A NOTE ON MIDDLE ENGLISH METER

Simon Armitage’s introduction to his splendid translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight provides all the basic information a reader might need to appreciate this work. For those readers who wish to hear, and to read, the original text, a few words on the poem’s meter might be useful.

Metrical practice is determined by the deeper music of a language. In Germanic languages, the tonic, or accented syllable, is usually the first syllable of a word. In romance languages, by contrast, the tonic syllable falls toward, or at the end, of words. Germanic poets therefore highlight the beginning of words with alliteration, whereas romance poets (e.g., French or Italian) highlight the end of words with rhyme.

Alliteration (from Latin litera, alphabetic letter) consists of the repetition of an initial consonant sound or consonant cluster in consecutive or closely positioned words. Anglo-Saxon is the earlier, purely Germanic form of English used in England from the time of the Germanic invasions in the fifth century until the Norman Conquest in 1066. All poetry in Anglo-Saxon is alliterative. Only after the Norman Conquest, and the impact of French, did poets writing in English begin to use rhyme as a fundamental part of their metrical practice. Anglo-Saxon poetry and metrical practice were for the most part displaced by models of continental poetry deploying rhyme, even if there are some very brilliant, post-Conquest exceptions (notably the alliterative Lawman’s Brut, c. 1190). From the mid-fourteenth century, however, for reasons not fully understood, an extraordinary range of alliterative poems appear. It seems likely that this body of work constitutes a revival of an older metrical tradition. Poems written or somehow located in the west of England (naturally the most conservative linguistically, given the pressure for change from the east) from the middle of the fourteenth century use alliterative meter in a wide range of poetic genres. To this group of texts, and in particular to a more refined, technically disciplined metrical practice characteristic of North-Western texts, the remarkable Sir Gawain and the Green Knight belongs. For all his commitment to alliterative verse of great technical virtuosity, however, the Gawain-poet also signals that he’s skilful in rhyme, too, since each stanza ends with five short rhyming lines.

The poem is written in stanzas. The number of lines per stanza varies. The line is longer, and does not contain a fixed number or pattern of stresses like the classical alliterative meter of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The standard metrical pattern is a a/a x, where a signifies an alliterating, stressed syllable; / signifies a caesura; and x signifies a nonalliterating stressed syllable. The poet frequently enriches this pattern. Each stanza closes, as mentioned above, with five short lines, rhyming a b a b a. The first of these rhyming lines contains just one stress, and is called the “bob”; the four three stress lines that follow are called the “wheel.”

—James Simpson