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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: the Role of Honor

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Submitted By flyboynaec
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Mason Floyd

ENGL 2220

Dr. Rhonda Sanford

7 November 2012

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Role of Honor

Honor has ancient roots in the history of man, but few periods from our past stand in comparison to medieval times. During this time of kings and castles stood a value system spawned out of the sheer and intense belief of honor. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight excellently encapsulates this immense respect for an honorable and noble lifestyle. Chaucer endowed English literature of the time with foundation and became a fore-father of English poetry. “Chaucer was the first to conceive of poetry in English not as the product of an isolated, provincial nation located in an obscure corner of Europe but as a vital agent in the fourteenth-century emergence of the vernacular as a literary language” (Simon pg. 657). In each of the four fitts composing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one can easily interpret that Chaucer’s writing is developed on the basis of honor and a chivalrous approach to life. It takes no time in reading through the beginning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to notice the relevance and importance of honor in the culture encompassing King Arthur’s time. While preparing to feast, King Arthur, his knights, and numerous other respectable individuals of the kingdom are seated not at random nor by age, but by honor. It seems as if an individual’s seat at this dinner, through honor, represents their social status in the kingdom. Chaucer states, “Their merrymaking rolled on in this manner until mealtime, when, worthily washed, they went to the table, and were seated in order of honor...” (Simon pg. 729 lines 71-73). Chaucer goes on to explain that this seating arrangement was appropriate due to the presence of Guinevere at the feast. It takes little interpretation of the later text and, with a pre-existing

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