Depiction of stability and order through and within knighthood in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ Isabel Sebode College

King Arthur’s Round table resonates with the medieval reader as an ideal of equality and order: there is no head of the table, so that each knight is depicted as equally worthy of renown and equally skilled in his capabilities. As this Round Table is a defining feature of knighthood, representing the best knights of Arthur’s court, the complete concept of knighthood is correspondingly associated with an underlying sense of structure, both through offering protection to the rest of society, and through representing an idealized version of man, whose virtues make him brave enough to confront any adventure. In the longest poem ascribed to him, the Gawain poet focuses on one of the Arthurian knights: Sir Gawain. The poem is structured through references to time and numbers, thereby resembling the perfection that is usually associated with knighthood. However, through different obtrusive factors the poem leads us to question the stability of knighthood and portrays the eventual fall of Arthurian order as inevitable due to the fallibility of the constituents of the system.

In reading Le Morte d’Arthur, the reader may quickly lose an awareness of time. The text’s different sections occur in a fast pace over a long narrative, making it...