Graphs and Conclusions

References by Canto

Click to show appearances of references for each Canto: Chivalry; Christian; Folklore; Nature; Pagan; Mythological

Findings

In creating the above chart, we first decided to sift through some of the information that we had gathered and had found to be, for whatever reason, extraneous to our research goal. We ultimately used the six kinds of references above to plot a trajectory of what occurs across the cantos of the poem. As apparent, mythological and pagan references disappear almost immediately. This, we felt, was possibly because they were only included in the text as a way to set up the story, and create a kind of framing device. They help early on to establish a kind of world for the poem, but ultimately fall to the wayside in order to focus on the poem’s main plot. Something similar happens to folklore, which we felt had more references overall and stayed relevant longer due to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight borrowing heavily from other stories originating in the British Isles. Nature builds steadily in importance as the poem progresses, particularly in the second and third cantos which feature Gawain adventuring to find the Green Chapel and a series of hunts in the woods respectively. However, references to nature seem to disappear in the climax of the poem, when much of the overt moralizing begins to occur. The two most enduring kinds of references are, perhaps unsurprisingly, chivalric references and Christian references. Christian references occur throughout the poem, but peak particularly in the second canto, which features a number of references to the Christian symbolism encoded on Gawain’s armor and his symbols. The trajectory of chivalric references is perhaps the most interesting. They start off very high in the first canto as the Green Knight and Gawain agree to the terms of their game, and decline in the second in favor of Christian symbolism. However, they skyrocket in the third and remain fairly high in the fourth, as the central thematic discussions on chivalry and the chivalric code occur in the latter half of the poem, during Gawain’s temptations and the fulfilling of his duties and obligations.

This chart looks at some of the collected data regarding how often what narrators discuss different topics. We included the poet’s voice, the omniscient voice, and the voices of the Green Knight, Gawain, Bertilak, and Lady Bertilak as characters (there are a few minor characters with only one or two lines who have been excluded). On the whole, the data we returned is not entirely surprising. Every narrator with the exception of the omniscient narrator mentions chivalry more often than any other topic, and even then, the omniscient narrator still mentions a fairly significant number of times. That he references topics like nature and religion with a higher frequency is likely a result of an attempt to set the stage for the play, as it is this voice that is responsible for most of the descriptive moments of the poem. This contributes to our belief that, by and large, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem about the difficulties of maintaining a chivalrous lifestyle, regardless of whether or not this lifestyle was approved of by the poet himself. Much of the information gathered is logical in context of the overall data collected, in the sense that virtually all narrators cease to discuss pagan, folkloric, and mythological topics after a certain point thus explaining their low mentions by various speakers. Again, only religion (largely appearing in the form of incidental pleasantries like “God bless you!”) and chivalry appear with any kind of notability.

In creating the above chart, we first decided to sift through some of the information that we had gathered and had found to be, for whatever reason, extraneous to our research goal. We ultimately used the six kinds of references above to plot a trajectory of what occurs across the cantos of the poem. As apparent, mythological and pagan references disappear almost immediately. This, we felt, was possibly because they were only included in the text as a way to set up the story, and create a kind of framing device. They help early on to establish a kind of world for the poem, but ultimately fall to the wayside in order to focus on the poem’s main plot. Something similar happens to folklore, which we felt had more references overall and stayed relevant longer due to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight borrowing heavily from other stories originating in the British Isles. Nature builds steadily in importance as the poem progresses, particularly in the second and third cantos which feature Gawain adventuring to find the Green Chapel and a series of hunts in the woods respectively. However, references to nature seem to disappear in the climax of the poem, when much of the overt moralizing begins to occur. The two most enduring kinds of references are, perhaps unsurprisingly, chivalric references and Christian references. Christian references occur throughout the poem, but peak particularly in the second act, which features a number of references to the Christian symbolism encoded on Gawain’s armor and his symbols. The trajectory of chivalric references is perhaps the most interesting. They start off very high in the first canto as the Green Knight and Gawain agree to the terms of their game, and decline in the sixth in favor of Christian symbolism. However, they skyrocket in the third and remain fairly high in the fourth, as the central thematic discussions on chivalry and the chivalric code occur in the latter half of the poem, during Gawain’s temptations and the fulfilling of his duties and obligations.