Like most medieval literature, SGGK participates in several important literary traditions that its original audience would have instantly recognized. Medieval poets were expected to re-use established source materials in their own works. Modern readers sometimes mistakenly take this as evidence of how lacking in creativity and originality the Middle Ages were. In reality, much of the interest of medieval literature comes from recognizing how one work of literature pulls against those that came before it, makes subtle changes from its sources, and invests old material with new meanings. One can read SGGK as simply a rollicking tale of adventure and magic or, alternatively, as a lesson in moral growth. However, understanding some of the literary and cultural background that SGGK draws upon can provide modern readers with a fuller view of the poem’s meaning.
SGGK belongs to a literary genre known as romance. As it refers to medieval literature, the word “romance” does not mean a love story, although that sense of the word is ultimately derived from the medieval romance genre. Originally, Romance referred to the various European languages derived from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The word became applied to the popular tales written in Romance languages, particularly French. In this sense, a romance is a tale of adventure involving knights on a quest. Elements of fantasy and magic are always present: There may be dragons or monsters to battle, mysterious places to visit, or peculiar spells or curses to be broken. Damsels in distress frequently appear in the plot as victims to be rescued or as initiators of the quest. Typically, the romance story begins at a noble court, where the knights receive a challenge before setting out on a journey to accomplish their task. As with SGGK, the challenge may come from a mysterious visitor. The knights travel far from home, encountering terrible hardships and doing battle with their enemies before achieving their goal and returning to the court to tell their stories. Every romance includes basic set pieces, such as the arming of the hero and the recitation of the names of famous knights. The romance genre was so formulaic and so universally familiar that by the Gawain-poet’s time, it had long since become clichéd. Chaucer, for example, was able to do a spot-on parody of the genre in his ridiculous Tale of Sir Thopas, part of the Canterbury Tales. Clichéd or not, the romance remained popular for centuries before finally reaching its logical end in Miguel de Cervantes’s romance spoof/homage Don Quixote, first published in 1605.
The most fertile field of the romance genre was the Arthurian romance. The legendary King Arthur, his court at Camelot, and his Knights of the Round Table are almost as familiar today as they would have been in the Gawain-poet’s time. However, most modern readers know only the stories set down in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, circa 1470, actually a late entry in Arthurian development. Literally hundreds of Arthurian tales pre-dating Malory exist in numerous variations, some of which directly contradict each other.
Although the tales were usually set in England (or Logres, a legendary pre-England), Arthurian romances were produced all over Europe. The masters of the genre were the French, most notably Chrètien de Troyes, who wrote a definitive group of Arthurian romances in the late 1100s. French dominance of this field, with its legendary history of England, was part of a larger cultural tension. The Norman French conquered England in 1066, and although Norman dominance had ended by the early 1200s, France and England remained bitter rivals throughout the Middle Ages. In the Gawain-poet’s time, there was once again open warfare between the two nations, spurred by English claims to the French throne. This literary and political rivalry has implications for SGGK. In French Arthurian romances, the character of Sir Gawain has a spotty reputation. Although Gawain is portrayed positively in the early the French tradition, in later French tales, Gawain becomes a womanizer, a confirmed sinner, and even a villain. By contrast, in English Arthurian tales, Gawain is almost always upheld as the paragon of knightly virtue, and in a sense, he becomes a specifically English model of the ideal knight. SGGK affirms this tradition.
