The Pentangle Hypothesis: A Dating History and Resetting of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Summary

More than one hundred and sixty years ago, in 1839, Sir Frederick Madden presented the first translation of the Middle-English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) to the Bannatyne Club of Edinburgh and dated it as having been written in the fifteenth century. In doing so, he established the first paradigm of dating the poem, based upon observations he made when analyzing the Cotton Nero A.x. manuscript, paying heed to handwriting, illuminated capitals, and details of clothing — assessments still upheld in contemporary scholarship, as will be shown below. Madden's paradigm was eventually dropped and replaced by a new position taken by John R. Tolkien and Eric V. Gordon in their introduction to a 1925 translation of SGGK, when they stated that the work was written in “the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the latest possible date being determined by that of the manuscript, c.1400.” My study will review the process whereby these scholars — Madden, Tolkien, and Gordon — dated the manuscript of SGGK, so that we can reexamine the present critical assumptions on the alliterative revival, handwriting, manuscript production, and late-medieval clothing as shown in illuminations.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is preserved, together with three other poems presumed to be by the same author, in a single manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x., housed in the British Library. I will present a fresh set of observations from the poem based on three contemporary critical strategies to be explained hereafter. The purpose of my model is to demonstrate a concrete, visualizable, new paradigm for dating SGGK, which sets the poem in the Warwickshire Midlands between 1425 and 1428. The name chosen for this model is The Pentangle Hypothesis, based on the heraldic symbol of loyalty Sir Gawain wears on his shield and coat. As this essay hopes to illustrate, such a reconceived method for dating the manuscript is needed, for as yet scholars have been unable to explain ambiguities and unknowns about this complex but important work. With new insights enabling scholars to situate the poem strategically within its political, social, and physical contexts, we may discern the work's formal structure, as well as its comedic and ironic elements, Welsh-English geographic and political references, symbols, gameplaying, and paradoxical characterizations.