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Notes
1. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd ed., ed. Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). All quotations from the poem are taken from this edition and are cited by line in the text;, all translations are my own.
2. As the site of Gawain's confession, penance, and absolution, of course, the name is more appropriate--but Gawain does not know this yet.
3. Gawain's reputation in the medieval romances is discussed in B. J. Whiting, "Gawain: His Reputation, His Courtesy and His Appearance in Chaucer's Squire's Tale," Medieval Studies, 9 (1947), 189-228. Whiting notes moments in French romances in which Gawain faces dilemmas much like the ones he undergoes in the Middle English poem (e.g., Perlesvaus 1.95.1814-16).
4. See, e.g., Reto R. Bezzola, Le sens de l' aventure et de l' amour (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1947), pp. 33-61. J.A. Burrow, in A Reading of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), notes (p. 59f.): "A knight who reveals his identity to others gives them, as in the modern metaphor, a 'handle'--something to get hold of. They may know his strengths and weaknesses by report; or his name may itself, more or less obviously, reveal them." Burrow appropriately cites Perceval 561-62 at this point:. "Et ce sachiez a la parsome, / Par le sornon connoist on l'ome."
5. The mention of Morgan recalls Arthur's origins:
Ho is euen þyn aunt, Arþurez half-suster,
Þe duches do3ter of Tyntagelle, þat dere Vter after
Hade Arþur vpon, þat aþel is nowþe. (2464-66)

("She is your aunt, Arthur's half-sister, the daughter of the duchess of Tintagel, who had Arthur--who is now so noble--with dear Uther.")
The illegitimate origin of Arthur returns to challenge his present glory and fame, the outgrowth of that questionable lineage.
6. See Marsha Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge, rev. ed. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983), on the linguistic bias of medieval epistemology.
7. "Nisi enim nomen scieris, cognitio rerum perit" (Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sire originum libri xx, ed. W. M. Lindsay [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911], I.vii). R. Howard Bloch, in Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), comments on this (p. 56): "for Isidore there can be no distinction between speech and its referent, between the arts of language and the physical sciences. His ontology is essentially an ontology of words."
8. See the discussion in Burrow, pp. 42-44.
9. Burrow's statement (p. 43 n.) that OED "Branch II senses

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('Conformity with fact', 'accuracy', etc.) are not recorded before the late sixteenth century" is inaccurate; OED citations for the adj. true suggest that the semantic range of the word had expanded to include objective as well as moral senses by the fourteenth century. The word in this sense is found in the poem alongside the more common soþ; see, e.g., 1050: "'For soþe, sir' quoþ þe segge, '3e sayn bot þe trawþe.'"
10. See R. H. Robins, Ancient and Medieval Grammatical Theory in Europe with Particular Reference to Modern Linguistic Doctrine (London: G. Bell, 1951), and W. S. Allen, "Ancient Ideas on the Origin and Development of Language," TPS, 1948, pp. 35-60.
11. "Non autem omnia nomina a veteribus secundum naturam inposita sunt, sed quaedam et secundum placitum, sicut et nos servis et possessionibus interdum secundum quod placet nostrae voluntati nomina damus. Hinc est quod omnium nominum etymologiae non reperiuntur, quia quaedam non secundum qualitatem, qua genita sunt, sed iuxta arbitrium humanae voluntatis vocabula acceperunt" (Isidore, I. xxix).
12. See Bioch, pp. 30-63, on medieval notions of origins, etymologies, and proper discourse.
13. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, II.xxv.38, tr. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 61.
14. "[v]oces sunt emulae rerum" cited in Bloch, p. 48.
15. After the opinion of Cratylus, a character in Plato's dialogue of the same name, who holds that names are replicas of the substances they name. See Plato, Cratylus, tr. B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937).
16. Burrow, pp. 187-89.
17. R. A. Shoaf, The Poem as Green Girdle: Commercium in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1984), p. 75, touches on this point.
18. Burrow, p. 158.
19. Interestingly, Wynnere and Wastoure makes a similar connection between the originary treason of Troy and the decline of truthfulness in language:
Sythen that Bretayne was biggede, and Bruyttus it aughte,
Thurgh the takynge of Troye with tresone with-inn,
There hathe selcouthes bene sene in seere kynges tymes,
But never so many as nowe by the nynde dele.
For nowe alle es witt and wylle that we with delyn,
Wyli wordes and slee, and icheon wryeth othere. (1-6)

("Since Britain was settled and Brutus possessed it, through the taking of Troy with treason, there have been marvels seen in several kings' times, but never even a small part of those seen now. For now we all deal in cleverness and desire, wily and sly words, and everyone deceives everyone else.")
A Short Good Debate between Winner and Waster, ed. Sir Israel Gollancz (Oxford, 1921; reissued Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1974).
20. Theodore Silverstein, "Sir Gawain, Dear Brutus, and Britain's Fortunate Founding: A Study in Comedy and Convention," Modern Philology, 62 (I965),194-96, discusses the name "Ticius" and its connection to "Tuskan" in line 11; he proposes ''Tirius" (or, less plausibly, "Tuscus") as the correct reading; in any of these words, given the lax requirements of phonological probability practiced by medieval etymologists, the two names should be understood to be connected.
21. Chrétien de Troyes begins his tale of Cligés by stressing the antiquity--and thus the truth--of its source: 'This story, which I intend to relate to you, we find written in one of the books of the library of my lord Saint Peter at Beauvais. From there the material was drawn of which Chrétien has made this romance. The book is very old in which the story is told, and this adds to its authority. From such books which have been preserved we learn the deeds of men of old and of the times long since gone by" (in Arthurian Romances, tr. W. W. Comfort [London: J. M. Dent, 1975], p. 91).
22. "Apud veteres enim nemo conscribebat historiam, nisi is qui interfuisset, et ea quae conscribenda essent vidisset. Melius enim oculis quae fiunt deprehendimus, quam quae auditione colligimus. Quae enim videntur, sine mendacio proferuntur" (Isidore, Etymologiae I.xli). This is repeated almost verbatim in the twelfth century by Hugh of St Victor, De scripturis et scriptoribus sacris iii, cited in M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, ed. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 166 n. 10.
23. John M. Ganim, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 61-62.
24. This is the classic definition given by Isidore: ''Historia est narratio roi gestae per quam ea quae in praeterito facta sunt, dignoscuntur" ("History is the narration of events by which things that were done in the past are sorted out") (I.41).
25. See Isidore, I.xli.2: "Haec disciplina [historia] ad Grammaticam pertinet, quia quidquid dignum memoria est litteris mandatur" ("History is a branch of grammar because whatever is worthy of memory is committed to writing"). Among the more famous comparisons between language and the unfolding of history is that found in Augustine's Confessions XI.xxviii.38, where he discusses temporal distension through the example of a recited psalm. He concludes: ''the same thing holds throughout the whole age of the sons of men, the parts of which are the lives of all men" (tr. John K. Ryan [New York: Image Books, 1960]).
26. See V. L. Galbraith, "Historical Research in Medieval England"

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in Kings and Chroniclers: Essays in English Medieval History (London: The Hambledon Press, 1982), pp. xi, 1-46, on the proliferation of local (monastic, cathedral, etc.) histories in later Middle Ages, made possible in part because of new modes of thought associated with literacy and the use of documentary evidence.
27. Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 203.
28. Patterson, pp. 205-6, and sources cited there, esp. William Matthews, The Tragedy of Arthur: A Study of the Alliterative "Morte Arthure" (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1960), pp. 187-90.
29. See, among others, Larry D. Benson, "The Date of the Alliterative Morte Arthure," in Jess Bessinger and Robert K. Raymo, eds., Medieval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein (New York: NYU Press, 1976), pp. 19-40; George R. Keiser, "Edward III and the Alliterative Morte Arthure," Speculum, 48 (1973), 37-51; and John Findlayson, "Morte Arthure: The Date and a Source for the Contemporary References," Speculum, 42 (1967), 624-38.
30. See Patterson, p. 179, who cites William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum as a good example; see also Ralph H. C. Davis, The Normans and Their Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976).
31. Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 266; cited from Bernard Guenée, L'Occident aux XIVe et XVe siècles: Les États (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1971), p. 126.
32. This question has been addressed in contemporary studies of historiography: "no given set of casually recorded historical events can in itself constitute a story; the most it might offer to the historian are story elements. The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like--in short, all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play" (Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978], p. 84; emphases original).
33. Robert Hanning suggests that Geoffrey of Monmouth was instrumental in introducing the tension between personal desires and national progress that developed into the ahistorical concerns of vernacular romance: "At no point in a romance of Chrétien de Troyes or a lai of Marie de France can we speak of an historical level, or point to a protagonist who symbolizes or exemplifies a national virtue. Ironically enough, the social context of the romance hero is often the court of King Arthur--an Arthur borrowed from Geoffrey, but one from whom all British historical associations have been carefully pruned" (The Vision of History in Early Britain: From

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Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966], p. 175).
34. Historical versions of the Arthur legend were usually linked, in poetry, to the Troy story and the legends of Britain's founding. The alliterative Morte Arthure, for example, ends with these lines:
Thus endis Kyng Arthure, as auctors alegges,
That was of Ectores blude, the kynge son of Troye.
And of Sir Pryamous the prynce, praysed in erthe;
Fro thythen broghte the Bretons all his bolde eldyrs
Into Bretayne the Brode, as þe Bruytte tellys. (4342-46)

("thus ends King Arthur, as authorities claim, who was of the race of Hector, the son of the king of Troy, and of Sir Priamus the prince, praised on earth--The Britons brought all their bold men thence into Britain, as the Brut tells.")

The Alliterative Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition, ed. Valerie Krishna (New York: Burt Franklin and Co., 1976). Such historical situation is seldom found in the Arthurian romances.
35. The clearly drawn distinction is found, for example, in Isidore, I.xliv (which in turn derives from Cicero's De inventione 1.27ff): "Nam historiae sunt res verae quae factae sunt;... fabulae vero sunt quae nec factae sunt nec fieri possunt, quia contra naturam sunt" ("Histories are things which have really happened ... fables are things which neither happened nor could have happened, because they are unnatural").
36. Patterson, p. 204.
37. Noted in Patterson, p. 201 n. 8.
38. The Gest Historiale of the Destruction of Troy, ed. G. A. Panton and D. Donaldson (London: EETS 39 and 56 [1866, 1874]), 11. 33-42.
39. Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968 [1969]), pp. 17-22.