Spelling, Grammar and Metre in the Works of the Gawain-Poet

Spelling, Grammar and Metre in the Works of the Gawain-Poet Ad Putter and Myra Stokes Careful readers of the works of the Gawain-poet know only too well that the spelling of words in M S Cotton Nero A.x. is subject to bewildering variation.1 This variation is in part due to the lack ofan accepted standard for written English before thefifteenthcentury, the consequences of which were ruefully noted by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde: 'ther is so gret diversite / ... in writyng of oure tonge'(V. I794-6).2 But our work on a new edition ofthe Gowa/n-poet's works for the Penguin English Poets Series has convinced us that many variations in spelling and grammatical forms are in fact motivated by metrical considerations. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that variant forms of the same word are often neither erratic nor scribal, but serve metrical purposes in the Gawa/n-poet's verse. 1 All citations of the texts in this manuscript are taken from the following e Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, rev. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); Pearl, ed. by E. V. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953); Patience, ed. by J. J. Anderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969); Cleanness, ed. by J. J. Anderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977). For a study of the graphemic variations in this corpus (which takes no account of metrical exigencies) see John C. McLaughlin, A GraphemicPhonemic Study ofa Middle English Manuscript (The Hague: Mouton, 1963). 2 The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson and others (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 78 Ad Putter and Myra Stokes In fairness to previous scholars, it must be said that such metrical principles as might be invoked to explain apparent vagaries of spelling are only n o w beginning to be be properly understood. W e summarise below what is now known about the metrical principles of the poems of Cotton Nero A.x, and append some brief observations about the implications of these metrical rules and norms for future scholarship. Against this background w e shall then examine some spelling variants and their metrical raisons d'etre. a) Patience and Cleanness are written in the metre of the unrhymed alliterative long line; Pearl in that of rhymed iambic tetrameter.3 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (henceforth SGGK) is a hybrid: iambic metre and rhyme are used for the bob and wheel; the rest of the poem is in the unrhymed alliterative long line. The unfortunate consequences of failing to grasp the implications of this basic metrical distinction between rhymed and unrhymed alliterating verse are illustrated in recent attempts to dispute the single authorship of the poems in Cotton Nero A.x on the basis of the uneven distribution of periphrastic con/can/ gan + infinitive. This construction sometimes adds an ingressive aspect to the action ('began to...') or emphasises its actuality, but it is also used pleonastically as an alternative to a simple preterite. In Pearl and only in Pearl, the construction also occurs as, more unusually, a periphrastic present-tense; for example: For al is trawbe bat He con dress (495) In compayny gret our luf con bryf (851) 3 On the iambic metre of Pearl see Hoyt N. Duggan, 'Libertine Scribes and Maide Editors: Meditations on Textual Criticism and Metrics', mEnglish Historical Metrics, by C. B. McCulley and J. J. Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) pp. 219-37. Duggan successfully demonstrates the poet's avoidance of clashing stress. However, if'iambic' is to be used stricto sensu, the case for iambic metre in Pearl an bob and wheel ofSGGK would also need to show that the poet tends to avoid sequences of two unstressed syllables and/or would have reduced such sequences by traditional prosodic methods such as syncope, elision, apocope, and synizesis. This case cannot be made here, but it is relevant to note that spelling again provides some suggestive eviden of reductions metri causa (which is not to say that the poet never allowed himselfthe licence of two successive unstressed syllables). Thus the selection of mas rather than makes ('Much mirthe...