The Word Order of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Congratulations! You've made it through the hardest material. Now things get a bit easier. This section is not only about the order of the words in sentences, but also on the idiomatic expressions of the Gawain-poet's language. We face two problems with approaching this subject. First, we can't distinguish with certainty when an expression or difficult word order is a genuinely spoken idiom and when it is 'poetic language'. Of course, this is an academic question; the important thing is that we figure out what it means. The second problem is that I know of no study which treats these issues in an easily digestible format, so I can't give you a quick summary as I have done for the spelling and inflexions. So I will just give a few notes here.

• The poet sometimes uses adjectives as nouns, such as þe hende 'the courteous one'.
• The present tense can be used with future sense: I...take 'I...will take' (line 383).
• Impersonal constructions are common: hym wondred 'it was a puzzle to him, he marvelled' (line 1201).
• Double negatives are common: And haue no men wyth no malez with menskful þingez 'and have no men with any bags with valuable things' (line 1809).
• A main verb of motion is often omitted after verbs like will: Bot I wyl to þe chapel 'But I will [go] to the chapel' (line 2132).
• Sometimes the relative pronoun 'that' is separated by some distance from the noun it refers to: Now hatz Arthure his axe, and þe halme grypez, / And sturnely sturez hit aboute, þat stryke wyth hit þo3t 'Now Arthur has his axe, and grips the haft, / And sturnly waves it about, who intended to strike with it' (lines 331-2). The þat refers to Arthur.
• Phrases like in erde, þat tyde, in londe (e.g. line 585) are sometimes of very little (or only intensive) meaning are mainly metrical fillers.

It should go without saying that many grammatical constructions in the poem are generated by the needs and constraints of the metre and alliteration.

This remarks will not answer all your questions, but use the notes and the glossary in the book well, and you won't have too much difficulty. Now you're ready for the last topic: the vocabulary.

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Last Update: 23 January, 2003