence, and indeed about perfection. It’s very common for Arthurian romances to be full
of superlatives: these stories are always about ‘the best knight’, ‘the most beautiful woman’, ‘the
most exciting adventure’; and they often present themselves in a very self-aggrandising way, these
romances use various clever techniques to advertise their own wonderfulness. So in that sense, this
poem is just taking its place in that tradition, in that style of writing, writing excellently about
excellence.
But what’s really great about this poem is that it doesn’t just make use of these traditional tropes, it
also reflects on these tropes; it takes this idea of perfection, it holds it up and explores it, and it
interrogates that perfection; for me, that’s what this poem is really about, beyond anything else.
What does it mean to be the best person in the world; or to try to be the best person in the world; or
to try and fail to be the best person in the world? Is such perfection really possible? Or is the very
concept of perfection a dangerous, unattainable ideal?
And this interrogation of perfection of course centres around Gawain himself, the superlatively
good hero. We see him behave perfectly in Fitt 1; then we are told, in Fitt 2, how wonderful he is,
first in the description of the pentangle that attaches to him, then more indirectly through the
amazing reputation he seems to have among the inhabitants of the castle where he finds lodging.
Gawain is set up as a faultless knight; and then he is tested in various ways. After reading Fitt 1, you
might assume that the tension in this story would arise from our fear for Gawain’s life: we should be
worried about what will happen to him at the end. And I think you do worry about that to some
extent. But it seems to me that much more tension arises from the question, ‘Will Gawain hold up
under these pressures?’ We know how wonderful he is; will he be able to stay that way and remain
faultless until he meets the Green Knight and faces death? In Fitt 3, we see Gawain put into this
very vulnerable position: and we need to feel very keenly that his excellence, his perfection is at
stake here; we need to feel invested in that, and worried about it.
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So I hope you can see how all these features of Fitt 3 that I’ve been talking about help to foreground
that theme and that tension. The brilliance of Gawain’s host, out hunting in the forest, threatens to
undermine Gawain, to make him look smaller and weaker; the skill and sophistication of the lady
threaten to lure Gawain into making a mistake; and in this context, the skill with which Gawain
handles this situation seems like the skill of the tightrope-walker; it’s supposed to be a little bit nailbiting.
The tightrope is a useful metaphor in this case, because what Gawain needs to do is to balance his
practice of different virtues, and thereby keep himself on this very straight, very narrow path of
virtuous conduct. The poet states this quite explicitly: here he’s describing the lady’s attempts to
seduce Gawain, and the narrator comments on the problem our hero has to deal with, the competing
demands that are placed on him:
For that prynces of pris depresed him so thik,
Nurned him so negh the thred, that nede him behoved
Auther lach there hir luf auther lodly refuse.
He cared for his cortaysye, lest crathayn he were,
And more for his meschef if he schulde make synne
And be traytor to that tulk that the telde aghte.
‘God schelde,’ quoth the schalk, ‘that schal not befalle.’
With luf-laghyng a lyte he layd him biside
All the speches of specialty that sprang of hir mouth. (1770-78)
First of all, Gawain can’t be rude to the woman in front of him. He is her guest, and in any case as a
knight he is supposed to be courteous to everyone, but especially to women. And this woman is
putting him in a position where he either has to ‘lach there hir luf’, take her love right there and
then, become her lover, or ‘lodly refuse’, rudely refuse her. He is not allowed to be a ‘crathayn’; I
love that word. It derives, apparently, from the Old French noun ‘cracheron’ meaning ‘spittle’. A
‘crathayn’ is a like a piece of spittle, a lump of gozz; a person with no class, someone who spits in
polite company. That’s what Gawain would be doing if he ‘lodly refused’ this woman, it would be
like spitting on her. And one of the virtues embodied by the Pentangle was courtesy, so Gawain
cannot be uncourteous.
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But he also cannot ‘make synne’ by being a traitor to his host. He’s promised to give back to his
host whatever he wins in the course of the day. That means that whatever the lady does to Gawain,
Gawain then has to do to the host; that’s one reason why he can’t actually make love to the lady
because then he would have to make love to her husband as well; it would also just be morally
wrong to have an affair with this man’s wife. But that’s the point, the rules of the exchange game
prevent Gawain from doing anything that he would have to conceal from this woman’s husband. So
this exchange game that didn’t seem to make much sense at first actually ends up being a brilliant
way of testing Gawain’s moral fibre.
The Pentangle tells us that Gawain must maintain all these virtues at the same time; he has to
maintain that complex shape, like a cat’s cradle, with all the points intertwining, balancing together,
all interdependent; the Pentangle is an image of perfection, perfect integrity; and here we see, in
practice, what it means for Gawain to practise that perfect integrity.
I said earlier that this poem interrogates the idea of perfection: and at this point, it seems to be
asking whether it is really possible for Gawain to do all these things at once. The key question here
is, does Gawain do anything wrong, does he succeed in keeping these two plates spinning, or does
he let one of them drop? How you answer that question depends first of all on how you interpret the
kisses. When Gawain allows the lady to kiss him, is he fulfilling the demands of courtesy – that is,
does he have to let her kiss him because to refuse these kisses would require him to be rude? – or is
he slightly over-stepping the line, is he transgressing in some way?
We could look at this from two angles, I think. First of all, we could say that Gawain is in the clear
because he gives these kisses back to his host. And that indicates that, from his point of view, they
are essentially non-erotic kisses. Here’s the first passage where Gawain kisses his host:
He haspes his fayr halse his armes withinne
And kysses him as comlyly as he couth avyse:
‘Tas yow there my chevisaunce, I cheved no more.
I wowche hit saf fynly thagh feler hit were.’
‘Hit is good,’ quoth the goodmon, ‘grant merci therfore.
Hit may be such hit is the better, and ye me breve wolde
Where ye wan this ilk wele by wyt of yourselven.’
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‘That was not forward,’ quoth he, ‘frayst me no more.’ (1388-95)
So Gawain doesn’t just give his host a peck on the cheek: he puts his arms around his neck, and
kisses him ‘comlyly’. Now there’s an ambiguous word: what is a ‘comly’ kiss? It can mean the
same thing as ‘seemly’; that is, appropriate, fitting. It can also mean ‘nice’ or ‘lovely’. And I think it
means both things here. Gawain gives his host a really lovely but also really appropriate kiss. It has
to be lovely because it came from a lovely woman; but it has to be appropriate, because it can’t be
adulterous. And there’s that balance between the two virtues: Gawain is courteous towards the lady,
he acknowledges her loveliness, and therefore invests this kiss with that loveliness; but he does not
betray his host, so he also invests the kiss with an appropriateness. The ‘comlynesse’ of the kiss
therefore stands as a guarantee both of Gawain’s courteous appreciation of the lady’s qualities and
of his non-adulterous behaviour while the host is out hunting; in the moment of this kiss, Gawain
fulfils his duties to both his hosts.
Okay, that’s one way to look at it. On the other hand, you might think that something slightly more
transgressive is going on here. Notice that when Gawain kisses the lord, on each of the three days,
the lord says first of all how nice the kiss was, and then makes a – sometimes oblique – comment
about where Gawain got the kiss. On the first day, he says the kiss is excellent but might be even
better if he knew where it came from; on the second day, the lord comments that Gawain is getting
richer by the day, two kisses instead of one, again coyly gesturing towards the mystery of how and
where Gawain is obtaining these riches; and on the third day, he again talks about the kisses as
though they were commodities, asking what price Gawain paid for them. And Gawain refuses to say
where the kisses came from: ‘that was not forward’, he says, that was not the agreement; technically
he just has to hand the kisses over, he doesn’t have to declare where he got them. You might think
that this implies some kind of guilt on Gawain’s part; if they were innocent kisses, wouldn’t he feel
free to say who gave them to him?
Well I think you can read it like that if you want to; and I think it’s a useful idea to have about these
kisses in some ways, for reasons I won’t go into just now; but I also think it’s kind of misguided.
From Gawain’s point of view, the kisses are innocent, therefore he can give them to the lord with a
good conscience; but they may not be innocent from the lady’s point of view. And it would be
wrong for Gawain to reveal the lady’s behaviour to her husband: that would make him a crathayn,
that would be un-courteous to the lady. He is under an obligation not to betray his host by having
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sex with his wife; but he is not under any obligation to tell the lady’s husband about her attempted
infidelities.
So I think Gawain does everything right. I think he succeeds in balancing courtesy to the lady and
fidelity to the lord; I think that, insofar as he is being tested by this situation, he passes the test with
flying colours. It’s a difficult balancing act, but he pulls it off brilliantly. And when the lady pushes
him too far, when she tries to give him something more intimate than a kiss, he says no – politely,
still courteously, but also very firmly and definitively.
Gawain passes that test. And then suddenly, the lady does a Columbo: just one more thing; and
Gawain suddenly gets a new, separate test: the lady stops trying to seduce him, and offers him a
magical girdle that will protect him from the Green Knight. And I’m not going to talk about this in
great detail because it’s a nice thing to discuss in seminars, but it’s very important that you think
carefully about what happens at this moment in the story. Is Gawain doing something wrong when
he accepts the girdle? If so, what precisely is wrong with his action here? What motivates this
action? Is he breaking the rules of the exchange game with his host? Is he breaking the rules of the
beheading game with the Green Knight? And if Gawain is doing something wrong here, what
should he have done instead? What would have been the right course of action: what would a truly
perfect knight have done in Gawain’s place?
So that’s an important moment. In the last couple of minutes, I’ll just highlight two other important
moments that follow on from this. Immediately after accepting the girdle, and before exchanging his
winnings with his host, Gawain goes to confession. He confesses all his sins, and we’re told that
Gawain is absolved to the point that he is so clean, so cleansed of all sin, that he could face
Judgement Day tomorrow. What does he confess to here, and what does he omit from his
confession? Does he confess to having taken the girdle; does he confess that he is going to conceal
it from the lord? These are interesting questions to ask, but above all try to think about this question:
why has the poet inserted this passage at this point, why is this reference to Gawain’s confession
here? What is its function in the text?
The second moment I wanted to draw your attention to is the final exchange of winnings between
Gawain and his host: we hear all about the lovely clothes Gawain is wearing, and you might want to
think about what they suggest about him here; and then he meets the lord returning from the hunt:
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He metes me this goodmon inmyddes the flore,
And all with game he him gret and goodly he sayd:
‘I schall fylle upon fyrst oure forwardes nowthe,
That we spedly han spoken there spared was no drynk.’
Then acoles he the knight and kysses him thryse
As saverly and sadly as he hem sette couth.
‘By Cryst,’ quoth that other knight, ‘ye cach much sele
In chevisaunce of this chaffer, if ye had good chepes.’
‘Ye, of the chepe no charge,’ quoth chefly that other,
‘As is pertly payed the porchas that I aghte.’ (1932-41)
The rest of this conversation is worth looking at as well, but I just wanted to point to some details
here and suggest that you might want to have a think about them.
Gawain initiates the exchange: he goes up to the lord first, and gives him the three kisses straight
away. On the previous two days, it was the lord who initiated the exchange; he gave Gawain the
spoils of the hunt, then Gawain gave him the kisses. Why the sudden change?
Why does Gawain emphasise the amount of drink they had when they made this agreement? This
was a pact they drank to, they drank in order to seal the agreement; but why does Gawain point that
out at this moment?
Look at the way Gawain kisses his host this time: on the first day it was ‘comlyly’, on the second it
was ‘hendly’; now it’s ‘as saverly and sadly as he hem sette couth’ (that word ‘sadly’ doesn’t mean
what it means in modern English, it’s important to look it up in the glossary). Is Gawain kissing
differently today? Is ‘saverly and sadly’ the same as ‘comlyly’ and ‘hendly’?
And finally, what do you think about Gawain’s response to the lord here? Why does he respond
‘chefly’, what does that mean? And when he dismisses this issue of the price he paid for the kisses,
is this essentially the same as his dismissive response on the first day – or again, do you think
something has changed this time?