Annotation Analysis
While annotating Poem 28 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we envisioned our project as one part of a teaching edition of Gawain. Our goal was to introduce high schoolers to a lesser-known part of Arthurian lore, the many solo adventures that run alongside and intertwine with King Arthur’s story. We also wanted to explore some of the distinctive features of poetry and storytelling from the Middle Ages, as a sort of “first taste” of what medieval culture is like. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the perfect work to accomplish this goal, as it features a dynamic main character that must grapple with complicated moral issues involving knightly values, such as his interactions with the Lady that challenge his chastity. This also means that Gawain explores the social norms of the Middle Ages, which could prompt further discussion within a high school classroom.
Since the goal of our research was to understand Gawain’s characterization across different works, we chose to annotate Poem 28, as it features detailed descriptions of Gawain’s physical appearance and his virtues. These types of descriptions are characteristic of how Gawain describes other characters, so Poem 28 acts as a microcosm of the poem as a whole in this regard. It also introduces the religious themes that continue throughout the poem, with its mention of the “five wounds” and “five joys.” Annotating these words allowed us to introduce these concepts and define any terms that could be unfamiliar to a high school audience that might not understand the complexities of Catholic worship. Furthermore, Poem 28 stands out for its unusual structure, which groups Gawain’s virtues into five groups of five. His armor reflects these virtues by including the symbol of the pentangle and other Christian imagery, which are meant to protect him in battle. Our annotations point out the links between morality and appearance in hopes of provoking discussion on how that theme applies to the rest of the poem. We thought it was important to explore Gawain’s virtues in such detail because understanding the virtuous, chivalric knight Gawain is meant to be at the beginning of the poem improves understanding of the choices he makes in the rest of the poem, particularly towards the end, where his virtue falters. We wanted to give our audience a good starting place from which to analyze the complicated ending of the poem, which might not be what students would expect.
Many of our annotations were aimed at helping students understand what the poem is actually saying. We chose to use A.S. Kline’s modern English translation of the poem because it keeps many of the distinctive features of Middle English poetry, such as heavy use of alliteration, but puts it into words that high schoolers will understand. We explained these features both in the annotations and the introduction to the project. However, even though the poem is translated, much of the terminology is unfamiliar, such as words like “pentangle” and “gules” (Gawain l. 23, 24). We defined these terms and included pictures where relevant so students could visualize the poem’s descriptions. Most of these pictures are of the objects Gawain carries with him, since his armor and weaponry are artifacts of the Middle Ages and won’t be familiar to high schoolers. For similar reasons, we provided detailed explanations of the allusions within the poem, so that students could better understand Gawain by understanding what the poem compares him to.
In some cases, like the annotations for the words “Free-handedness,” “Continence,” and “Piety,” we went back to the original, untranslated text of the poem to get the best sense of what values the poem was trying to convey. The more modernized terms that Kline uses in his translated version of the poem are still unfamiliar to a high school audience and also carry slightly different connotations than the original words used in the poem. So, we found the original text of the poem in the University of Michigan’s library and looked up the words it used with the Middle English Dictionary. This inspired us to add an annotation with the full original text of Poem 28, taken from the University of Michigan’s digital edition of Gawain. We wanted students to be able to compare the translated version with the original to see how the words matched up and differed for themselves. Our hope is that they will attempt to read the Middle English and notice the distinctive features we have highlighted in our annotations and introduction to the translated version, such as the alliteration and bob-and-wheel.
Finally, we included a brief summary of the entire Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on our main blog page to be read alongside our annotated version of Poem 28. We wanted students to be able to see how Poem 28 fits into Gawain’s narrative, especially if this teaching edition is their first exposure to the poem. Like we mentioned before, one of the goals of the annotations was to show how Gawain’s virtues influenced the story, so we thought it was important to show how that story plays out in a way that fits with our blog.
Data Analysis
Our research question was an analysis of how Gawain and the Green Knight’s depiction of Gawain compares to or fits into the greater King Arthur canon. We attempted to answer this question by examining how the depiction of Gawain differs between Gawain and the Green Knight and Le Morte D’Arthur. In order to compare the portrayals of him, we decided we needed to find what some of the most common associations with or descriptions of Gawain are throughout Le Morte. Our plan was then to repeat the process with Gawain and hopefully find some differences.
Gawain and the Green Knight was written by one author with not much other known work while Le Morte D’Arthur was a compilation of stories designed to serve as a compendium of King Arthur lore written nearly one hundred years later. Due to this, we considered that Le Morte may present a fairly different of Gawaine. Once word frequency was calculated, we hoped to find dominant adjectives or nouns that occurred at a significantly higher rate in one text or the other. If we found that, we wanted to be able to draw some conclusions about how the depictions differed.
As Le Morte compiles stories from multiple sources and cultures, it depicts Gawain in several different lights, from having him swear to “never refuse mercy to him that asketh” and “never be against lady nor gentlewoman,” to having characters describe him as “uncourteous,” “false knight Sir Gawaine.”* Perhaps due to this, there was a rapid drop off among the most common word frequencies. The three most common words occurred 396, 333 and 246 times. The next most common word occurred only 84 times. In terms of relative frequencies this resulted in a drop from around 0.113 to 0.025. In Gawain, the top words had a lower relative frequency with the most common word having a relative frequency of 0.05. This signifies that Gawain used words more evenly, at least in the passages describing Gawain. This may point to a more constant depiction or at least a more constant style and tone than that of Le Mort.
One way in which the two texts were similar was the frequency of the word knight. The relative frequency in Le Morte was 0.0074 and in Gawain it was 0.0073. Other forms of title generally came up more often in Le Morte. Sir and Gawain were the two most common words in that book while they were seventy-second and twenty-ninth in Gawain, respectively. One possible reason for this is the difference in the style between the two works. As Gawain is poetry it seems to use names less as it does not require complete sentence structures the same way prose does. However, both works still emphasize proper forms of address and respect to authority, showing that both Gawains are working within a similar hierarchical social structure, even if they navigate their worlds differently.
Some words that stood out in the top twenty relevant words in Le Morte were rode, smote, great, fought, and slew. Often Le Morte describes Gawain during battle and impressive feats which is evidenced by the presence these words. In the same list for Gawain some standout words were full, good, bright, fair, gold, and love. When discussing Gawain, the poem is less about fighting and instead has more mentions of social interactions, including feasts, and description of pretty things which surround Gawain for parts of the poem. Near the start and end of the story Gawain and the Green Knight meet in a sort of battle but each of these battles contains essentially one blow. There are still words that show up on our top twenty list which express knightly values such as good, high, noble, and swiftly but Gawain’s chivalry is more evident by his chasteness, trustworthiness, and obedience.