THE TURKE AND SIR GAWAIN: FOOTNOTES

1 Who deserve to have their prowess tested

THE TURKE AND SIR GAWAIN: NOTES

Abbreviations: P = Percy Folio; BP= Bishop Percy's marginal notes in the MS; M = Madden's edition; F = Furnivall's edition. See Select Bibliography for these editions.


10 ff. The appearance of a strange, potentially threatening figure as preliminary to a great feast occurs frequently in Arthurian romance. See note at line 169 below. The "Turk" as emblem of festive exoticism occurs also in civic pageants at Gloucester; in 1595 the chamberlains paid ten shillings to cover expenses "for a wagon in the pageant and for the turke," the latter clearly a figure whose lavish dress conveyed his exotic, and entirely conventionalized, strangeness (Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire: Records of the Early English Drama, eds. Audrey W. Douglas and Peter Greenfield [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986], p. 313). The "Turk" also appears as a character in many of the folk plays that originated in the Middle Ages. Surviving versions of Sword Dances, St. George Plays, and other mummings include "The Turk," "The Turkish Knight," "The Turkish Champion," "Turkey Snipe," and so on, a boisterous figure who stands as the enemy of the plays' comically chivalric Christian heroes (see Alex Helm, The English Mummers' Play [Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1981], pp. 34, 76, 80, with other examples as well).

12 came. The word has been written over, perhaps by BP. P may originally have read taite, which M gives. F reads the corrected form as cane (which he notes means came).

18 iff. I follow M's reading; F reads Gift, taking the ampersand for "g".

25 Give . . . hand. M: Gine . . . hands.

35 your. P: yo^u; F reads the abbreviation as your, which I follow.

39 thrise. P: 3ise.

40 on middlearth. M: in middlearth.

51 northwards. M: northward.

56 Hawtinge. M: Lawtinge, and adds Lawghinge? in his note.

59 part. M: that (the letter "thorn" with superscript "t"), though F's part seems accurate.

62 shalt. M: shall.

74 beene stood. M's reading of the line ends with beene, though additional (undecipherable) letters appear at the end of the line; here and at later breaks, F seems to have been able to make out more of the text, and I follow his reconstructions.

75 made them noe answere. M's line begins noe answere.

77 The mysterious adventures within this depopulated Castle, which is inside a hill and surrounded by merke (line 69), parallel events in other romances, especially (in the motifs of dangerous feasts) those associated with the Holy Grail. The entrance to the other world through an earthly, seemingly natural portal - "a hill," "The earth opened and closed again" (lines 66-67) - occurs in a wide variety of narratives beginning with Homer and Virgil, but is especially common in stories with Celtic connections. In the Breton lai, Sir Orfeo, the hero rides "In at a roche [cliff]" to enter fairyland (ed. A. J. Bliss, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1966]; see Bliss's comment, pages xxxviii ff.).

79 horsse. M: horse. Whether the Turk lacked a horse during the entire journey (see line 51) or has lost his horse only at this point seems uncertain, but what is clear is the contrast between Sir Gawain as knight - mounted warrior - and the Turk as powerful, and even magical, but not chivalric. In line 114, the romance significantly notes that Gawain must abandon his horse. Jeaste makes a point of noting the discomfiture that follows upon each combat when a knight (including Gawain, in the last encounter) loses his horse.

82 look. M: looke.

113 Ther stood a bote and. M's line ends with stood a.

121 hee. M: hoe, in the sense of "stop" ("whoa").

124 we. P: he; I emend for sense.

see. P: doe; I emend for rhyme.

128 Here, and at lines 143, 195, and 210 occur defective three-line stanzas, all linked by tail-rhyme to the previous or succeeding stanza (making four potential nine-line stanzas). Other defective stanzas (e.g., at lines 37 and 74) are clearly the result of losses in the MS. See also line 219 and note.

129 the King of Man. Despite the characterization of the King as a heathen soldan (line 130), the reference seems clearly to locate this enemy on the Isle of Man in the Solway Firth; this is (as line 51 suggests) off the northwest coast of England, near Scotland. The Isle of Man is opposite Cumberland, the county which contains Carlisle, Inglewood Forest, the Tarn Wathelene, and other locations repeatedly associated with Arthurian legend in the popular Gawain romances. Man was one of the "Southern Islands," in contrast to the northern islands (which included the Orkneys, by tradition one of Sir Gawain's ancestral homes). The Manx people, originally of Celtic descent, intermarried with Scandinavian invaders, and lived under their own king, who did homage to the kings of Norway and Scotland. English control of Man began about 1290, during the reign of Edward I, though it passed back to the Scots several times during the next half century. Several English knights ruled the Manx people (by appointment of the king or purchase of the Manx crown) before 1400; in 1406 Henry IV made Sir John Stanley the hereditary King of Man, and members of this family governed the island through the eighteenth century. The chivalric exploits that led the king to appoint Sir John as ruler of the Manx people parallel those celebrated in romances (see General Introduction, pp. 33-34).

144 Wee shall be assayled. Though this form might, in its context, be taken as "assailed" - i.e., "we shall be attacked before we finish" - I have interpreted it as a spelling of "assoil," meaning "absolve." The Turk's concern for Christian absolution suggests the superficiality of his role as exotic stereotype within the narrative. He serves clearly as a "stage Saracen," whose strangeness works to set off the hero and offset some of the plot's predictability. Within the action, though the Turk seems Gawain's adversary, he cooperates in the adventures he orchestrates to advance Christendom: he calls the King of Man a "heathen soldan" (line 130, and note at line 129), destroys the King when he rejects Christianity (lines 263 ff.), and spontaneously calls upon the Virgin Mary before his transformation. The covert alliance of the Turk with the conventional Christian ethos of the poem is only thinly veiled, therefore, by his exotic appearance.

150 The line breaks off, with fragment of a word beginning hi visible.

154 that Bishopp Sir Bodwine. This reference to a Baldwin who is by title both a bishop and a knight seems unarguably to assume a single identity for the Bishop Baldwin who accompanies Gawain in Carlisle, and the knight who exchanges vows with Arthur, Kay, and Gawain in Avowyng. See Carlisle, line 28 and note, and Avowyng, line 74 and note.

160 ff. This attack on the spiritually or clergy in England and not att the temporaltie seems, both in its very terms and in its unmotivated appearance at this point in the poem, to be a post-Reformation insertion into the text, and in this resembles the outburst in Carle, lines 269 ff.

169 Gawain's refusal to begin the feast until he witnesses an adventure is a commonplace of French and English chivalric romance. It occurs notably at the outset of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and in Malory's tale of Sir Gareth (Works, p. 293); the beginning of the present poem more distantly echoes the convention. See note at line 10.

172 thee. P: then; I emend to restore the common idiom.

181 seventeen. M: ix.

192 axeltree. The word refers literally to an axle for wheels; here it seems to be an instrument - a huge staff perhaps - used by the Turk in the tennis game and in combat against the giant.

194 assayed. M: aflayed.

194 ff. The three lines that follow, and constitute a separate short stanza, continue the sentence begun in line 194. The sense is, "He shall be more fully put to the test before he leaves - as I've said, so help me - with the three adventures, and no more, with me as witness, right now."

195 soe mote I the. M and F read tho, which almost rhymes with more (line 196). The letter form is sufficiently ambiguous to allow reading the; though not at all a rhyme, grammatically and idiomatically this is precisely the form the context demands.

199 the. F reads they, which seems possible, though there is a blot on the line.

220 bowles. M: bowler. The last line of this stanza is lost because of a missing half-page, but the rhyme scheme of the surviving five lines is defective.

222 Thris. P: ?is.

226 them. M: then.

232 gay. M suggests gray.

250 The Turk seems to rematerialize at this point, as the giant's dismay suggests.

257 wondorous. M: wonderous.

261 Eatein. M: eaten.

262 The King's pointed rejection of Christianity, symbolized by his spitting on Gawain, casts him in the role of heathen soldan (line 130), as adapted from popular verse romances associated with Charlemagne and the conquest of the Saracens (to whom the Turk would be equivalent). In The Sowdone of Babylon, when Laban, the chief enemy of the Christian West, is offered baptism, he spits into the font, and is promptly beheaded. See line 3167 of Alan Lupack's edition of The Sultan of Babylon, in Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990), p. 92.

269 washe. M: was he.

271 The act of disenchantment, where by delivering a return blow Sir Gawain changes the Turk back into Sir Gromer, is a version of the folk motif called the Beheading Game. It vividly recalls the beheading scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Carle, and calls attention to the missing scene in Carlisle. Moreover, the metamorphosis to a true self as the climax of the romance resonates as well with the endings of Ragnelle, Marriage, and The Greene Knight.

292 Te Deum Laudamus. This is a Latin hymn of praise to the Father and Son, often (though falsely) attributed to St. Ambrose and associated with the baptism of St. Augustine. It dates probably from the fifth century, and was widely familiar from its use in the daily offices and in the liturgies for various feasts and ceremonies. It was also frequently used to conclude popular festivities and plays, where its singing emphasized the solidarity of the Christian community. The transformed Sir Gromer's spontaneous performance of the hymn here signals his restoration to Christian knighthood.

299 many a worthy man. Apparently the defeat of the King of Man, with his preternatural powers, together with the transformation of the Turk, liberates those other knights and ladies whom the King had defeated, captured, and enchanted; see above, lines 226 ff. The actual restoration of these knights and ladies to their proper identities parallels the scene in Carlisle (lines 517 ff.), and its counterpart in Carle (lines 409 ff.), where the Carle shows Gawain the liveries and bones of the knights he has slain. Unlike the beheading of the Turk, the disenchantment of the Carle, who also had been "transformed soe" (Carle, line 410), does not result in the liberation of a tyrant's victims, only in prayers for their souls. The freeing of the captive ladies (to which Sir Gromer refers in lines 304 ff.) resembles the episode at Le Chastel de Pesme Avanture in Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain (lines 51 ff.), which is reproduced in the English Ywain and Gawain. In the English version, Ywain arrives at the Castel of the Hevy Sorow (line 2933), confronts a porter, defeats two "fowl felouns," and releases the women of "Maydenland" (line 3010): " 'Maidens,' he said, 'God mot yow se, / And bring yow wele whare ye wald be' " (lines 3355-56). This episode in Turke also recalls Lancelot's release of Gawain's brother Gaherys and sixty-four other knights of the Round Table from captivity within Sir Terquyne's castle, and his freeing of "three score ladyes and damesels" by the defeat of "two grete gyauntis" (Malory, Works, pp. 265-72).

301 ff. The willingness of the transformed Sir Gromer to share a meal with Gawain contrasts with the Turk's interruption of the court's feast (lines 10 ff.) which he is not asked to join, and with the apparent refusal of the Turk to partake in the meal he serves Gawain at the depopulated castle (lines 83 ff.). The shared meal signifies the restoration of Gromer's proper individual identity, and the confirmation of the generalized cultural identity he and Gawain take part in as Christian knights.

310 There they wold . . . abide. This line is not now at all legible. I follow the text as given by F. M provides no text for this line.

318 they. P: the.

320 Sir Gromer. This knight of the Round Table is apparently identical with Sir Gromer Somer Joure of Ragnelle (see line 62 and note) and Malory's Sir Gromore Somyr Ioure (Works p. 1164), an ally of Galeron of Galloway (see Awntyrs, line 417 and note).