Structure and Symmetry in Sir Gawain

No one who reads Sir Gawain and the Green Knight fails to notice its elaborate, symmetrical structure. Everywhere in the poem is balance, contrast, and antithesis. Things are arranged in pairs — there are two New Year's days, two “beheading” scenes, two courts, two confessions; or in threes — three temptations, three hunts, three kisses, three strokes of the ax. These intricacies are unobtrusively integrated with events and themes; and perhaps just for that reason, critics have taken note of them only piecemeal and in passing, often with reference to the poem's mythic or symbolic content. In what follows I intend to examine the narrative units based upon structural parallels in Sir Gawain, and to suggest in what way they coincide with the divisions of the poem marked by the ornamented and colored capitals of the manuscript. To do so, however, I shall have to turn first to the symbolism of the poem; for what I wish to argue is that its most protracted structural parallel depends upon the juxtaposition of two symbols, the shield and the girdle.