The Poem as Green Girdle:

Commercium in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Introduction

How persistent Bertilak's Lady is. Late in the third fitt of Sir Gawain, as part of her effort to persuade Gawain to accept the green girdle, she asks him, "`Now forsake 3e þis silke . . . / For hit is symple in hitself?'" (lines 1846-47).1 The question, we quickly catch on, is a leading one. She continues with a description of the girdle that is significant for the poem's meaning:

"And so hit wel semez.
Lo! so hit is littel, and lasse hit is worþy;
Bot who-so knew þe costes þat knit ar þerinne,
He wolde hit prayse at more prys, parauenture;
For quat gome so is gorde with þis grene lace,
While he hit hade hemely halched aboute,
þer is no haþel vnder heuen tohewe hym þat my3t,
For he my3t not be slayn for sly3t vpon erþe."

Four words in this description refer to the world of commerce: worþy, costes, prayse, and prys. 2 One of them, costes, is a pun: its basic meaning is something like "quality," but on numerous occasions in the poem-- and the present passage is a good example-- its context suggests the homonym "cost." Two of these words, prayse and prys, are related as verb and corresponding noun. The noun prys, in addition to its commercial meaning, is rich in connotations from its pervasive role in medieval French chansons de geste and romances (AfWb 7 :1877-84). It occurs twelve times in Sir Gawain--the highest frequency of any word in the poem's commercial vocabulary. The last of the four words, worþy, enjoys many shades of meaning, but often its context insists on the meaning of "value" in the commercial sense. In addition to these 4 words, 63 more of a similar type, comprising 2 1/2 percent of the {1/2} poem's total vocabulary, occur almost 190 times (see Appendix). Small though it may be, this commercial vocabulary, as its role in the strategic description of the green girdle suggests, is an important part of the poem and its total effect.

The commercial vocabulary of Sir Gawain consistently informs its structure. Exchange--discourse, intercourse, currency (each a form of commerce)--accounts for a part of the poem's vocabulary and several of its central images and tropes ultimately because the poem is itself an economy in the sense that it is a dispensation or arrangement of media and mediation for the purpose of evaluating--better, "assaying" (cf. 2362, 2457)--human civilization or, in the poem's word, nurture (991, 1661). 3

Such evaluation or assaying begins as early as the very opening of the poem, where British civilization is shown to have a heritage of tricherie (4) descending from superbum Ilium. 4 The "assaying" continues when Gawain, the fyne fader of nurture (919), betrays his host by concealing the latter's girdle only to be punished thereupon by an exposure to mortality so humiliating that he can never possibly forget it (2511-12). It culminates in Gawain's return to Arthur's court wearing the syngne of surfet, the token of untrawþe (2433, 2509, respectively), which, because the members of the court share it with him, signifies the court's meaning, too: Arthurian civilization is worth the green girdle. This is to say two things at once, that it is worth a great deal {2/3} and that its worth has definite limits all the same. 5 Arthurian civilization and its ideal exemplar are not perfect and their imperfection is serious; but their awareness of their imperfection, expressed in their willingness to display the sign of that imperfection, grants them a freedom and a recourse from superbia which suggests that Britain may not repeat the Fall of Troy. Similarly, the poem itself, less a pentangle than a green girdle, less a fixed icon than a fluid sign, is aware of its own limits as art; and from that awareness it gains a beauty, a precision, and an importance that more ostentatious symbols must sacrifice.

In the study that follows, the ways in which the commercial vocabulary helps to locate the meaning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are demonstrated. First, it is argued that the old values of chivalry and feudalism were competing, unsuccessfully, with commercialism in the fourteenth century. Aware of the conflict between them, Sir Gawain attempts to reconcile these opposing forces through its vision of media and mediation in human affairs--its vision of man's middled and muddled estate that is somewhere between personal loyalties and abstract market forces. Motivating the reconciliation, the chapter goes on to suggest, are both Christian traditions and contemporary economic realities.

Next comes the suggestion that the specific Christian rite grounding the commercial vision of the poem is circumcision. Within the sacrament of penance, which is fundamental to the poem, the rite of circumcision functions as a source of imagery and of theological information. It is suggested by the nirt (2498) in the neck that Gawain receives from the Green Knight on New Year's Day, the day when the Church celebrates the Feast of the Circumcision. Authorizing the connection suggested here is the crucial fact that, liturgically, circumcision is understood to be a commerce between God and man--this, according to the antiphon "O admirabile commercium" sung during Laudes of the Feast of the Circumcision. This antiphon and subsequent commentaries on it illuminate the language and the setting of the exchange between Gawain and the Green Knight at the Green Chapel. Moreover, the sacramentality of circumcision, in light of late medieval sacramental theory, contributes to an understanding of that emphasis on signs and tokens that the poem introduces after Gawain's experiences at the Green Chapel (2398, 2433, 2509).

Chapters 3 and 4 contain an analysis of the numerous passages elsewhere in the poem in which the commercial vocabulary dominates. The exchange between Gawain and the Green Knight completes a process of commercialization (so I will call it) that began with Gawain's arrival at Hautdesert. That process involves the transformation of {3/4} Gawain, on the one hand, into a consumer and, on the other, into a merchant; Bertilak's Lady effects the one, Bertilak himself, the other. Having become consumer and merchant, Gawain can at last accept both his prys (2364) and, in the antiphon's formula, the inevitable consequence of that prys, or nostram humanitatem.

After an interlude for a summary of the entire argument up to that point, chapter 3 continues with an analysis of the seduction scenes. During these scenes, Bertilak's Lady traps Gawain into insisting on private values to the exclusion of his numerous relationships and their attendant duties. She convinces Gawain that everything has its price, and she effectively reduces him, in doing so, to a consumer. And when Gawain buys her word, as he finally does, it is because, as he himself says, he has become proud of her evaluation of him. The circumcision at the Green Chapel metaphorically cuts away this pride. Next, a survey of the covenant making between Bertilak, the Green Knight, and Gawain demonstrates the importance of law to the poem's commercial vision and situates the covenant making in a context of both medieval English contract law and Old Testament legalism. This section of the study concludes by demonstrating that Gawain becomes a "foxy" merchant in his dealings with Bertilak, so much so that he is able to overlook the breach of contract in his concealment of the green girdle. Like the fox which Bertilak hunts, Gawain pridefully works with wylez (1711). The circumcision metaphorically cuts away this pride, too.

The book culminates in an exploration of the connection between Gawain's cowarddyse and couetyse (2374) and the sin of idolatry. Texts contemporary with the poem, as well as earlier ones, affirm that covetousness and idolatry are sins inseparable from each other genetically; from this evidence arises the argument that the green girdle must replace the pentangle as Gawain's standard because, unlike the latter, it is so conventional and arbitrary a sign that it can never threaten to become an idol and thus a spur to covetousness. The poem's emphasis on signs and tokens, the argument maintains, is an integral part of its larger concern with order and meaning in civilization. Finally, it is suggested that the poem itself resembles the green girdle more than the pentangle. As a text, the poem insists on its conventionality and temporality in such a way as to affirm its concern with meaning and with the way in which meaning is made. {4/5}