Two Notes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: l. 34 ‘Lel Letteres’ and l. 193 ‘Dok’
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Much debate has been occasioned by the poet’s reference, at the start of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to the form of his ‘laye’ as he alleges both to have heard it recited ‘in toun […] With tonge’ and to have received it as it is set down ‘In stori stif and stronge, | With lel letteres loken’.1 A number of readers have taken the reference to ‘lel letteres’ as an allusion to the poem’s alliterative verse form: Christine Chism, for example, finds here a suggestion of ‘the antiquity of the meter as a native tradition’.2 The edition by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon supports such a reading by glossing ‘With lel letteres loken’ as ‘linked with true letters’; the editors comment that ‘[t]his [phrase] seems to refer to the alliterative staves’.3 John Burrow interprets the passage similarly, translating it in the notes to his edition as ‘made firm with true alliteration as has long been the custom in the land’.4 Other scholars, however, have cautioned against assuming here a self-conscious allusion to the poem’s metre: Derek Pearsall observes that ‘it would be more usual for the narrator to be referring, conventionally, to the veracity and antiquity of his story’.5 P. J. Frankis notes that two instances of phrases involving ‘lel letteres’ in fifteenth-century Scottish poetry offer no support for the view that the expression contains a reference to alliterative verse technique; instead, he concludes, ‘what little evidence there is supports the meaning “enclosed in true letters, embodied in truthful words”’.6 Andrew and Waldron, citing Frankis, translate ‘With lel letteres loken’ as ‘enshrined in true syllables’.7 Ad Putter and Myra Stokes offer in the footnotes to their edition the translation ‘set and embedded in record firm and solid, soundly enclosed in trustworthy words’.8 In a previous issue of this journal, Jason Herman emphasizes that ‘loken’ implies ‘“fastness” or “fixity”’; rejecting Tolkien and Gordon’s gloss ‘linked’, he argues that the line about ‘lel letteres’ may be understood not as an allusion to alliterative form but rather as ‘a reference to the power of writing to fix the story in its present form’.9 I propose to extend and modify Herman’s interpretation by examining, instead of ‘loken’, the implications of the word ‘letteres’. In his prologue, the poet emphasizes the antiquity of his tale, which, he says, has long existed: ‘In londe so hatz ben longe’ (l. 36). He does so with reference to a traditional understanding of ‘letteres’ that also emphasizes ‘fastness’ and ‘fixity’, the power of writing to preserve past events for posterity. The author of Sir Gawain could have found just such an account of ‘letteres’ as a tool of memorialization in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ‘arguably the most influential book, after the Bible, in the learned world of the Latin West for nearly a thousand years’ after its composition in the early decades of the seventh century.10 In his chapter on the letters of the alphabet (‘De litteris communibus’), Isidore observes that ‘[t]he use of letters was invented for the sake of remembering things, which are bound by letters lest they slip away into oblivion. With so great a variety of information, not everything could be learned by hearing, nor retained in the memory’.11 In proposing this chapter as a possible source for the poet’s understanding of ‘letteres’, I am indebted to Alastair Minnis, who discusses the same passage in connection with Chaucer’s House of Fame, without, however, making the connection to Sir Gawain. Commenting on Isidore’s discussion of litterae, Minnis observes that ‘[a]ll this is vividly illustrated in the House of Fame. The letters inscribed on the side of the ice-mountain which are unprotected by the shade of Fame’s castle are fading away […]. By contrast, the inscriptions on the side which Fame shades are as fresh as if men had written them that very day or hour’.12 The prologue to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is even closer than Chaucer’s text to Isidore’s sentiments about writing, since the poet here writes specifically of the ‘binding’ powers of ‘letteres’ that have (he alleges) preserved the story for the present retelling: with the Gawain-poet’s ‘loken’, one may compare Isidore’s ‘alligantur’, ‘bound’.13 Both the Middle English poet and the Etymologies associate ‘letteres’ with fixity, while that which we hear is vulnerable to the limitations of human memory. In contrast to the implicit fallibility of a recital ‘with tonge’, the Gawain-poet asserts that the written form of the narrative has preserved it ‘In londe […] longe’. A second discussion of ‘letters’, probably itself influenced by Isidore’s account of litterae, and potentially available to the poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, similarly highlights the power of writing against the fallibility of memory. In the Prologue to his Polychronicon, Ranulph Higden argues that we would lose the benefit of the moral examples provided by the deeds of our forebears without writers to preserve them: In historico namque contextu chronographorum nobis diligentia delegato relucet clarius norma morum, forma vivendi, probitatis incentivum, trivium quoque theologicarum virtutum et quadrivium cardinalium trabearum, quorum notitiam apprehendere seu vestigium imitari nostra modicitas non sufficeret, nisi sollicitudo scriptorum nostrae transfunderet imperitiae memoriam transactorum. Siquidem vita brevis, sensus hebes, animus torpens, memoria labens, inutilis demum occupatio nos impediunt multa scire, novercante semper oblivione memoriae inimica. Sed et in praesentiarum artes et jura prorsus ruerent, spectabilium actionum exemplaria non paterent, loquendi quoque tropi et schemata penitus deperirent, nisi in remedium imperfectionis humanae litterarum usum divina miseratio providisset. John Trevisa’s Middle English translation of the same passage reads as follows: For in þe makynge and bookes of stories, þat is to vs i-sent and byqueþe by grete besynesse of þe writers of cronicles, blaseþ and schyneþ clerliche þe riȝt rule of þewes, ensaumple of leuynge, clensynge of goodnes, þe metynge of þe þre waies of þe þre vertues of deuynyte, and þe metynge of foure weies of þe foure chief vertues of þewes of real cloþynge. Of þe whiche þinges our litel konnynge myȝte nouȝt take knowleche, noþer folwe þe foure, but besines of writers to oure vnkunnynge hadde i-holde and i-streyned mynde of olde dedes. For why schort lyf, dul witte, and slowe vnderstondynge, and ydel occupacioun letteþ vs to knowe many þinges; forȝetingnes all wey kypinge þe craft of a stepdamme, he is enmy of mynde. Also now, in our tyme, art, sciens and lawe al were i-falle, ensample of noble dedes were nouȝt i-knowe; nobilite and faire manere of spekynge were all i-lost; but þe mercy of God had i-ordyned vs of lettres in remedie of vnparfiȝtnesse of mankynde.14 Trevisa’s translation in fact especially emphasizes the ‘binding’ power of letters alluded to by the Gawain-poet, as he renders Higden’s ‘transfunderet’ (from transfundo, ‘to transfer’) as ‘i-holde and i-streyned’, with Middle English streinen having the senses both of ‘[t]o spread, carry, transmit’ and ‘[t]o tie […], bind, fasten’.15 In both the original Latin and in the Middle English translation, ‘letteres’ (or ‘litterarum usum’) are presented as a remedy for the imperfections of human memory. It is quite possible that the Gawain-poet was familiar with this discussion in Higden’s Polychronicon: the work was an ‘immediate and unprecedented success’, and it formed one of the main sources for the contemporary alliterative poem The Siege of Jerusalem.16 Whether or not he knew the passage directly, the parallel discussions in the prologues to Sir Gawain and Higden’s history indicate the importance of the fixative powers of ‘letters’ to the poet’s presentation of his work as history, part of the chronicles of Britain and its marvels (the term the author uses in l. 34, ‘stori’, denotes a ‘story from history or accepted as history’).17 At stake is not a particular metrical form, but the ability of writing to preserve from oblivion the extraordinary episode from the annals of King Arthur that the poet will now disclose or unlock for the reader. *** The best-known of the Gawain-poet’s many descriptive passages portrays the equally startling and magnificent Green Knight and his horse, including their co-ordinating hairstyles: The description of the Green Knight’s mount, taken as a whole, may be seen as characteristic of a medieval tendency towards ‘ornamental and ostentatious’ equine accoutrements, which became in this period, as Herbert James Hewitt observed, ‘part of knightly splendour’.18 I am concerned here with a particular aspect of that ‘splendour’, the adornment of the horse’s hair with precious stones, ‘as þe dok lasted’ (193). According to the Middle English Dictionary, which cites the present passage from Sir Gawain as the sole attested instance, ‘dok’ here refers to ‘[t]rimmed hair (of tail and forelock)’ (MED, s.v. dok, n.). The Oxford English Dictionary, however, includes the quotation from Sir Gawain under the alternative sense of ‘[t]he solid fleshy part of an animal’s tail’, while noting that the use in the poem ‘has been […] interpreted as showing the sense “the trimmed hair of a horse’s tail (and forelock)”’ (OED, s.v. dock, n. 2, 1.a.). The OED editors further note that their sense 1.a. is ‘[n]ot always clearly distinguishable from’ their 5.b., ‘The stump of an animal’s tail that has been cut short or docked’, a definition akin to the interpretation favoured by the MED, though referring only to the tail, rather than to a trimmed portion of hair from tail and forelock. The OED thus suggests for ‘dok’ two different senses potentially relevant to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight l. 193, with the MED providing a variation on the second. Contrary to the impression created by the MED’s terse entry, the poem’s editors and translators have in fact interpreted the line variously. The interpretation of ‘dok’ as ‘trimmed hair (of tail and forelock)’ first appears, to my knowledge, in the glossary to the edition by Israel Gollancz published for the Early English Text Society in 1940, which offers ‘trimmed hair of tail and forelock […] cp. mod. Ic. dokkr [recte dokkur], a short stumpy tail’.19 The MED apparently followed Gollancz, since its replicates his phraseology, including in its account of the word’s etymology: ‘cp. Icel. dokkr a stumpy tail’. Gollancz’s interpretation is also echoed by numerous subsequent editors and translators. Burrow’s glossary closely follows Gollancz/MED with ‘cut hair (of tail and forelock)’. Andrew and Waldron provide the footnote gloss ‘to the end of the tuft’ for ‘as þe dok lasted’, and J. J. Anderson follows suit with ‘to the end of the tuft’. Putter and Stokes translate in their footnotes as ‘running the length of the dok [bunch of hair]’. Marie Borroff retains ‘dock’ in her modern English translation, which is provided with a marginal gloss ‘clipped tail’ in the Norton edition, while W. R. J. Barron’s parallel-text translation provides ‘The tail and his forelock were plaited to match […] decorated with precious stones, to their cropped ends’.20 The MED/Gollancz interpretation is not held unanimously, however, among the poem’s various editors. Richard Morris, whose 1864 edition for the Early English Text Society was later superseded by that of Gollancz, glossed ‘dok’ simply as ‘tail’.21 Tolkien and Gordon also provide the gloss ‘tail’, offering modern Icelandic ‘dokkr’ (recte dokkur) as an analogue, a gloss that is retained by Norman Davis in his revision of Tolkien and Gordon.22 Theodore Silverstein similarly favours ‘tail’, again with reference to the Icelandic.23 In weighing up the competing senses offered by the MED and OED and by the poem’s various editors one might notice, first, that nothing in the description in Sir Gawain requires that one must imagine the horse’s tail to be docked or its hair trimmed into ‘tufts’. The poet says that the Green Knight’s beard and hair were clipped (‘euesed’, l. 184), that the knight’s hair was like that of his horse (‘of his hors swete’, l. 180), and that the horse’s mane was like the knight’s hair (‘Þe mane of þat mayn hors much to hit lyke’, l. 187). But the mane is not actually said to be cut but instead ‘cresped and cemmed’, curled and combed (l. 188). Rather than assume that the horse’s hair is cut short, one might equally suppose that both the mount’s mane and the knight’s hair are crimped, the latter perhaps in a style like that of Chaucer’s Squire, or of Absolon in The Miller’s Tale (The Canterbury Tales, I.81, I.3314). Hewitt’s study of the medieval horse concluded, in fact, that tail docking was rather rare in this period, on the basis that in fourteenth-century illustrations of horses, ‘[n]o tails are docked but hair is cut so that it does not drag along the ground’, although one might also notice that the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales depicts the Miller’s horse with a rather short tail.24 Those readers who favour the Gollancz/MED interpretation ‘trimmed hair (of tail and forelock)’, rather than simply ‘tail’, presumably respond primarily to the fact that the poet mentions tail and ‘topping’ (forelock)25 together in line 191, and he insists in the next line that these are alike in being both braided and entwined with green ribbon. The necessary inference appears to be that the precious stones of line 193 must also adorn both forelock and tail, and that ‘dok’ must therefore refer to both. But one might propose, alternatively, that in the expansively ‘appositive style’ of the poem and of this passage,26 the description of the gems in line 193 extends the account of the ‘tayl’ of line 191 alone, just as the final four lines of this stanza (199–202) refer solely to the ‘freke’ and not also to the ‘fole’ mentioned with him in line 196.27 A similar interpretation is presumably accepted by the minority of editors and translators that favours ‘tail’ rather than ‘trimmed hair of tail and forelock’ for ‘dok’. It seems uncertain, in any case, that ‘dok’ can serve as a term applicable to both forelock and tail: while ‘dock’ is attested from the early eighteenth century as the stump of a trimmed tail, it is not recorded by the OED as a term for a clipped mane, for which ‘hogged’ is preferred from a similar period (OED, s.v. hog, v.1, 3). The case for ‘dok’ as a tuft or bunch of hair, variously from forelock or tail, appears unsupported by any clear evidence outside the poem itself. The sense proposed by the MED and the majority of editors, if accepted, would have to be understood as a nonce usage, perhaps for alliterative convenience. Finally, while I have not been able to locate any medieval illustration of a horse with braided mane and tail, or, indeed, of one with bells in its hair,28 a braid that runs the length of the dock, in the sense of ‘the solid fleshy part’, rather than the length of the whole tail (or the length of a clipped tuft of forelock or tail) would be in keeping with modern practices of tail braiding, and would also seem most practicably to accommodate bells on top of the knot that finishes the braid, as described in lines 194–5.29 A typical modern equine braid draws strands of hair from either side of the tail until the end of the dock is reached, at which point the braid is finished, looped, and fastened.30 The poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was perhaps describing a similar braid, which would leave the remaining part of the horse’s tail (unincorporated into the plait) loose and ‘[f]ayre fannand’ (l. 181) like the hair of his rider. The Middle English Dictionary entry ought to acknowledge, I would argue, the uncertain status of the definition ‘[t]rimmed hair (of tail and forelock)’. On the available evidence, the OED’s interpretation of ‘dok’ in Sir Gawain l. 193—not ‘trimmed hair of tail and forelock’, nor simply the tail, but that rigid part composed of vertebrae, muscle, and skin—appears preferable to that adopted by any of the poem’s editors and translators.
Source: Notes and Queries
Author: Sarah Wood
Institution: University of Warwick
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,296
OpenAlex ID: W4407606149