‘With Lel Letteres Loken’: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Line 35

Herman examines the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the nineteenth century, Frederic Madden, the poem's first modern editor, glossed loken as 'secured, inclosed, fastened'. Both Richard Morris and Israel Gollanez accepted this interpretation. In the twentieth century, J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon suggested the meaning 'linked' for loken and took the phrase as a reference to the alliterative verse technique. This interpretation has come to predominate, and in her widely read translation Marie Borroff enshrined it as 'linked in measures meetly / By letters tried and true'.