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S IR G AW A IN A N D T H E S A C R A C I N T O L A RICHARD FIRTH GREEN University of Western Ontario I n a seminal article written over twenty years ago, D. R. Howard argued that the “most protracted structural parallel” in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight “depends upon the juxtaposition of two symbols, the shield and the girdle.” 1 Many other commentators have been similarly struck by the con trast between these two symbols (a contrast pointed, as Howard notes, by the balancing of one against the other in the two arming scenes), but in general it has been the device of the pentangle rather than any other aspect of Gawain’s shield that critics have singled out for comparison with the lady’s girdle.2 The validity of such a comparison can hardly be questioned, yet one cannot but be aware of a certain disparity between these symbols,3 for while the poet leaves us in no doubt as to the importance and appropri ateness of the pentangle, devised by no less an authority than Solomon “in bytoknyng of traw]?e” (626), he gives us little explicit guidance as to how we should interpret the girdle, regarded by Gawain alone as a “token of vntrawjie” (2509).4 Clearly the double-ended girdle provides an elegant and satisfying contrast to the “endeles knot” of the pentangle (there is, as A. Kent Hieatt puts it, “architectonic balance between the rigid, endless, and seamless pentangle of troth and the apparently yielding, incomplete noose of untroth with its ends knotted together” ),5 but it is not immediately obvious why the poet should have chosen a girdle, rather than some other funiform object, to point up this contrast. Where the poet himself is silent, critics have been eager to explain the girdle: some, such as Benson, regard it as “the common lovetoken of medieval romance,” others, like Friedman and Osberg, as “a sexual trophy” ; Howard calls it a “symbol for worldliness” ; Hieatt sees it as “a noose or snare,” and Gross as an (unsporting) talisman.6 All these are possible explanations, but none seems absolutely compelling; an ornamental chain (fashionable as a love-token from the late fourteenth century),7 or a garter (hardly less suggestive a sexual trophy than a girdle) might appear to have served the poet equally well. In proposing yet one further way of interpreting the lady’s gift, I do not mean to imply that some, or even all, of E n g lish Studies in C anada, x i, i , March 1985 these explanations are fanciful, for the Gawain-poet is clearly very much at home with allusive complexity, and certainly a venerable tradition, reaching back at least to the cestus of Venus, makes the untied girdle a powerful symbol of sexual acquiescence, but I suspect that the poet had a much stronger reason for fixing upon this particular sign of his hero’s failure. Its effect, I believe, depends upon a quite specific reference which has not hitherto been emphasized. Howard is properly sceptical of the value of symbol-hunting (he calls it “an easy game with no particular criteria of corrigibility” ), and in order to claim that any external reference is necessary to the understanding of a particular symbol we must first be able to show that such a reference could readily be made by the writer and his audience (Zimmer’s notorious “green Tibetan corpses,” for instance, clearly lay beyond the poet’s experience),8 that it is actually made, at least implicitly, within the work itself, and finally that it sheds light on passages, particularly those otherwise ambiguous or obscure, in which the symbol is employed. The specific referent which I wish to propose for Gawain’s “token of vntraw}?e” fulfils, I believe, these criteria, and provides moreover so rich a source for structural and contextual ironies that I cannot but feel that the Gawain-poet was deliberately exploit ing it. While I would not wish to suggest that my interpretation in any way diminishes the force of the pentangle/girdle equation, it does have the advantage of deepening the symbolic...
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