SOURCE: Lenz, Joseph M. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” In The Promised End: Romance Closure in the “Gawain”-poet, Malory, Spenser, and Shakespeare, pp. 31-44. New York: Peter Lang, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Lenz examines section by section the circular structure of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Very few poems are more structurally sound than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poet blends a variety of disparate sources—the folklore motifs of the exchange of blows and the exchange of gifts, the courtly love game, the Arthurian setting and characters—into a marvelously wrought tale whose whole, as Marie Borroff tells us, is “far greater than the sum of its parts.”¹ Because of its stable and intricate structure, few poems are more satisfying than Gawain. The association of structure and satisfaction implies that there comes a point when we recognize the interrelation of the various...