Near the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, when Gawain finally reaches the spot where he is to fulfill his covenant with the Green Knight, he exclaims in surprise:

He has been combing the wilderness for a place called the "grene chapel" (451); he finds instead "nobot an olde caue" (2182). His expectations are baffled because the name of the place bears no relation to its nature; in a literal sense, the name is untrue.2

    In a similar way, Gawain's name raises expectations which are not always fulfilled. When he comes to Bertilak's castle and it is discovered that "Gawain himself" is a guest, for example,

Those who know the name 'Gawain' believe that they also know the nature of the knight to whom the name refers; Gawain is known as "þat fyne fader of nurture" (919), the perfectly courteous knight. The men of the castle know this not by experience, seeing Gawain in love or in battle, but by repute, hearing stories of the deeds associated with his name.3

    The proper name places the knight in a context, social and historical, in which he can be known.4 Gawain's deeds have defined him as the sign of a certain sort of courtly perfection; his reputation--the public perception of his history--gives meaning to his name. When Gawain does not meet the expectations raised by this reputation, the validity of his name is questioned---he is reminded that he is Gawain, and his actions should conform to the stories told about him.

    In his first exchange with the Lady of the castle, Gawain confronts his own reputation:

--to which Gawain replies,

Gawain's actions have established his reputation--now his reputation has begun to shape his actions.

    On the next day the lady says, in effect, "I am amazed that you are Gawain; you have forgotten the lesson I taught you yesterday" (1481ff.). She offers a definition of knightly behavior, based on what she has heard and read: deeds of and for love are "þe tytelet token and tyxt of hir werkkez" ([1515] "The titled (definite) sign and text of their works"). The literary language here "werkkez" meaning both "deeds" and "writings"--suggests that she views the career of a knight as a sort of text, something to be read and interpreted. Gawain's reputation, as she reads it, is first among knights ("Your worde and your worchip walkez ayquere" [1521]); he must therefore act as knights are said to act. Once his deeds inscribed his reputation; now the text of his reputation prescribes his deeds.

    When Gawain shrinks from the first stroke at the Green Chapel, the Green Knight exclaims:

Like the chapel that is "nobot an olde caue," the experience of meeting Gawain does not fulfill the expectations raised by the knowledge of his reputation. The name should be appropriate to its referent; the reputation of the knight called 'Gawain' should accurately reveal the nature of the man who bears that name. Consistently, when his actions fall short of this reputation, it is the validity of Gawain's name that is called into question.

    Testing the truth of reputation is, of course, the motivation for the Knight of the Green Chapel's visit to Camelot. He comes in response to the high renown of Arthur's court:

When his outlandish appearance stuns the court into silence, he pointedly questions whether the knights deserve their great reputation:

We are reminded of the purpose of the Green Knight's challenge when Gawain has endured his test:

The whole action of the poem is motivated by an inquiry into the troth of reputation--testing the relation between the language used to describe Arthur's court and the things that language describes. Morgan and Bertilak are, as it were, scientists, testing a widely held hypothesis by

    The poet's interest in the reputation of the Round Table is fundamentally an interest in knowledge its acquisition, its circulation, and its relation to experiential reality. Traditional medieval epistemologies place considerable emphasis on the relation between the name of something and its nature, and by extension, between the knowledge of a name and the knowledge of a quality;6 Isidore of Seville states, "without knowledge of the name, the understanding of the thing would perish."7 If the connection between the knower and the object of knowledge is mediated by the linguistic sign, then the apprehension of truth depends upon the proper correspondence of res and verbum. By framing the question of reputation in terms of the validity of Gawain's name, the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight examines and challenges the propriety of language as a means of discerning truth.

    The test of trawþe in the poem, as has often been recognized, addresses this question of the reliability of language: whether or not a word (in the poem, a promise or contractual obligation) is necessarily connected to a thing (the deed that fulfills that promise or contract).8 The primarily moral meaning of trawþe--fidelity, loyalty, constancy, 'troth'--concerns the prospective connection between present words and future actions. In the fourteenth century, trawþe developed an additional objective sense fact, accuracy, correspondence to reality.9 This objective sense concerns the retrospective connection between present words and the things or actions which existed prior to the language used to describe them. These two senses are related by the fact that accuracy in language is ensured by duration, proper and unbroken emanation from an origin, not constituted at each moment of discourse by reference to extralinguistic reality. Trawþe is the temporality that validates referential language, the concord between intention and fulfillment, the harmony of beginning and end; falsehood is deviation from an original promise or purpose. The truth of a word depends on where it comes from; the propriety of signs, in the Middle Ages, is a question of fidelity to their origin.

    Medieval theories of language, incorporating two contradictory traditions of classical thought on the matter,10 recognized that names could arise either by nature or by convention: "Not all names were imposed by the ancients according to nature, but some according to convention, just as we sometimes give names to our servants and possessions according to our will. Thus it is that the etymologies cannot be discovered for all words, because sometimes names derive not from qualities, which are innate, but after the judgment of human will."11 Most medieval writers on language, including Isidore, managed to profess both ideas at the same time: they held that names are conventional in origin but may also bear a natural likeness to the thing named.12 Au-

    J. A. Burrow was, I believe, the first to point out that both the natural and conventional imposition of significance are figured in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.16 Burrow notes that the pentangle on Gawain's shield derives its meaning from an impositio secundum naturam, set by Solomon in accordance with its natural virtue:

The "endeles knot" (630) signifies the unbroken and interwoven nature of trawþe; like true language, the propriety of the pentangle's significance is not marred by rupture or disjunction in either its nature or its origin. The pentangle could not mean anything but what Solomon said it means; the sign was instituted by an Adamic intuition of its true nature. Furthermore, the pentangle is a sign proper to Gawain: "Þ:at bisemed þe segge semlyly fayre ... þe pentangel apendez to þat prynce noble" [622-23] ("That suited the knight very well ... the pentangle was proper to that noble prince.") The sign, its origin, and its referent are all harmonious; the token of trawþe is a true token.

    The pentangle as Gawain's sign is replaced by another "knot" (2376, 2487), the green girdle.17 "Unlike the pentangle," Burrow suggests, "the belt is not, so far as the poem is concerned, a 'natural' symbol. It does not, that is, have any particular symbolic value on the strength simply of its intrinsic natural properties."18 Its significance is determined by common consent. Yet the girdle does have a 'proper' significance,

    When the girdle replaces the pentangle as Gawain's sign, the poem has moved from a concept of signification dependent on trawþe, the continuity that binds the sign to its proper origin, to a purely conventional and relative view of language, value, and truth. If names signify only by agreement among men, then a sign may be wrenched from its first significance by any subsequent act of imposition; in the words of the poet, "þe forme to þe fynisment foldez ful selden" ([499] "The beginning and the ending seldom meet"). The girdle is the proper symbol of Gawain at the end of the poem precisely because it is a conventional sign--like the name Gawain, the emblem of perfect knighthood, its meaning is determined not by what it is, but by what it is said to be.

    These inquiries into the relation between the origin of a sign and its later valuation are framed by another tale of origins--that of Arthur, Brutus, and Troy.19 The poem begins with a list of ancient cities and their eponymous founders: Romulus-Rome, Ticius-Tuskan,20 Lengobardi-Lumbardi, Brutus-Britain. The medieval translatio imperii, the unbroken thread that binds the present to the past, is presented here as a process of naming. These names arise through an impositio ad placitum--Romulus "neuenes [Rome] his aune nome, as hit now hat" ([10] "[He] names [Rome] with his own name, which it now has"). This originary naming is also connected to acts of violence--from Troy, ''brittened and brent to brondez and askez" ([2] "broken and burnt to charred logs and ashes"), to the Italy of Aeneas, to Britain, "Where werre and wrake and wonder / Bi syþez hatz wont þerinne" ([16-17] ''Where war, destruction, and wonder have dwelt there in turn"). The fall of Troy, the originary act that gives rise to Britain, is seen as the consequence of "þe trammes of tresoun" wrought by Aeneas, whose breach of trawþe is "þe trewest on erthe" (3-4). The process of naming and founding that leads to Arthur's court is thus linked at the outset with rupture and violence, not with natural and continuous derivation from an original and proper source.

    With violence rather than nature thus placed at the beginning of history, the movement of the poem then forces us to consider the relation

    The poet begins by placing his story within this historical discourse; linking his "forme" to his "fynisment," he returns to his historical context after he tells of the fate of the green girdle:

The author is careful to stress the authority for his tale ("þe best boke of romaunce," "þe Brutus bokez þerof beres wyttenesse"); at the beginning of the text he emphasizes both the antiquity of his sources and his fidelity to them:

He begins and ends as if his story were a history.

    The poem's opening stanzas, however, move quickly from epic "seege" to romance "ferly," from the authority of ancient historical report to the elusive disavowal implied by the phrase "summe men hit holden" (28)? Like the Green Knight, the poet has heard of the renown of the Round Table history is another form of reputation:

Thus he ambiguously locates his authority somewhere between reliable report and tall tale, between history and reputation.

    Since history is no more than the language used to describe deeds in the past,24 historical truth is included in the poet's general destabilization of the natural connection between signs and their original referents. Gawain, Arthur, Brutus, and Troy are things we know of only by report; their present renown is the consequence of their past deeds, and the poem raises the possibility that the relation between deeds and renown may not be one of trawþe. Like other reputations in the poem, the meaning of these historical facts is not intrinsic and invariable but conventional and relative; historia is a branch of grammatica, the science of signs.25

    There are several good reasons, beyond simple skepticism, why a medieval poet might question the univocal significance of historical truth. The medieval sense of history, like our own, was undeniably political: the past gave legitimacy to the present. In a narrow sense, this use of the past is seen in royal charters and genealogies, or records of monastic benefits and foundations, but these are only the most obvious politically motivated historical reconstructions.26 The past was both precedent and authority for the present--the legendary story of the founding of Britain by the Trojans, and the stories of Arthur's European conquests, were used to legitimize the English monarchy, a way of imposing continuity and direction on the violent and disrupted history of the island.27 The Arthurian legend was still used in the fourteenth century as a form of political self-justification;28 the connection between the alliterative Morte Arthure and events in the latter fourteenth century, for example,29 suggests that the story was constantly reviewed and revised in contemporary terms--it still functioned as a potent analogue to political and historical circumstances.

    To justify a present order one must assert the truth of its vision of the past; because history is used to justify the present, however, the past is as variable as the pragmatics of politics. The Anglo-Normans revised English history to place themselves within it;30 the story of Brutus was used as an authority for both sides during the Hundred Years' War: "in the Débat des hérauts de France, the Englishman argues that the wars of Brutus in Gaul justify the undertakings of his modern heirs; to which the Frenchman replies that the Bretons are descendants of Brutus but the English are not."31 To the nonpartisan observer, these revisions and conflicts in the reconstruction of the historical record might suggest that the meaning of the past is imposed by the present, not naturally derived from the events themselves.

    History is the foundation on which the present builds itself; as political factions compete for precedence, history is rewritten--different moments chosen, new episodes interpolated, deeds and characters interpreted differently. If the past, like Gawain's career, is a text, it is the present that writes it.32 Its value thus depends not on some inherent and self-evident significance but on our perception; historical trawþe is conventional, not natural.

    History is subject not only to revision but to interpolation; the stories of Troy and Arthur were the background for the great outpouring of romance adventures in the later Middle Ages, fictional accretions around the kernel of narratio rei gestae.33 The legend of Arthur was elaborated in both historical and romance accounts;34 the romances that arose from supposedly historical events and persons blurred the distinction between truth and fiction,35 and tended to create, in Lee Patterson's words, "an instability that itself put into question not merely the authenticity of a particular narrative, or even of historiography as a whole, but the legitimacy of the historical life itself."36

    Historia and fabula were uneasy cohabitants; a concept of history emerges only in opposition to a notion of fiction from which it must carefully and self-consciously separate itself. Merging fictional into factual narrative, disrupting the lineage that is the guarantee of history, is dangerously close to lying, a breach of trawþe in both its moral and objective senses. In his vehement attack on Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Brittaniae, William of Newburgh blames Geoffrey for mixing fabula with the historica veritas of Bede.37 The author of the alliterative Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy complains of this mixture of historia and fabula in his own sources: