Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde. Jaargang 112

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Felicity Riddy
Giving and receiving
Exchange in the Roman van Walewein and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight^*

Abstract - Resemblances between the Roman van Walewein and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may derive from their shared background in French romance, though conceivably the English poet knew the Flemish one. The closest resemblance between the two poems is their use of gift-exchange, a concept used in anthropology. Exchange provides both with a dynamic principle of plot-construction, which creates the optimistic tone of Walewein and a future-oriented masculine subjectivity in its hero. Dynamism, optimism and aspiration can be related to the urban-courtly milieux in which the poems were probably composed, and the poems themselves are products of cultural exchange.

To the reader familiar with Middle English romance, the Roman van Walewein is both curiously familiar and curiously strange: familiar because of its sympathy for the figure of Walewein/Gawain, and strange because of its fantastical optimism. Anglocentric criticism has long held that there is a specificially English perspective on Gawain, which retrieves him from the progressive degradation he undergoes in the French tradition, between the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and the prose Tristan. The fact that Gawain occupies a central role in a large group of Middle English romances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries seems to provide evidence of this; no other Arthurian knight receives so much attention in England, including Arthur himself.¹

The revelation which the Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein contains for the previously ignorant English reader is that the attitude to Gawain which we have parochially believed to be English turns out also to have been Dutch. Walewein, which is probably a century or so older than any of the surviving English Gawain romances, is a work of considerable elegance and sophistication; the only thing comparable to it in English is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. None of the English Gawain romances is earlier than the fourteenth century, and several are of the fifteenth. Some survive, possibly in debased forms, only in the seventeenth-century Percy Folio Manuscript. Yawain and Gawain, which is an English rendering of Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, made in the north of England in the first half of the fourteenth century, is probably the earliest, but despite the courtliness of the original, Ywain and Gawain lacks the aristocratic tone of either Walewein or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

* This is the third contribution in the series ‘De Walewein in internationaal perspectief’; see TNTL 111 (1995), p. 193-205, 310-322

1 See B.J. Whiting: ‘Gawain: His Reputation, His Courtesy and His Appearance in the Squire's Tale’. In: Medieval Studies 9 (1947), p. 189-234, at p. 194. Whiting's survey of romances in several languages does not cover the Roman van Walewein. The Middle English Gawain romances include Ywain and Gawain, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Awntyrs off Arthure, The Grene Knight, The Turk and Gowin, Sir Gawene and the Carle of Carlelyle, The Avowyinge of Arthur, The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell, The Marriage of Sir Gawaine, and The Jeaste of Syr Gawayne. Golagrus and Gawain is Scottish. For bibliographical details, see A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050-1500, I, Romances. Ed. J. Burke Severs. (New Haven, 1967).

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So there is in Middle Dutch a poem which precedes any of the English Gawain poems, which is more sophisticated than almost all of them, and which exalts Gawain, against the French tradition, as a model of courtliness. It is tempting to entertain the possibility that Walewein was known to English readers. Anglo-Flemish literary relations in the later Middle Ages have not been adequately studied, though the presence of sizeable Flemish communities in England is well known. The fact that the surviving manuscripts of Walewein - both of Flemish provenance - date from 1350 or later, means that the text was presumably circulating in Flanders in the period when Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was composed.² Anglo-Flemish contacts in the fourteenth century extended from the nobility to the artisans: Edward III, who was married to Philippa of Hainault, took the title of king of France at Ghent in 1340, and his son John of ‘Gaunt’ was born there later that year. The vagaries of the war between England and France produced a pattern of shifting Flemish allegiances between then and the end of the century, but trade between the regions was always important, particularly for the English cloth industry.³ Just as Chaucer's knowledge of Italian literature, it has been argued, may have been enhanced by his acquaintance with Italian merchants in London,⁴ there is also a possibility that Anglo-Flemish trade contacts produced literary contacts as well. The two languages, Middle English and Middle Dutch, are very close even to the modern reader, and there were probably more people in fourteenth-century England who understood Flemish or Dutch than Italian. It is not inconceivable that the poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, about whom nothing at all is known, encountered the Middle Dutch Walewein: it is precisely the kind of work we should expect him to be interested in, after all. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is written in the dialect of the north-west midlands, but the patronage of the poem has been sought among the aristocracy who moved back and forth between the royal court in the south-east and their own estates.⁵ If the poet was employed in the household of one of these landowners, there is no need to see him as living out his days in provincial isolation. Members of aristocratic families had London residences as well as rural castles and manor-houses. And if Chaucer went on diplomatic missions to Italy, Spain and France, could the Gawain-poet not have travelled to Flanders? Bart Besamusca's suggestion that the thirteenth-century patrons of Flemish romances should be sought at one of the points at which lesser nobility and urban patriciates come together,⁶ and Walter Prevenier's argument that there were ‘no clear divisions between noble and urban consumers of culture’,⁷ are particularly telling both for Walewein and for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It has already been argued that the latter may have been composed for an audience - presumably in London or Chester - familiar with mercantile discourses as well as courtly ones, and one of the purposes of this paper is to suggest that both poems are the products of exchange between differing social and cultural groups.⁸

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins, like Walewein, with a feast at Arthur's court. Into the New Year festivities rides a green knight on a green horse, carrying a great axe. He challenges Arthur's knights to prove their worth by giving him a blow with the axe. A condition of the challenge is that whoever gives the blow must present himself at the green knight's abode a year later to receive a blow in return. Arthur is about to take up the challenge when Gawain offers himself in Arthur's stead, and cuts off the green

2 The date of composition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is no more certain than that of the Roman van Walewein. The sole manuscript is probably not later than around 1400, and the poem is generally agreed to have been composed in the last quarter of the the fourteenth century. The most recent attempt to challenge this dating is that of W.G. Cooke: ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Restored Dating’. In: Medium Aevum 58 (1989), p. 34-48, which places it in the mid-fourteenth century. My quotations are from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. [Ed.] J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, [rev.] Norman Davis. Oxford, 1967.

3 See England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages. [Ed.] Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul. Stroud and New York, 1995. Several of the essays in this collection stress the linguistic and cultural connections that existed alongside the trading links between the two regions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In her introduction, Caroline Barron writes: ‘There was contact and exchange between England and the Low Countries at every level. Whereas more “doche” probably came to settle in England than vice versa, yet more Englishmen and women are likely to have passed through the Low Countries as travellers and pilgrims. At the highest social level, aristocratic marriages facilitated the exchange of people, expensive artefacts, ideas and skills between countries’ (p. 14).

4 See Wendy Childs: ‘Anglo-Italian Contacts in the Fourteenth Century’. In: Chaucer and the Italian Trecento. [Ed.] Piero Boitani. Cambridge, 1983, p. 65-87.

5 See especially Michael J. Bennett: Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Cambridge, 1983.

6 Bart Besamusca: ‘De Vlaamse opdrachtgevers van Middelnederlandse literatuur: een literair-historisch probleem’. In: Ntg 84 (1991), p. 150-162.

7 W. Prevenier: ‘Court and City Culture in the Low Countries from 1000 to 1530’. In: Medieval Dutch Literature in Its European Context. [Ed.] Erik Kooper. Cambridge, 1994, p. 11-29, at p. 23.

8 See Jill Mann: ‘Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. In: Essays in Criticism 36 (1986), p. 298-318.

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knight's head with a single blow of the axe. Unfazed, the green knight picks up his head and rides out of the hall, eyes rolling. A year later Gawain puts on his armour, with his shield that bears a pentangle on the outside and an image of the Virgin Mary on the inside; he leaves Arthur's court, amid the lamentations of his friends, to receive the return blow. On his way he gets lost in the wilderness, but he reaches a castle at which he is hospitably received by its lord, Sir Bertilak, and his wife, who has a grotesque old female companion. He is invited to stay over Christmas, and enters into an agreement with his host whereby Sir Bertilak undertakes to give him each evening whatever he has won at the day's hunting, in exchange for whatever Gawain has acquired while staying at home in the castle. For three days Sir Bertilak goes out hunting each morning, while his wife attempts to seduce their guest in her husband's absence, telling Gawain that she knows his reputation as a lover and inviting him to live up to it. On the first two days Sir Bertilak brings back a deer and then a boar, which he presents to Gawain; in return Gawain gives him the kisses which are all he will accept from Sir Bertilak's wife. On the third day Gawain finds the wife's attentions particularly hard to resist but he manages to do nothing more than receive a kiss. She gives up the attempt to seduce him and instead gives him a green girdle which she tells him will protect him against violence. Mindful of his imminent encounter with the green knight's axe, Gawain accepts it, and does not hand it over to Sir Bertilak that evening in exchange for the fox which Sir Bertilak gives him. The next day he leaves for the green chapel which is the green knight's abode. He meets the green knight in a particularly wild spot and is told to prepare his neck for the blow. At the green knight's first attempt Gawain flinches, but he stands firm at the second. This time the green knight feints and does not hit Gawain. At the third blow he brings the axe down on Gawain's neck, but he merely nicks the flesh. To Gawain's utter chagrin, the green knight then reveals that he is Sir Bertilak; the first two strikes with the axe were harmless because Gawain had truthfully exchanged what he won on the first two days in the castle; the nick on the third signified Gawain's failure to hand over the green girdle. The green knight also tells Gawain that the whole thing had been engineered by the grotesque old woman, whom he identifies as Morgan la Fée, out of hatred for Guinevere. The green knight laughs forgivingly, but Gawain cannot forgive himself and returns to Arthur's court wearing the green girdle as a badge of shame. When he tells them what has happened, his admiring fellow courtiers also adopt it, as an emblem not of shame but of honour.

There are certainly some striking similarities between the two poems: in both an opportunity for ‘adventure’ is presented to Arthur's court, for which Gawain volunteers in Arthur's place; in both Gawain is received in the courtly household of an otherworldly shapeshifter: Sir Bertilak in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and King Wonder in Walewein; both poems make play with the fact that Gawain is already known by reputation to the other characters, though in Walewein the hero consistently confirms that reputation, while in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight he resists it. Both poets represent aristocracy in terms of material luxury - sumptuous feasts, elegant clothes, fabulously ornate beds - and in terms of a social style in which elaborate rituals of hospitality are de rigueur. Both poets are interested in the boundary between animals and humans: the enchanted fox, Roges, in Walewein and the beasts of the hunt in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.⁹ The river as an impassable barrier, which occurs several times in Walewein, is not used in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but is deployed by the Gawain-poet as a central symbol in Pearl. And there are similarities of tone in the delicate humour with which the predicaments of both heroes are presented by the poets. Now these similarities can probably be explained

9 See my ‘The Speaking Knight. Sir Gawain and Other Animals’. In: Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend. [Ed.] James Carley and Martin Shichtmann. New York, 1994, p. 149-162.

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by reference to the poem's common sources in French romance; the work of Ad Putter and others on the background to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight¹⁰ demonstrates just how familiar the poet must have been with twelfth and thirteenth-century French romances in verse and prose, and thus how deeply conventional in many ways the poem is. The same has been observed of Walewein, which has been described as ‘almost a compendium of mediaeval romance fiction.’¹¹ Nevertheless, given that the resemblances between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French romances are, for the most part, general rather than specific, I can see no reason why we should not entertain the possibility, at least, that a Middle Dutch romance circulating in Flanders might also have been an intermediary between twelfth and thirteenth-century French romance and fourteenth-century England. Both the Gawain-poet and the authors of Walewein are, after all, engaged in the same project of creating a courtly literature in a vernacular of lower status than French.

One of the most striking similarities between the two poems lies in the use they make of the exchange of gifts in constructing and energizing their plots. The idea of exchange seems particularly relevant to the cultural milieu I have just been positing. It is a key concept in social anthropology and has been particularly studied in archaic and non-western societies, though it is a universal activity. John Davis has recently defined it thus:

Exchange is interesting because it is a chief means by which useful things move from one person to another; because it is an important way in which people maintain and create social hierarchy; because it is a richly symbolic activity - all exchanges have got social meaning.¹²

The trading of the marketplace is only one kind of exchange, as Davis points out: ‘most of us engage daily in formulaic domestic exchanges, buy drinks for friends, knit scarves for nephews, give and receive presents at Christmas’.¹³ These exchanges can be categorised and analysed in terms of the objects exchanged, the intended results, the relations between exchangers, and the complex meanings they carry. I wish to develop the idea of exchange as a way of exploring some of the similarities and differences between Walewein and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.¹⁴ A reading of different kinds of medieval evidence - chronicles, wills, registers, and so on - shows clearly that gift-exchange was a potent means of establishing networks of power and reciprocity in and between aristocratic and urban milieux,¹⁵ and it is quite frequently represented in art. My concern is with giving and receiving as a process, as a source of narrative energy, rather than as a static icon. The many illustrations that survive in medieval manuscripts in which an author is depicted as a donor, offering his or her book to a patron, are what I call static icons of exchange. The reciprocity that the gift engenders is not depicted, and so we can only guess at the relationships of reward, protection or patronage of which the presentation of the book is only a part. This kind of illustration, intentionally or not, flatters aristocratic narcissicism by constructing the gift as a one-way process. By contrast, in both Walewein and Sir Gawain the exchanges are explicitly reciprocal and generate the action; they are what move the plot forward. The effect is very different from what Northrop Frye has called the ‘and then’ structure of romance, where episodes are simply juxtaposed with one

10 Ad Putter: ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ and the French Arthurian Romance. Oxford, 1995. See also W.R.J. Barron: ‘Chretien de Troyes and the Gawain-Poet: Master and Pupil or Twin Temperaments?’. In: The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes. [Ed.] Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly and Keith Busby. Amsterdam, 1988, vol. II, p. 255-84, and Marjory Rigby: ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Vulgate Lancelot’. In: Modern Language Review, 78 (1983), p. 257-266.

11 By G.L. Kittredge: ‘Arthur and Gorlagon’. In: Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 3 (1903), p. 149-275, quoted by David F. Johnston in his edition and translation of Penninc and Pieter Vostaert: Roman van Walewein. New York/London, 1992, p. xxiii. All quotations from the Middle Dutch text, and translations into English, are from this edition.

12 John Davis: Exchange. Buckingham, 1992, p. 1. This introductory study is particularly useful in its emphasis on the universality of exchange.

13 Davis: Exchange (n. 12), p. 3.

14 For an extended reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in terms of Marcel Mauss's interpretation of gift exchange, see Britton J. Harwood: ‘Gawain and the Gift’. In: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 106 (1991), p. 483-499. Harwood assimilates gift exchange to the noble virtue of largesse.

15 For example, the fourteenth-century ‘King John cup’, owned by the borough council of King's Lynn and West Norfolk, may have been given to the town by John IV, duke of Brittany, who owned an estate near King's Lynn from c. 1378, in return for gifts he received from the citizens. See Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400. [Ed.] Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski. London, 1987, p. 435-436. John of Gaunt's register for 1382 shows him paying to have the queen's coat of arms engraved in the bottom of two silver bowls which he had recently been given by the citizens of London, and which he gave in turn to the queen on her coronation; see John of Gaunt's Register, 1379-1383. [Ed.] E.C. Lodge and R. Somerville. London 193. 2 vols. (Camden Society 3rd ser., 42, 47), vol. I, p. 232.

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another in a paratactic sequence and in which there is no energizing forward drive.¹⁶

The exchanges in Walewein have received a good deal of attention (though not in these terms) since W.P. Ker first identified the story as being essentially the same as that of the Grimm brothers' Golden Bird; A.M.E. Draak has demonstrated very thoroughly that Walewein is the earliest example of a folktale type in which the fulfilment of one task is contingent upon the fulfilment of another.¹⁷ Arthur offers to exchange his kingdom for the chess set; in turn King Wonder offers to exchange the chess set for the Sword with Two Rings; then King Amoraen offers to exchange the Sword with Two Rings for Ysabele, daughter of King Assentijn. Gawain undertakes these exchanges and brings the chess set, and the princess, back to Arthur's court. Moreover all these objects also participate in the energy of exchange: they are not merely commodities but are given agency, offering themselves as gifts. The chess set flies through the air to Arthur's court; the sword leaps of its own accord to do obeisance to Walewein; the princess chooses as her lover, not the king who sends Walewein for her, but Walewein himself. Her agency is crucial, since it allows the princess to give herself to Gawain: if she did not, then his abduction of her from her father's castle would be, in medieval terms, a rape, and the circle of giving and receiving would be broken.

These are merely the major exchanges, however: the structure is reiterated throughout the poem. The fox, for example, exchanges his services to Gawain for the resumption of human form, while the dead Red Knight exchanges his services to Gawain for Christian burial; hospitality is constantly dispensed in return for Gawain's acts of prowess. In fact, read in this way, we see that the whole poem continually represents relations between people as established and identified by networks of giving and receiving that symbolize status, power, reciprocity and obligation. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which also has folktale parallels, the two major plot elements are the Beheading Game - an exchange of blows - and the Exchange of Winnings Game; this reciprocity has already been established in the opening scenes in which Arthur's court engage in the ‘formulaic domestic exchange’ of New Year's gifts. Here, too, the objects of exchange are mobile and not static, though in a different way from in Walewein: the meanings of the green girdle, for example - love-token, talisman against death, badge of shame, badge of honour - change as it passes from the lady, to Gawain, to his fellow knights.

In both poems the structures of giving and receiving produce narratives that end where they began; indeed it could be said of them both that the circulation of gifts is made explicit and literal in the circularity of their plots. In Walewein the circularity and coherence of the plot are particularly striking because of its length. The drive of the action is towards a reassuring sense that the world which seems so open at many points in the narrative - with its use of sea and water symbolism to represent the unbounded and mobile geography of desire - turns out to be a place inhabited by people the hero has already met and in which no encounter is wasted. It is this feature which gives the poem its peculiar optimism, to which I shall return later. There are some untidinesses in Pieter Vostaert's conclusion, but the general impression is that he grasped very clearly the principles which Penninc had established. So, for example, Walewein's last great test of prowess, which begins at line 10333 when

16 ‘Romance moves from one discontinuous episode to another, describing things that happen to characters, for the most part, externally’: Northrop Frye: The Secular Scripture. London, 1976, p. 47.

17 See W.P. Ker: ‘The Roman van Walewein’. In: Folk-Lore 5 (1894), p. 121-27; A.M.E. Draak; Onderzoekingen over de ‘Roman van Walewein’. Haarlem, 1936. The story of Walewein is Aarne-Thompson tale-type 550.

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it is discovered that an army has pitched camp outside the castle at which Walewein is staying, brings together two plot strands and completes two exchanges: Walewein's host, the castellan, is the squire to whom he had given Gringolet nearly nine thousand lines previously, while the army is led by the duke whose degenerate son had been killed by Walewein about two thousand lines before this encounter. The episode of the squire is in Penninc's part of the poem; the episode of the degenerate knight is in Pieter Vostaert's; both of these seem at the moment of their telling to be merely extraneous adventures and only turn out much later to have generated the reciprocities of obligation and vengeance. The circularity and coherence of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are also striking; the Green Knight's revelation, later on, that it has all been engineered by Morgan la Fée in order to harm Guinevere, which can appear to be an excrescence, is in fact an example of the same principle operating in Walewein whereby everything turns out to be functional. The fat lady in Sir Bertilak's hall is not, after all, a superfluous stranger but someone whose hostilities Arthurian romance knows very well.

If the plots operate in terms of principles of parsimony, nevertheless the exchanges themselves are founded upon excess. Throughout Walewein, aristocracy is coded as excess, whether it is a matter of the superlative luxury of the court of King Wonder, or King Assentijn's castle with its twelve moated gates, at each of which are stationed eighty men-at-arms through whom Walewein succeeds in fighting his way. The virtue of mesure is quite alien to this world. Arthur's desire for the chess set is wholly gratuitous. His willingness to give his kingdom in exchange for it is a kind of potlatch, what anthropologists call a ‘total prestation’.¹⁸ In its symbolically self-destructive extravagance¹⁹ it is a bit like Richard II of England's razing of Shene Manor after his queen, Anne of Bohemia, died there in 1394. All communities produce goods in excess of their needs, and exchange those that they do not consume themselves. Nevertheless, within communities different groups behave differently. As John Davis remarks: ‘Children do not produce much, nor do Princes, and the incidence of exchange in their lives is greater than for other individuals.’²⁰ That is, for princes exchange itself is an aspect of aristocratic excess. In Walewein, aristocracy exchanges superfluous chess sets, swords and women; this is how it is defined. Ysabele is of course excessive: the king who desires her does not live to marry her, and she is superfluous to Walewein's identity, as is revealed by the doubt expressed by Pieter Vostaert at the end of the poem as to whether or not Gawain takes her as his wife:

Niet wel en wetic der waerhede hier
Oft hise trouwede die ridder fier
Maer ic wille laten dese saken
Liden ende een ende maken. (11169-72)

[I do not now well the truth of it, / whether that brave knight married her or not; / but I would leave the matter for what it is / and make an end to the tale.]

Walewein is not required to be a married man like Yvain, nor is this a maturation story, like Le Bel Inconnu or Sir Thomas Malory's ‘Tale of Sir Gareth’ in Le Morte Darthur, which ends with the marriage of the hero. Ysabele is last seen returning to

18 Potlatch was first described by Franz Boas: Ethnology of the Kawakiutl. Washington, 1921. Its meaning has been the subject of continued debate. ‘Total prestation’ is the phrase used by Marcel Mauss to denote a gift which involves the total social personality of the exchanger. Insofar as Arthur offers his kingdom for the chess set, this seems to be ‘total prestation’. See Marcel Mauss: The Gift. Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London, 1954.

19 Self-destructiveness seems to be an essential element of potlatch. I call Arthur's pledging of his kingdom ‘symbolic self-destruction’ because he undertakes to give away his kingdom for the chess-set only after his death.

20 John Davis: Exchange. Buckingham, 1994, p.2.

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Endi with her father, with or without Walewein. She circulates among men of status, rather like the kula of the Trobriand Islanders first recorded by Bronislaw Malinowski,²¹ and in the end is redundant to the plot.

The larger structures of both poems are, as I have already said, circular, and the route by which gifts circulate brings Walewein/Gawain back to where he started. Nevertheless there are crucial differences. The exchanges out of which the plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is created are closed, involving promises between only two men (though Gawain thinks they are three), whereas the exchanges which structure the Roman van Walewein are open. A trade with one man leads to a further trade with another. These exchanges are dynamic; they move forward, driving the hero from one scenario of desire to another. This suggests that as well as seeing them as means of structuring the plot, we might also look at exchanges from the point of view of the hero. Walewein is a third-person narrative, but the attention of the poem is on him, and events are often seen through his eyes.²² Walewein himself can be read not solely as a character seen from the outside who acts as an exemplar of courtesy (which is the way he is often treated), but also as a character whose perspective on events is adopted by the narrator, and who is thus a focalizer of a certain kind of masculine subjectivity.²³ The gift-exchange plot produces a subjectivity which is youthful, forward-looking, aspiring, ambitious, and mobile. Exchange entails risk and the courting of danger, crossing the boundaries between the known and the unknown; it marks the future out as the space in which transformations may take place, where everything may be different, where actions may be performed that not only confirm the past but reshape it.

I have already referred to the peculiar optimism of Walewein, which derives, I believe, from the combination of the circular structure (the hero comes home) and the parsimony of event (everything is meant), with this orientation towards the future. The narrative plays with the plot devices which elsewhere in Arthurian story are tragic, like the moment at which the lovers, Walewein and Ysabele, are caught together in the chamber (8077 ff.), which seems to echo the scene in La Mort le roi Artu in which Lancelot and Guinevere are trapped by Agravain and Mordred. Indeed Walewein's role in relation to Ysabele, as the young man who falls in love with the woman intended for the king on whose behalf he goes to seek her, is a rewriting of Tristan. Nevertheless, in Walewein these plot devices have happy outcomes. If Walewein retrieves Gawain from degradation, it also retrieves Arthurian narrative from tragedy. Tragedy is about being answerable to the past: about Arthur in the end facing his own misbegotten son across the battlefield, as he does in La Mort le roi Artu. Tragedy assumes a continuity of some sort of identity, harking back in this case to the Merlin, where Mordred's conception and birth are recorded. Tragedy is by definition backward and not forward-looking; it remembers. The comedy of exchange looks forward; it plays with unstable identities and loves its shapeshifters: the Green Knight who turns out to be Sir Bertilak; the fox, Roges, who is a prince. Walewein is about the promise of a future which is not utterly free - tracks are laid down in it by the exchanges and bargains into which the characters constantly enter - but which is the space of achievement, of ambition, of enterprise, risk and hope. Days pass but not seasons; neither Penninc nor Pieter Vostaert has the Gawain-poet's

21 Bronislaw Malinowski: Argonauts of the West Pacific. London, 1922. Kula is a trading system in accordance with which objects travel in a circle back to the initial exchanger.

22 Examples from early in the poem are lines 217-18 (Walewein sees the chess-set floating before him); lines 244-6 (Walewein sees the mountain which seems to reach to heaven); lines 315-6 (Walewein inside the mountain sees a point of daylight ahead). Other perspectives are permitted, as when Arthur and his court watch Walewein disappear from view (lines 203-231). Nevertheless the focus is still on Walewein here: he is the object of perception rather than its subject.

23 I follow Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan: Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London, 1983, p. 72, who points out that ‘speaking and seeing, narration and focalization, may, but need not be, attributed to the same agent. The distinction between the two activities is a theoretical necessity’. The distinction seems useful here: the narrator is the one who speaks, while the focalizer is the one who sees. Walewein is frequently the focalizer.

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more pessimistic sense of the inexorable pressure of time and the ruin it brings: ‘And al grayes the gres that grene watz ere, / Thenne al rypez and rotez that ros upon fyrst’ (527-28). In Walewein day becomes night, but time is experienced as the dimension of change, not of decay. Walewein often rises early, and new days dawn bright with the promise of what might be achieved. The whole narrative shapes itself to accommodate his desires. Georges Duby has linked the plots of twelfth-century French romances with the predicament of younger sons of noble families;²⁴ perhaps the self-confident ambition of this thirteenth-century Flemish romance, in which the hero's prowess earns him the right to a kingdom, picks up some of the drive to achievement that must have powered the social and economic transformation of Flanders and the struggles among the oligarchies of the Flemish towns, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.²⁵ Read in this way, Walewein is not an exemplar of courtly conduct but a way of writing social energy. His is the consciousness of the upwardly mobile as well as of the nobility.

Both Walewein and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are apparently courtly poems - at the beginning of this article I described them as sharing an aristocratic tone - and the exchanges that activate their plots are represented as being within the courtly order. Nevertheless, their courtliness should probably be seen as their dominant, rather than their sole, effect. Another way of putting this might be to suggest that courtliness is the product of negotiation between different social groups and is not just the preserve of the aristocracy. There was, historically, no such thing as an exclusive aristocracy or a self-contained court, after all: the noble style of life was the result of a shared (though not democratic or organic) enterprise, maintained in households employing cooks, grooms, laundresses and potboys who were paid in kind and in coin - that is, who were involved in gift exchange with their aristocratic employers. The wines, silks, and jewels which are the hallmark of aristocratic luxury were the products of exchange in towns like Ghent and London where nobles, burgesses, artisans, hawkers and beggars negotiated the same social space, asserting power, obligation, friendship, deference, and a whole range of other possible relationships. It is by the dynamic relations of the marketplace that courtly culture is sustained. I want to conclude by looking at the idea of exchange metaphorically, and arguing that the poems themselves are the products of cultural exchange, of negotiations between competing elements in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Flemish and English societies, both aristocratic and non-aristocratic.²⁶

The gifts - the chess set and the Sword with Two Rings in Walewein, and the green girdle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - which seem to be emblems of the aristocratic value system, are a point at which the city and the court come together. The chess set is of ivory inlaid with precious stones, and the pieces are more valuable than all of Arthur's kingdom (58-62). The sword is of red gold, with a belt of shining gold lace; we are told that the clasp ‘hadde ghecost menich pont’ [had cost many a pound] (3328), reminding us that the magical markers of aristocratic status are also goods which are bought and sold. The green girdle is ‘Gered...with grene sylke and with gold schaped, / Not bot arounde brayden, beten with fyngrez’ (1833-34) [Fashioned with green silk and trimmed with gold, set only at the edges, applied by hand]. The ‘fyngrez’ are those of the embroiderer whose skills took years of apprenticeship to acquire.²⁷ This emphasis on craftsmanship is struck throughout Walewein, where

24 Georges Duby: Chivalrous Society. London, 1977.

25 An excellent introduction to the period for English-speaking readers, with a good bibliography, is David Nicholas: Medieval Flanders. London, 1992.

26 My position is slightly different from that of W. Prevenier in the article cited in n. 7 above. Prevenier argues that bourgeois readers of courtly literature are imitating aristocratic life-styles; see ‘Court and City Culture, in the Low Countries from 1110 to 1530’, p. 23. My argument is that aristocratic life-styles are inseparable from the skills of the artificers who create them; that is, that in some sense the bourgeois is always an element in the aristocratic life-style.

27 Caroline Barron (unpublished conference paper entitled ‘Further Thought on Growing Up in Medieval London’) has identified three surviving indentures apprenticing girls as ‘silk-throwsters’. For a discussion of embroidery and silkwork in London, see Kay Staniland: Medieval Craftsmen: Embroiderers. London, 1991.

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courtly luxury is continually represented in terms of skilled artifice, as in the description of the gold tree in the arbor in Endi where princess Ysabele is to be found:

Hi es beneden herde groot
Ende al van finen goude root
Mi wondert hoet noit man ghedochte
Dat hi den riken boom gewrochte...
Up elken telch al sonder waen
So staet een gouden voghelkijn
Dat zere proper es ende fijn
Die boom es rikelic ende diere
Ende wel gheraect in alre maniere (3505-08; 3514-18)

[It is very broad at the base / and made entirely of fine red gold. / It amazes me how anyone could have devised / to fashion such a magnificent tree /...on every branch, without fail, / there is perched a little bird of gold, / beautiful and finely crafted. / That is a precious and costly tree, / well wrought in every way].

The implication is that tree and bird require taste and sophistication in their manufacture as well as in their display, and capital for their production as well as their purchase. In this way, Walewein makes explicit what courtly culture usually seeks to suppress: the labour and skill of the artificer that go into creating its dreams of elegance. The third major object of exchange, the princess Ysabele, is described at lines 3420-50 as the product of another kind of cultural negotiation, between different kinds of narrative and different versions of the heroine. We can identify two of these narrative kinds: the classical and the Arthurian. She is fairer than Venus, Olympias of Rome, and the twelve Roman goddesses; she is also fairer than the two Ysolts from the Tristan legend. In addition, she is fairer than three women from some other source or sources which have not been identified: Torabene, Verghine and Barbeline. If these are Dutch, then Ysabele is a means of holding together at this moment quite diverse elements in contemporary culture, associating with the classical and the Arthurian another vernacular narrative kind.

This same approach can be extended to the poems in which these gifts figure. They are, likewise, the creations of an energizing social, cultural, and commercial exchange. Walewein and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are not merely courtly; both of them are the products of negotiation between different elements - social groups, kinds of language, genres - which must have been, historically, in contest with one another in the milieux in which the poems originated.²⁸ The idea of contest is central to both poems, and in both the hero responds to the hostility of one world for another. These different, contestatory elements include, along with the courtly and mercantile, French and Dutch/English, romance and folktale, secular and religious,²⁹ oral and literate,³⁰ high and low, male and female, and so on. The narratives themselves could be described as marketplaces in which exchanges between all these diverse elements are transacted. Although we know so little for certain about their origins, Walewein and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight surely reveal in their structure and language both the complexity and the dynamism of the ‘urban-noble’ cultures in which they first circulated.

28 R.H. Hilton has recently summarised urban conflicts as: ‘those between urban communities and various representatives of feudal interests; those between the crafts and their allies against the mercantile oligarchies; and those within the crafts between the merchants and the journeymen....[W]e have to take into account also the involvement of other social strata, such as the unskilled workers outside the craft structure, and the marginals, not to speak of splits within the main classes’. See English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, 1992, p. 127.

29 The most striking use of a religious discourse in Walewein is in the episode in which Walewein persuades the dying Red Knight to repent his sins. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the use of religious discourses in the description of the pentangle and elsewhere has been the subject of much critical discussion.

30 Both poems, although manifestly literary in their intertextual allusions, also associate themselves with oral culture. Penninc's preface to the Roman van Walewein opens with the remark that many of Arthur's adventures have never been written down (that is, that they circulate orally), and then represents himself as sitting sleepless over his book night after night. The narrator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight promises to tell his tale to an audience of listeners ‘as-tit / As I in toun herde / with tonge’ (31-2).

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Adress of the author: Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, York, England