[CHAPTER VIII.]
ALLITERATIVE ROMANCES AND POEMS.
Though English poets, in the fourteenth century, had a full command of rhyme, and of many forms, simple or complicated, of rhyming verse, there began a return to the old Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, sometimes combined with rhyme. Chaucer, later, makes his parson say,
I am a Southren man,
I can nat geste—rum, ram, ruf—by lettre;
Ne, God wot, rym holde I but litel bettre.
The parson's Opinion is his own, not that of Chaucer, who certainly "liked rhyme," whether he liked alliterative rhythm or not.
Gawain and the Green Knight.
A famous and really amusing alliterative romance, with a rhymed close to each passage, is "Gawain and the Green Knight". This tale is found in a manuscript which also contains two devout poems, "Patience," and "Cleanness," with an elegy of remarkable merit, "The Pearl". All four poems are attributed by several critics to the same author, and some of the Scottish learned believe that author to have been a very prolific and accomplished Scot. A few words may be said on this question later, meanwhile "Gawain and the Green Knight" has the merit of being readable. Though Gawain is best known in modern times through Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," in the romance he was by no means the "false, fleeting, perjured" knight of the great Laureate. In the Welsh Triads and other early Welsh versions, he is one of the three "golden-mouthed heroes," one of the three most courteous. He was the eldest son of King Llew, Loth or Lot, a contemporary of Arthur, from whom he received Lothian. In Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gawain appears as Walwainus. The figure of Lancelot comes later, as we saw, into romance, and Lancelot and Gawain then become foes. When Tristram (or Tristan) was introduced into the circle of Arthur, later, the authors of the Tristan (under Henry II and Henry III) had, for some reason, a bitter spite against King Lot and all his family; and calumniated Gawain on every occasion. This vein of detraction pervades Malory's "Morte Arthur," where Tennyson, looking for a false fleeting knight, found the Gawain of the "Idylls".
In "Gawain and the Green Knight," Arthur's friend displays great courage, courtesy, tact, and chastity under severe temptations, while, if he falls for a moment short of heroic virtue, he redeems his character by frank confession. The story is too good to be spoiled by a brief summary: grotesque as is the figure of the gigantic Green Knight, who suffers no inconvenience from the loss of his head, the trials of Gawain are most ingeniously invented, and he overcomes them like the Flower of Chivalry. He is rewarded by the magical "green lace" which may, it has been suggested, symbolize the Order of the Garter (about 1345), though the ribbon of the Garter is now dark blue.
Pearl.