Fights and Games: Terms for Speech in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

I. INTRODUCTION

The Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) is one of the best-known examples of the so-called Alliterative Revival of the late Middle English period. These poems are characterized, generally speaking, by the presence of four stressed syllables in each line, the first three of which tend to alliterate.¹ The alliterative requirements of their metrical structure and their authors' taste for technically accurate and detailed descriptions, where a single concept could be referred to by a wide array of terms through variation, meant that poets needed to have access to a large pool of terms ([near]-synonyms as well as words related to each other in terms of hyponymy, metonymy, and different levels of prototypicality) so as to refer to common concepts and key elements in the narrative. Traditional poetic words (including archaisms), dialectally marked words, and loans from various languages, mainly French and Old Norse (many of which are also dialectally marked), helped to develop the authors' lexical repertoire.²

In keeping with the significance of lexical richness in these texts, scholars have already paid much attention to the Gawain poet's choices in connection with terms referring to elements of thematic, generic, and cultural significance, such as knights, horses, armor, landscape, hunting, and the legal and commercial terms included in the various agreements Gawain enters into.³ Yet scholarly attention has not extended to the poet's choices in connection with the lexico-semantic field of speech, with the important exception of a few words, mainly the Middle English (ME) legal terms covenaunt and foreward, the apparent neologism "luf-talkyng," and ME treuth, a central term in the poem referring to a complex set of moral, religious, cultural, and linguistic concepts.⁴ We should not forget either Michiko Ogura's very brief description of the syntactic contexts where one can find some of the verbs for speech (particularly ME seien, tellen and quod/th, a residual form of ME quethen) in our author's texts.⁵

Despite the lack of due scholarly attention, the study of the terms for speech in SGGK is very important for our understanding of the text because the representation of speech plays a central role in the poem.⁶ To some extent, this is a generic convention, in keeping with its topic and metrical form. On the one hand, as noted by Frank Brandsma, "[i]n Arthurian romance, knights seem to talk at least as much as they fight."⁷ On the other hand, together with nouns meaning 'man, warrior' and verbs of movement, verbs referring to speech are among those words that attract the highest number of near-synonyms in late alliterative texts.⁸ Thus, from both a generic and a formal perspective, the study of terms belonging to this lexico-semantic field engages with the very fabric of the poem and, therefore, requires further attention.

Instead of focusing primarily on the links between the poem's rich vocabulary and near-contemporary cultural practices, as is generally the case in previous studies, this paper brings together various theoretical approaches to lexical semantics and stylistics to scrutinize the relations between the various terms referring to speech. Following this line of enquiry, some verbs meaning 'to utter' are shown to be particularly important for the development of the combative atmosphere that surrounds Camelot's interaction with the Green Knight (overtly) and Gawain's discussions with the Lady of Hautdesert (covertly). Hence, this study reveals a crucial aspect in the text's replacement of martial encounters with verbal duels. This approach also enables us to account further for the games that the poet plays on his audience, on the one hand by tricking them about the significance of Gawain's stay in Hautdesert for his agreement with the Green Knight, and on the other by offering visual and linguistic clues about this connection. Accordingly, the significance of this paper lies not in the provision of new readings, but in the demonstration of the centrality of an understudied lexico-semantic field for the artistic success of...