‘In the hierarchy of values by which most historians live, truth stands higher than fiction, and prose higher than verse’1: where, then, does this leave the works considered so seminal to our understanding of the medieval era, when such works are often in verse? Historian Gabrielle Spiegel considers prose to be ‘a language of fact’1, and argues that it can communicate those truths about the human experience that history is tasked with recounting more accurately than poetry. The discourse between literature and history can be traced back to the Aristotelian principle of truth, as defined in Metaphysics: ‘to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true’2. Taking this principle in conjunction with Aristotle’s ideas that poetic statements are universal in nature and historical ones are singular allows us to begin to understand the difficulty of examining the truth of medieval verse: if ‘to say of what it is that it is, and of what is not that it is not’ is true, then how can a work in verse, whose statements are universal in nature, reliably present truth?
Before approaching this question, the notion of truth requires some further expansion. In medieval works, it is presented in ways that differ according to genre: chivalric works, particularly chivalric romances, typically centre diegetic interpersonal truths; works concerning dream visions voice subconscious truths; fabliaux use parody to extend past the bounds of diegesis and challenge the readers’ perception of truths. The truth of a verse and the truth in a verse should also be considered separately, as to attempt otherwise would be an oversight, considering that the former is concerned with extradiegetic tale-reader relationship, and the latter with intradiegetic interactions. In listing these, I have switched from using the singular ‘truth’ to the plural ‘truths’ to try and escape the monolithic connotations of the former in order to appreciate the multiplicity of truths found in medieval texts.
The principal focus of this essay will involve the medieval chivalric romance, a genre woven around a particularly rigid canonical framework. Paradoxical though it seems, the strict delineation of plot and character in the genre allows for a great deal of ‘tonal variation’ in tale-reader discourse, if ‘tonal variation’ can be used as a useful term for the often implicit and subtle differences in connotation that arise between the reader and the different tales. Firstly and most obviously, the truths explored in the diegesis of a chivalric romance will centre around the concept of medieval chivalry, a rigid code of conduct dictating the religious, moral, and social behaviour of a knight. The intricacies of the plot are unpicked and examined by the reader, who searches for commonalities between texts, whilst the characters are scrutinised through a lens shaped by the expectation of chivalrous conduct. Underpinning this is an often implicit trust that the knight—perhaps Chaucer’s Troilus, his Palamon, or Malory’s Lancelot—upholds a variety of truths that accord with the chivalric code. Two texts of the chivalric romance genre providing fruitful grounds for the exploration of truths are the Gawain poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.
The aforementioned similarities between chivalric romances bring into focus their differences; considering this, a comparison of the two verse works makes the most sense. To begin with, the basic difference between the texts’ truths is that the Gawain poet’s work centres ‘moral-chivalric truth’3, whilst Chaucer’s Troilus centres ‘romantic truth’3; immediately we can see that the texts differ in their distribution of importance, and thus that Sir Gawain is more concerned with its eponymous character than with the romance foregrounded in Troilus.
Meanwhile, the basic similarity between the two involves speech acts and their associated linguistic play, where—despite differing in specifics—speech and word both carry immense importance. Uniting these facets allows us to explore the role of linguistic play in the exploration of truth and, further, how it varies between the two verse works.
Defined as ‘an act of speaker meaning that can (though need not) be performed by saying that one is doing so’4, speech acts have major diegetic importance in Sir Gawain, both lending credence to its categorisation as Arthurian literature—wherein, as Frank Bransdma reminds us, ‘knights seem to talk at least as much as they fight’5—and acting as the platform upon which discussions of truths are raised. Brandsma’s words neatly illustrate that importance: fighting (an established knightly pursuit) and talking (a means of humanising the knight) are quantified and judged to be equal. As an example of the power of lexis, the Green Knight’s words at the beginning of the poem are as follows:
Now is the revel and the renoun of the Rounde Table
Overwalt with a word of on wyes speche,
For all dares for drede without dint shewed!3
Here, the ‘revel and the renoun’ are juxtaposed with ‘a word of on wyes speche’ in a way that minimises the former in the face of the latter’s power. The singularity of the ‘wyes speche’ and the contrasting plurality of the ‘revel and renoun’ seem expanded in connotation, as the ‘revel and renoun’ is robustly alliterative, predictably stressed and chiastically syllabic: it is collective, healthy, and ample, whilst the ‘wyes speche’ is unalliterated, unevenly syllabic—standalone and seeming somewhat fragile when set beside the revelry. It is strange that something ‘fragile’ should wield power over something so robust, and yet it decidedly does. There is also an obvious sense of concreteness to the ‘Rounde Table’ that logically should surpass the power of something as tenuous as a spoken word, yet fails to. It is this failure that raises speech—to expand Brandsma’s idea slightly—to a level at least on par with action in Sir Gawain.
The dominance of speech is explicitly referenced at the end of Troilus and Criseyde:
Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende,
Shal neyther ben ywiren nor ysonge
No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende.
O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge!6
In this case, it is Criseyde who laments the power of word, spoken or written: her reputation is at the mercy of those who know of her adultery, and can be made or broken with ease. Chaucer’s metaphor of being ‘rolled […] on many a tonge’ lends Criseyde’s words a temporary physicality, transforming them into the action of rolling, and her into the object being rolled; the rhyme royal scheme here associates the second and fourth lines, and the lexical similarity of ‘ysonge’ and ‘tonge’ not only links the words but metonymises the latter, leading to the conclusion that the word (which is spoken via the tongue) has enough weight to both become and overcome an action, or a person; just as the tongue is made metonymic of the song, Criseyde is made to represent the words spoken of her (treacher, adulteress, wench, etc.), rather than the opposite, which we might have expected. Underpinning these few lines is the also unspoken presence of truth, or the lack thereof: the obvious juxtaposition between Criseyde’s true stance (one of remorse and shame) and her presumed stance (a brazen adulteress) stages a deceptively clear binary between truth and mistruth in romance. If truth is to be equated with faithfulness, then unfaithfulness is mistruth; does Criseyde not therefore clearly abandon truth through her liaison with Diomede? Considering it as separate in action and word accommodates for the complex web of romance between Troilus and Criseyde.
Returning to Sir Gawain, we can see that the truths are as complex as in Troilus and Criseyde, if not more so: Gawain’s numerous obligations—to the kingdom, to his host, to the king’s wife, and to himself—morally divide him, and simultaneously work on the levels of the public, the private, and the personal. Thus, considering Gawain’s truths as present and separate in action and word, just as in Troilus and Criseyde, allows us to see that he is in a hopeless bind that leads inevitably to his failure. Perhaps the single most crucial moment occurs when Gawain accepts the king’s wife’s sash:
Then he thulged with her threpe and tholed her to speke,
And ho bere on him the belt and bede hit him swythe,
And he granted, and him gave with a good wille,
And bisoght him for her sake discover hit never,
Bot to lelly layne fro her lord; the lede him acordes
That never wye schulde hit wit, iwysse, bot that twayne,
For noght.3
The Gawain poet wrote in alliterative verse, which carries the effect of forming lexical fields of the alliterated words, similarly to Chaucer’s rhyme royal. Here, ‘thulged’, ‘threpe’, and ‘tholed’ are alliteratively linked, meaning ‘tolerated’, ‘insistence’, and ‘suffered’ respectively; a clear idea of unwillingness is communicated. ‘Tholed’ is of particular interest given the connotations of religiosity that arise from images of Jesus on the cross when discussing suffering; Gawain has unwittingly entered a martyr-like state far earlier than now (likely when he accepted the quest that placed him in his bind), but at this moment he appears conscious at last of this state, although he—after all, merely human—misattributes its cause. Gawain’s obvious desire to remain unaffected by her advances now appears to be the desperate stoicism found in someone struggling under the weight of chivalric expectations. But we question why he engages in this punishing stoicism, and why, when he inevitably succumbs to temptation, he conceals it. Answers to these questions can be read in his kisses:
He hent the hathel about the halse and hendly him kysses,
And eftersones of the same he served him there.3
[And,]Then coles he the knight and kysses him thryes
As severely and sadly as he hem sette couthe, 3
The ambiguity of these passages is the subject of much debate. Whether they are examples of chivalrous behaviour between friendly males or whether they imply something homosexual, it is clear that Gawain and his host are close, and therefore that Gawain has obligations towards him that he must fulfill—truths, in other words, that are complicated by his obligations to remain unaffected by his host’s wife’s advances. Again the alliterative verse is apparent but in the case of the former quotation, only the first line is alliterated (and we are led to consider ‘seized’, knight, ‘neck’, and ‘prettily’ as associated); the following line seems like an aside in light of this, allowing the emphasis to fall on the action of the kiss rather than its repetition. Carolyn Dinshaw states in an essay that priests of the time were ‘growing concerned about the behaviour of knights and boys’7, which makes it possible that Sir Gawain and the potent homoeroticism occurring between the two ‘main events’ (hunting and courting) is a response to this fear. In this case, Gawain owes his host one more truth in addition to that which a knight owes his fellows: that of love, or at least of attraction. In this case, considering the historical context of suppressing queerness, a taboo element is added to his character, preventing him from considering himself as ‘hende’ and ‘gentyl’ as he is said to be.
Here we see that Gawain’s loyalties are tangled far beyond anything seen in Troilus and Criseyde, but whilst the entanglement of truths in the latter is largely a result of avoidable conduct from both eponymous characters and their peers, in Sir Gawain it is generally inevitable. The entire trustworthiness of Gawain’s character hinges on his decision to accept the magic sash and his decision to conceal the gift from his host—but when faced with the threat of a seemingly certain death, it would be nothing short of saintlike to remain steadfast. In this idea lies the main issue with the tangled truths: Gawain is a human before he is a knight, and he is governed by thoughts and words before the chivalric code. He is fallible, and between his split loyalties and truths is an incongruence that he is unable to reconcile. 8
