ABSTRACT
Sir Gawain is sent off on his journey to the Green Chapel with a filler phrase, “The bok as I herde say” (line 690),1 which points to both literary and oral textual traditions. The poem is authorized by earlier (perhaps Latin and therefore more authoritative) texts or the “bok” and is transmitted to the reader through a performance that is “herde.” Similarly, at the poem’s opening, as a transition from the epic history of the settling of Britain to the narrative of the Green Knight’s appearance at Camelot, the narrator explicitly refers to oral performance, implying simultaneously that his poem is in the process of being performed and that other oral performances serve as sources for the current version of the poem: “If ye wyl lysten this laye bot on littel quile, I schal telle hit astit, as I in toun herde” (lines 30-31). This reference to performance also suggests that the poet’s tale has literary merit as a “laye” that hails from a cultural center or “toun.” These phrases occur at transition points in the poem (e.g., to mark a shift from epic history to romance narrative or a shift from a description of Gawain’s armor to his moving out into the wilderness) and can be read as “empty,” as mere devices to direct the reader’s perspective or to mimic a performer’s technique of using repetition or set phrases to hold the audience’s attention while the next part of the story is invented or remembered. They could also signal an oral residue indicating that some parts of the poem were originally orally composed through an invention process cognitively distinct from written composition. However, the narrator’s use of recursive rhetorical strategies recommended by contemporary handbooks2 as well as the poem’s literary and thematic coherence set limits for reading Sir Gawain as an example of oral traditional literature.
