British: Medeival And Early English Literature Flashcards
Beowulf
Beowulf
You can count a set of questions on Beowulf. It is likely that ETS will give you a passage and ask you to be able to summarize it, maybe explain how a specific word is used, and identify the poetic devices or meter used. If you have not read it, DON’T (I didn’t). Read a short synopsis online, memorize the characters, and focus on what’s important–it’s historical significance. Schlors (and ETS) are more interested in the dynamics of early Anglo Saxon verse than they are in the actual content of the poem.
ETS is going to want you to identify a caesura, which is the metrical break in the middle of an Old English line. If you see a passage in which every line is broken into two pieces, you’re probably looking at Beowulf or an immitation of it. Also knowing that Beowulf is alliterative will be important.
Beowulf (c. 700-1000 A.D.) is a heroic epic poem. At 3,182 lines, it is notable for its length in comparison to other Old English poems. It represents about 10% of the extant corpus of Old English poetry. The poem is untitled in the manuscript, but has been known as Beowulf since the early 19th century.
First battle: Grendel
Beowulf begins with the story of King Hro_gar, who built the great hall Heorot for his people. In it he, his wife Wealh_eow, and his warriors spend their time singing and celebrating, until Grendel (angered by the singing) attacks the hall and kills and devours many of Hrothgar’s warriors. Hrothgar and his people, helpless against Grendel’s attacks, abandon Heorot.
Beowulf, a young warrior, hears of Hrothgar’s troubles and, (with his king’s permission) leaves his homeland to help Hrothgar.
Beowulf and his men spend the night in Heorot. After they fall asleep, Grendel enters the hall and attacks, devouring one of Beowulf’s men. Beowulf, feigning sleep, leaps up and grabs Grendel’s arm in a wrestling hold, and the two battle until it seems as though the hall might fall down due to their fighting. Beowulf’s men draw their swords and rush to his help, but there is a type of magic which aids Grendel and makes it impossible for swords to hurt him. Finally, Beowulf tears Grendel’s arm from his body and Grendel runs home to die.
Second battle: Grendel’s mother
The next night, after celebrating Grendel’s death, Hrothgar and his men sleep in Heorot. Grendel’s Mother appears, however and attacks the hall. She kills Hrothgar’s most trusted warrior in revenge for Grendel’s death.
Hrothgar, Beowulf, and their men track Grendel’s Mother to her lair under an eerie lake. Beowulf prepares himself for battle; he is presented with a sword, Hrunting, by a warrior called Unferth. After stipulating a number of conditions (upon his death) to Hrothgar (including the taking in of his kinsmen, and the inheritance by Unferth of Beowulf’s estate), Beowulf dives into the lake. There, he is swiftly detected and attacked by Grendel’s mother. Unable to harm Beowulf through his armour, Grendel’s mother drags him to the bottom of the lake. There, in a cavern containing her son’s body and the remains of many men that the two have killed, Grendel’s mother fights Beowulf.
Grendel’s mother at first prevails, after Beowulf, finding that the sword (Hrunting) given him by Unferth cannot harm his foe, discards it in a fury. Again, Beowulf is saved from the effects of his opponent’s attack by his armour and, grasping a mighty sword from Grendel’s mother’s armoury (which, the poem tells us, no other man could have hefted in battle), Beowulf beheads her. Travelling further into the lair, Beowulf discovers Grendel’s corpse; he severs the head, and with it he returns to Heorot, where he is given many gifts by an even more grateful Hrothgar.
Third battle: The dragon
Beowulf returns home and eventually becomes king of his own people. One day, late in Beowulf’s life, a man steals a golden cup from a dragon’s lair. When the dragon sees that the cup has been stolen, it leaves its cave in a rage, burning up everything in sight. Beowulf and his warriors come to fight the dragon, but only one of the warriors, a brave young man named Wiglaf, stays to help Beowulf, because the rest are too afraid. Beowulf kills the dragon with Wiglaf’s help, but dies from the wounds he has received. The dragon’s treasure is taken from its lair and buried with Beowulf’s ashes. And with that the poem ends.
Anglo Saxon poems
Anglo Saxon poems
Now, it’s pretty unlikely that either of the poems I have here will appear on your test, but a random poem from the Exeter Book may appear.
“The Wife’s Lament,” (before 1072)
Genre: an “elegy” or lament for things and/or persons lost, often lost to death. The predominant features of Anglo-Saxon verse are produced by oral-formulaic composition, in which an illiterate but immensely learned bard sings, to his own instrumental accompaniment, a song he composes as he sings by following strict metrical rules and a huge array of thematic content strands.
The poem’s date is impossible to determine except that it must have been composed and written down before the Exeter Book, in which its sole surviving copy was found, was donated to the Exeter Cathedral library by Exeter’s first bishop, Leofric, upon his death in 1072. Scholars generally accept the conclusion that this, the largest surviving collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry (131 parchment leaves measuring roughly 12.5 by 8.6 inches), is the manuscript the bishop’s will calls “.i. mycel englisc boc be gehwilcum _ingum on leo_wisan geworht.” [“one great English book with many things written in verse.”]
Form: four-stress lines of varying syllable lengths, divided in halves by a caesura which often indicates a breath pause. The prose translation obscures many of the work’s poetic features, but Anglo-Saxon verse is notoriously difficult to translate into Modern English verse.
Characters: the narrator, a woman married to a man from a distant community which is hostile to her, and her husband as she characterizes him, also hostile–toward others, but also perhaps toward her (an interpretive crux).
Summary: The narrator makes the case that her grief deserves to be told in song because she is exiled from her own kin and from her husband, doomed to poverty amid a wilderness and surrounded by hostile neighbors, facing old age alone.
“Judith”
Judith is a poem written in Old English during the Middle ages in England on the topic of the beheading of Holofernes, an Assyrian military leader as recorded in the Biblical-era Book of Judith. The author is unknown.
Everyman
Everyman
Everyman is a pretty important play, but there’s no reason to spend time reading it for the GRE.
Everyman is the best surviving example of the type of Medieval drama known as the morality play . Moralities evolved side by side with the mystery plays, although they were composed individually and not in cycles. The moralities employed allegory to dramatize the moral struggle Christianity envisions universal in every individual.
Everyman , a short play of some 900 lines, portrays a complacent Everyman who is informed by Death of his approaching end. The play shows the hero’s progression from despair and fear of death to a “Christian resignation that is the prelude to redemption.” First, Everyman is deserted by his false friends: his casual companions, his kin, and his wealth. He falls back on his Good Deeds, his Strength, his Beauty, his Intelligence, and his Knowledge. These assist him in making his Book of Accounts, but at the end, when he must go to the grave, all desert him save his Good Deeds alone. The play makes its grim point that we can take with us from this world nothing that we have received, only what we have given.
The play was written near the end of the fifteenth century. It is probably a translation from a Flemish play, Elckerlijk (or Elckerlyc) first printed in 1495, although there is a possibility that Everyman is the original, the Flemish play the translation. There are four surviving versions of Everyman , two of them fragmentary.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer Chaucer is (rightly) huge with ETS. The Cantebury Tales wil definitely be on your test, and Troilus and Criseyde has a fair chance, too. Again, there is no need to read either of these for the test. There are only few characters that you need to know from the Tales, and a synopsis of Troilus will do. Knowledge of rhyme schemes and meter of these workds is, I think, very important for the exam.
**The Cantebury Tales
You will have to read Chaucer on your exam and be able to explain it. A good way to prepare for this is to read the prologue to the tales; it’s not necessary, but it’s good practice on sounding out Middle English verse.
Apart from picking apart the verses, you’ll have to identify characters. A random character or two may pop up, but chances are that one a few favorites will appear. I have included The Knight, The Miller, The Nun’s Priest, and The Wife of Bath here, but I would also suggest reading up on “The Merchant.”
The Knight’s Tale is the first tale.
The Knights tale is about two knights, Arcite and Palamon, who are imprisoned by Theseus, duke of Athens. In prison they see and fall in love with the sister of Hippolyta, Emily (Emelye). They variously get out of prison and end up in a tournament over Emily arranged by Theseus. Arcite wins, but dies before he can claim Emily as his prize and so Palamon marries her. It introduces many typical aspects of knighthood such as courtly love and ethical dilemmas, etc. The story is in the form of poetry.
The Knight and his tale both embody the ideas of chivalry. The following tale, by the Miller, is a direct antithesis to the Knight’s with none of the nobility or heritage of classical mythology, but is instead rollicking, bawdy, comedic and designed to annoy the Knight.
The Miller’s Tale
The Miller’s tale is about a carpenter/landlord and his wife. The Reeve, another of the travellers, happens to be a carpenter, and urges the Miller not to joke about his profession; the Miller replies that he does not mean to insult carpenters in general, or portray them as cuckolds, and tells his tale anyway. Thus, The Reeve’s Tale follows, which ‘quites’ the Miller with a tale in which some students make a fool out of a dishonest and greedy miller.)
The story is of a student (Nicholas) who persuades his jealous old landlord’s much younger wife (Alisoun/Alison) to spend the night with him, making that possible through an elaborate scheme in which he convinces the landlord that he has found, through his astrology, that a flood of Biblical proportions is imminent. The solution, says Nicholas, is for each of them to wait silently overnight for it in separate tubs suspended from the rafters, and to cut their tubs from the roof when the water has risen. He adds that if the landlord tells anyone else, he’ll become insane. This comic prank allows Nicholas and Alison the opportunity to sneak down after the landlord falls asleep and be together.
While Nicholas and Alison lie together, another hopeful suitor, the foppish Absolon, appears and asks Alison for a kiss. She quietly tells Nicholas to watch and get a good laugh. She sticks her “hole” out the window, and he kisses it “full savorly,” pausing only when he feels bristly hair and considers that no woman has a beard. He realizes the prank and, hearing them laughing at him, becomes enraged. He disappears to borrow a red hot colter (a plow part) from the early-rising blacksmith. Returning, he asks for another kiss. This time Nicholas, who had risen from bed to “piss” (urinate), sticks his “ers” (arse) out the window. When Absolon say “speak sweet bird, I know not where thou art”, Nicholas almost blinds him with an enormous fart, shocking Absolon, who then brands Nicholas in the rear, searing off the skin. Nicholas cries for water, awakening the landlord, who hears someone screaming “water, water” and thinks that the Second Flood is come at last. He panics and cuts himself down, falling clean through the floor and breaking his arm; the rest of the town awakens to find him lying in the tub in the cellar. He tries to explain what he’s doing in the tub, and sure enough in accordance with Nicholas’prophesy, he is considered a madman (and a cuckold, too) by the whole town.
The Wife of Bath
Her tale begins with an allusion to the absence of fairies in modern day, and their prevalence in King Arthur’s time, then begins her tale, though she interrupts and is interrupted several times, creating several digressions. A knight in King Arthur’s Court rapes a woman. By law, his punishment is death, but the queen intercedes on his behalf, and the king turns the knight over to her for judgement. The queen punishes the knight by sending him out on a quest to find out what women want, giving him a year and a day to discover it and having his word that he will return. If he fails to satisfy the queen with his answer, he forfeits his life. He searches but every woman he finds says something different, from riches to flattery.
On his way back to the queen after failing to find the truth, he sees four and twenty ladies dancing. They disappear suddenly, leaving behind an old hag and he asks for her help. She says she’ll tell him what to tell to the queen and save him if he promises to grant her request at a time she chooses. He agrees and they go back to the court and he is pardoned after he tells them that what women want most is “to have the sovereignty as well upon their husband as their love, and to have mastery their man above”. The old woman cries out to him before the court that she saved him and that her reward will be that he takes her as his wife and loves her. He protests, but to no avail, and the marriage takes place the next day.
The old woman and the knight converse about the knight’s happiness in their marriage bed and discuss that he is unhappy because she is ugly and low-born. She discourses upon the origins of gentility, as told by Jesus and Dante and reflects on the origins of poverty. She says he can choose between her being ugly and faithful or beautiful and unfaithful. He gives the choice to her to become whatever would bring the most honour and happiness to them both and she, pleased with her mastery of her husband, becomes fair and faithful to live with him happily until the end of their days.
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
The tale of Chanticleer and the Fox is a beast fable popularised by the 14th century Middle English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer’s 625 line poem comprises the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, one of his Canterbury Tales.
The tale follows the monk’s depressing accounts of despots and fallen heroes and, as well as sharing these themes, the tale also parodies them. It also has ideas in common with earlier tales with the marriage between Chanticleer and Pertelote echoing the domestic lives depicted in tales like Franklin’s and The Tale of Melibee. These different themes help to unify several tales and offers a lively story from a previously almost invisible character.
The tale concerns a world of talking animals who reflect both human insight and error. Its protagonist is Chanticleer, a proud rooster who dreams of his approaching doom in the form of a hound. Frightened, he awakens his “wife” Pertelote, who assures him he only suffers from indigestion and chides him for paying heed to a simple dream. After recounting stories of other prophets who foresaw their deaths, Chanticleer is comforted by Pertelote and proceeds to greet a new day.
Unfortunately for Chanticleer, he predicted his doom correctly. A sly fox who has tricked Chanticleer’s father and mother to their downfall now awaits Chanticleer’s inflated ego. When the fox insists upon hearing the cock crow, Chanticleer sticks out his neck just a little too far and is promptly snatched from the yard. As the fox is chased through the forest, Chanticleer (all the while dangling from the fox’s jaws) suggests that the fox should pause to tell his pursuers to give up their chase.
Now the fox’s haughtiness rears its ugly head, and as the fox complies, the rooster falls out and proceeds to fly up the nearest tree. The fox tries in vain to convince the wary Chanticleer, who now prefers the safety of the tree and fails to fall for the same trick a second time.
Troilus and Criseyde
Troilus and Criseyde is a work on another scale altogether, 8239 lines of rhyme-royal (seven-line stanzas rhyming ababbcc) in five books, the first major work of English literature and sometimes called the first English novel on account of its concern with the characters’ psychology. Shakespeare also composed a version of Troilus.
The story comes from Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, and it is most intriguing that Chaucer nowhere mentions the name Boccaccio. Instead, in Troilus, he claims to be simply translating a work by a certain Lollius, wrongly assumed in the Middle Ages to have written about Troy, whereas he is in fact radically altering Boccaccio’s story to make it deeper and more poetic.
When he began to write Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer was already fully aware of the need to make the English language into a poetic diction that would be as powerful in expressing emotion and reflexion as the other literary languages he knew. He was familiar with the writings of Ovid, Cicero, Virgil, Macrobius, Boethius, and Alain de Lisle in Latin, with Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio in Italian, with the Romance of the Rose and other French works, as well as with the native English romances. He had travelled, too, his mind was European. The opening lines of Troilus and Criseyde show why John Dryden called Chaucer the “father of English poetry” (in the Preface to his Fables Ancient and Modern of 1700):
The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen, That was the king Priamus sone of Troye, In lovinge, how his aventures fellen Fro woe to wele, and after out of joie, My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye. Thesiphone, thou help me for t'endite These woful vers, that wepen as I write. To thee clepe I, thou goddess of torment, Thou cruel Furie, sorwing ever in peyne, Help me, that am the sorwful instrument, That helpeth loveres, as I can, to pleyne. For wel sit it, the sothe for to seyne, A woful wight to han a drery feere, And to a sorwful tale, a sory chere.
Chaucer was following in the footsteps of Dante in his attempt to form vernacular English into a poetic language able to stand beside the language of Virgil and the classics.
Troilus and Criseyde is set inside Troy during the Trojan War. In Book 1 of Chaucer’s version, one of Priam’s sons, Troilus, appears as a young warrior scornful of love, until he glimpses Criseyde in a temple. Love’s arrow having wounded him, Troilus suddenly finds himself deeply in love with her. He withdraws to complain alone, but a friend of his, Pandare, overhears him and he admits he is in love with Criseyde. Pandare offers to help Troilus meet her.
Much time elapses as they slowly establish a relationship, until at last Pandare skillfully arranges for them to spend a night together. This represents the first movement, ‘from woe to wele’ a rise to happiness. Suddenly Criseyde learns that her father, a prophet who has fled to the Greeks, is arranging for her to leave Troy and join him. The lovers are separated by blind destiny. Once in the Greek camp, Criseyde soon turns for protection to a Greek Diomede and although she and Troilus exchange letters, soon she seems to forget him. One day Troilus finds a brooch he gave her fixed in a cloak he has torn from Diomede during the fighting, and knows that she has betrayed him. He tries to kill Diomede, but cannot. Suddenly the book seems to be over, since the love-tale is at an end:
Go, little book, go, little myn tragedye,
Ther God thy makere yet, er that he dye,
So sende might to make in some comedye!
But little book, no making thou n’envie,
But subgit be to alle poesye;
And kiss the steppes, whereas thou seest pace
Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, Stace.
And down from thennes faste he gan avyse
This littel spot of erthe, that with the se
Embraced is, and fully gan despise
This wrecched world, and held al vanite
To respect of the pleyn felicite
That is in hevene above; and at the laste,
There he was slayn, his lokyng down he caste.
And in hymself he lough right at the wo
Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste;
And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so
The blynde lust, the which that may not laste,M
And shoulden al oure herte on heven caste.
And forth he wente, shortly for to telle,
Ther as Mercurye sorted hym to dwelle.
The remaining stanzas seem to suggest Christian and moralizing readings of the story at odds with the main narratorial tone. Finally comes an invitation to “moral Gower, philosophical Strode” (Chaucer’s friends) to correct the work if necessary, and a final prayer translated from Dante’s Divine Comedy.
John Gower
John Gower
It’s unlikely that Gower will apear on your exam. If he does, it will be in relation to Chacuer andTroilus and Criseyde. Here’s a short bio in the event that he appears on your exam:
John Gower, poet and friend of Chaucer, was born around 1330, into a prominent Yorkshire family which held properties in Kent, Yorkshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Gower’s coat of arms is identical to those of Sir Robert Gower of Brabourne. Nothing is known of his education, though it has been speculated that he was trained in law. Gower himself held properties in Suffolk and Kent, where he seems to have resided until taking up residence in the priory of St. Mary Overies in Southwark, London, around 1377.
In 1385, Gower’s good friend, Geoffrey Chaucer, dedicated the Troilus and Criseyde to him, giving him the epithet “moral Gower.”
In 1386, Gower began work on his most acclaimed work, Confessio Amantis (i.e. Lover’s Confession). Unlike his previous works, Gower wrote the Confessio in English at the request of Richard II who was concerned that so little was being written in English. It is a collection of tales and exempla treating of courtly love. The framework is that of a lover complaining first to Venus, and later in the work, confessing to her priest, Genius. The Confessio , completed around 1390, is an important contribution to courtly love literature in English. Some of the stories have their counterparts in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , and one of the stories later served as the source for Shakespeare’s Pericles , in which Shakespeare had Gower appear in the Chorus.
Sir Thomas Malory
Sir Thomas Malory (1405-1471)
Malory is important because he wrote the first major Arthurian romance, which continues to be rewritten up to the current day. I don’t see the summary here being very important; I would remember, however, that this is a work of prose. Many questions on the GRE can be answered if simply rember whether a work is prose or verse. A good GRE question would try to trick you into identifying Malory as the author a verse Arthurian romance.
Here’s a brief history of the man and the work:
Few facts are certain in Malory’s history. From his own words he is known to have been a knight and prisoner, and his description of himself as “a servant of Jesu both day and night” has led to the inference that he might have been a priest . It is believed that he was knighted in 1442 and entered the British Parliament representing Warwickshire in 1445 .
In 1450, it appears that he turned towards a life of crime, being accused of murder, robbery, stealing, poaching, and rape. However, the validity of these charges are the subject of much controversy given Malory’s unclear political affiliations. False charges were common amidst the political strife of the War of the Roses. Supposedly while imprisoned for most of the 1450s (mostly in London ‘s Newgate Prison ), he began writing an Arthurian legend that he called The Book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table. His work was first published posthumously by William Caxton as Le Morte d’Arthur in 1485.
Malory is believed to have obtained the material for his work from many French sources in addition to earlier English Arthurian Romances, most notably the stanzaic Morte Arthur and the alliterative Morte Arthure. In the preface to the first edition of the Le Morte D’Arthur , William Caxton speaks of the work as printed by himself “after a copy unto me delivered, which copy Sir Thomas Malory did take out of certain books of French, and reduced it into English.” Malory himself tells us that he finished the book in the ninth year of King Edward IV of England (about 1470 ). Le Morte D’Arthur brought together the various strands of the legend in a prose romance which many critics reckon the best of its kind.
Mystery plays
Mystery plays
Mystery plays or miracle plays are one of the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. They developed from the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song. As these liturgical plays became more popular, more vernacular elements were introduced and non-clergy began to participate. As the dramas became increasingly secular, they began to be performed entirely in the vernacular and were moved out of the churches by the 13th or 14th century.
These vernacular religious performances were taken over by the guilds, with each guild taking responsibility for a particular piece of scriptural history. From the guild control they gained the name mystery play or just mysteries, from the Latin mysterium (meaning handicraft and relating to the guilds). Mystery plays should not be confused with Miracle plays, which specifically re-enacted episodes from the lives of the saints. Also, Miracle plays were performed in Latin, unlike Mysteries which were meant to be understood by the common man.
The mystery play developed into a series of plays dealing with all the major events in the Christian calendar, from the Creation to the Day of Judgment. By the end of the 15th century, the tradition of acting these plays in cycles on festival days (such as the Feast of Corpus Christi) was established across Europe, each play was performed on decorated carts called pageants, that moved about the city to allow different crowds to watch each play. The entire cycle could take up to twenty hours to perform and could be spread over a number of days. Taken as a whole, these are referred to as Corpus Christi cycles.
Piers Plowman
Piers Plowman
Piers Plowman will very likely be on your exam. Be able to recognize the beginning of the poem; it might be worth looking at a footnoted version of the poem so you get a sense of what’s going on and how the language works. Likely questions will concern the verse form (unrhymed alliterative verse) and translations of some of the words in the opening.
Piers Plowman or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman (William’s Vision of Piers Plowman ) is the title of an apocalyptic Middle English allegorical narrative written by William Langland . It is written in unrhymed alliterative verse divided into sections called “passus” (Latin for “step”). Piers is considered one of the early great works of English literature . It is one of a very few Middle English poems that can stand beside Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales . The poem concerns the narrator’s intense quest for the true Christian life, in the terms of the medieval Catholic mind. That quest entails a series of dream-visions and an examination into the lives of three allegorical characters, Do-Wel ( “Do-Well” ), Do-Bet ( “Do-Better” ), and Do-Best, who are sought by Piers, the humble plowman of the title. The poem begins on the hillside of Malvern Hill in Malvern, Worcestershire .
The poem is written in unrhymed alliterative verse.
It begins:
In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,
Wente wide in this world wondres to here.
Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles
Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.
I was wery forwandred and wente me to reste
Under a brood bank by a bourne syde;
And as I lay and lenede and loked on the watres,
I slombred into a slepyng, it sweyed so murye..
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a good candidate for the GRE, but it is not a guarantee, either. Know the plot, but focus more on the style.
The poem is written in verse stanzas that end with the “bob and the wheel.” The “bob” is a very short line, and the wheel is a trimeter quatrain. The five lines together rhyme ABABA. This is an obscure poetic device, but if you see it on the GRE, you’ll know that you’re looking at Gawain.
Example: ill-sped Hounds hasten by the score To maul him, hide and head; Men drag him in to shore And dogs pronounce him dead.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th century alliterative romance recorded in a single manuscript, which also contains three other pieces of an altogether more Christian orientation.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is written in the style that linguists have termed the Alliterative Revival of the fourteenth century. Instead of focusing on a metrical syllabic count and rhyme, the alliterative form relied on the agreement of (usually a pair of) stressed syllables at the beginning of the line with (usually) a third and fourth at the end of the line. The line always finds a “breath-point” at some point after the first two stresses, dividing the line into two half-lines, separated by the pause called a caesura.
Plot:
The Challenge
The story begins at King Arthur’s court at Camelot on New Year’s day. As Arthur’s court is feasting, a stranger, the gigantic Green Knight, mounted on horseback and armed with an axe, enters the hall and lays down a challenge. One of Arthur’s knights may take the axe and strike a single blow against the Green Knight, on the condition that the Green Knight, if he survives, will return the blow one year and one day later. Sir Gawain, the youngest of Arthur’s knights, reluctantly accepts the challenge and chops off the giant’s head. The Green Knight, still alive, picks up his own head, reminds Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year and a day, and rides off.
Sir Gawain’s journey
Almost a year later, on All Hallows Day, Sir Gawain sets off in his finest armour, on his horse Gringolet, to find the Green Chapel and complete his bargain with the Green Knight. His shield is marked with the pentangle, which the poem attributes to Solomon [Stanzas 27-28], and which is to remind him of his knightly obligations. The journey takes him from the isle of Anglesey to a castle somewhere in the West Midlands, where he arrives on Christmas Eve. Gawain meets the lord of the castle and his beautiful wife, who are pleased to have such a renowned guest. After the feasting of Christmas Day, the lord inquires why Gawain has journeyed so far from home during the holiday season. Gawain tells of his New Year’s Day appointment at the Green Chapel and that he must continue his search the next day. The lord laughs and insists Gawain must prolong his visit, for his search has ended: the Green Chapel is not two miles away! [ll. 1068-78]
The lord’s bargain
That night, the lord announces that while he spends the next day hunting, the travel-weary Gawain shall stay at the castle, sleep as late as he wants (even through Mass), and eat whenever he chooses to arise; the lady will keep him company. But to add a little interest to the day, the lord proposes a bargain: he will give Gawain whatever he catches, on condition that Gawain gives to the lord, without explanation, whatever he might gain during the day. Gawain accepts. The next morning, after the lord has gone, the lady of the castle visits Gawain’s room and tries to seduce him, claiming that she knows of the reputation of Arthur’s knights as great lovers. Gawain, however, keeps to his promise to remain chaste until his mission to the Green Chapel is complete, and yields nothing but a single kiss. When the lord returns with the deer he has killed, he hands it straight to Sir Gawain, as agreed, and Gawain responds by returning the lady’s kiss to the lord. According to the lord’s bargain, Gawain refuses to explain where he won the kiss.
On the second morning, Gawain again receives a visit from the lady, and again politely refuses her advances. That evening, when the lord returns, there is a similar exchange of a hunted boar for two kisses.
On the third morning, when the lady visits his chamber, Gawain maintains his chastity but accepts a green silk girdle, which is supposed to keep him from harm, as a parting gift. But, the lady insists, he must not tell her husband. That evening, the lord returns with a fox, which he exchanges with Gawain for three kisses. However, Gawain keeps the girdle from the lord so that he can use it in his forthcoming encounter with the Green Knight.
The meeting with the Green Knight
The next day, Gawain leaves for the Green Chapel, with the lady’s silk girdle hidden under his armour, and accompanied by a guide from the lord’s castle. Leaving the guide, who is afraid to approach the Green Chapel, Gawain finds the Green Knight busy whetting the blade of an axe in readiness for the fight. As arranged, the Green Knight moves to behead Gawain, but after three axe-swings Gawain remains only slightly injured, the third blow barely cutting his neck. The Green Knight then reveals himself to be an alter ego of the lord of the castle, Bertilak de Hautdesert, and explains that the three axe blows were for the three occasions when Gawain was visited by the lady. The third blow, which drew blood, was a punishment for Gawain’s acceptance of the silk girdle. There is much speculation as to whether the girdle would have really kept Gawain from dying had the Green Knight desired to kill him. The lady, it seems, has lied to Gawain insofar as the girdle has not kept him completely from harm. On the other hand, it has kept him from death. The author leaves the exact powers of the girdle undefined and open to interpretation, but makes it clear that the Green Knight would not have willingly spared Gawain’s life had he failed to resist the lady’s sexual advances. Assuming it has no life-saving powers, it is meant to be ironic that the girdle, the one thing that Gawain thinks will save him, is actually the thing that harms him; furthermore, assuming the girdle has no real powers, it would have been the thing that led to his death had he taken it as a love token, which is what the lady originally offerered it to him as.
The Green Knight explains that Gawain’s trial was arranged by Morgan le Fay, mistress of the wizard Merlin and now a guest at Hautdesert castle. The two men part on cordial terms, Gawain returning to Camelot. There, Sir Gawain recounts his adventure to Arthur and explains his shame at having partially succumbed to the lady’s attempts, if only in his mind. Arthur refuses to blame Gawain and decrees that all his knights should henceforth wear a green sash in recognition of Gawain’s courage and honour.
Robert Henryson
Robert Henryson (1425-1500) Robert Henryson was a Scottish poet who is remarkable mostly for his relationship to Chaucer; Henryson wrote a conclusion to Chacuer's Troilus.
Henryson’s longest, and in many respects his most original and effective work, is his Morall Fabillis of Esope, a collection of thirteen fables, chiefly based on the versions of Anonymus, John Lydgate and William Caxton. The outstanding merit of the work is its freshness of treatment. The work is unrivalled in English fabulistic literature.
In the Testament of Cresseid, Henryson supplements Geoffrey Chaucer’s tale of Troilus with the story of the tragedy of Cresseid. The description of Cresseid’s leprosy, of her meeting with Troilus, of his sorrow and charity, and of her death, give the poem a high place in writings of this genre.
Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich (1342-1413)
Julian of Norwich is considered to be one of the greatest English mystics . Little is known of her life aside from her writings. Even her name is uncertain, the name “Julian” coming from the Church of St. Julian in Norwich, where she occupied a cell adjoining the church as an anchoress . At the age of thirty, suffering from a severe illness and believing she was on her deathbed, Julian had a series of intense visions. These visions would twenty years later be the source of her major work, called Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (circa 1393 ). This is believed to be the first book written by a woman in the English language.
Margery Kempe
Margery Kempe (1373-1439 or 1440) Margery Kempe is known for writing The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language. At around the age of 35, after a failed confession that resulted in a bout of self-described "madness," Margery Kempe had a vision that called her to leave aside the "vanities" of this world. Having for many weeks railed against the institutions of family, marriage and church, Kempe reports that she saw a vision of Christ at her bedside, asking her "Daughter, why have you forsaken me, and I never forsook you?" From that point forward, Kempe undertook two failed domestic businesses--a brewery and a grain mill--both common home-based businesses for medieval women. Though she had tried to be more devout after her vision, she was tempted by sexual pleasures and social jealousy for some years. Eventually turning away from what she interpreted as the effect of worldly pride in her vocational choices, Kempe more fully responded to the spiritual calling that she felt her earlier vision required. Striving to live a life of commitment to God, Kempe negotiated a chaste marriage with her husband, and began to make pilgrimages around Europe to sites that were holy to her, if not to others. The stories surrounding these travels are what eventually comprised much of her Book, although a final section includes a series of prayers.
Part of Margery Kempe’s significance lies in the autobiographical nature of her book: it is the best insight available that points to the middle class experience in the Middle Ages. Kempe is admittedly unusual among the more traditional holy exemplars of her time, such as Julian of Norwich. Though Kempe is often depicted as an “oddity” or even a “madwoman,” recent scholarship on vernacular theologies and popular practices of piety suggest she was not, perhaps, as odd as she appears compared to more traditional, cloistered holy women.
