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Article Excerpt
The significance of the pentangle emblazoned on Gawain's shield has often been a matter of dispute. Some readers, A. D. Horgan suggests, 'are inclined to regard it as a learned irrelevancy or as bearing, at best, only remotely on the central concerns of the poem'; (1) for others, the pentangle emerges, not just as a commanding heraldic device, but also as 'the symbolic expression of the poem's idea', something that is 'central to the understanding of the poem'. (2) But even those accounts of the pentangle that accept its importance scarcely agree about why it is so, and precisely what its five points signify.
About three of the five pentads, the poet is generous with regard to clues, although such generosity is not without its own complications; accordingly, the five wounds of Christ, the five joys of the Virgin, and the five virtues are adequately explicated in secondary material. The last of these, in particular, presenting as it does a complex amalgam of moral and courtly virtues, has proved a magnet for interpretation. Norman Davis's suggestion, that the virtues 'do not seem to have been chosen by the poet with especially close regard to the adventure which follows, or to the particular qualities for which Gawain is later praised', has not been universally accepted. (3) Gerald Morgan, for example, who has argued at length for the centrality of the pentangle, finds Davis's suggestion a 'disturbing' judgement that 'it is quite impossible to accept if we are to continue to think of the poem as a masterpiece'. (4)
However much attention has been paid to the final three groups, the first and second receive considerably less comment. Indeed, it is difficult to escape the feeling that for some commentators they have no particular significance, but are there simply to make up the numbers. In this article, I want to suggest a reading of Gawain's 'fyue wyttez' that acknowledges the artistry and design of the poem, and prevents us from concluding that a poet whose skills both in storytelling and in handling of structural detail are so conspicuous elsewhere should suddenly be trapped by the demands of an elaborate numerical scheme that he had freely adopted. My suggestion is that the phrase should be taken as referring to the inner wits, or 'gostli' wits, that is, to 'the powers of the mind that process sensory information' (MED, s.v. 'wit', 4 d).
When we look at either glosses on or translations of the line in question (line 640), there is general agreement that Gawain's five wits are to be interpreted as his five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. The most fully argued (and widely accepted) interpretation of the five wits as five senses is that of R. W. Ackerman, who explains the phrase in terms of its frequent occurrence within penitential literature, and then seeks to establish a connection between the five senses and the five wounds of Christ and the five joys of Mary through common penitential contexts. (5)
However, in spite of the wealth of examples Ackerman provides, his argument is not without some problems. First, almost all the examples he cites have to do with some confession of, or warning against, the misuse of the senses. 'Mercy [??]at I haue mis-spent / Mi wittes fyue' is a recurrent idea. (6) But what we have here is not a confession of 'myspendyng of .v. wyttes', but a declaration that the bearer of the pentangle 'watz funden fautlez' in this respect. The poem may develop in a way that eventually requires a double confession of Gawain, but at this point there is nothing penitential about the context, and nothing to justify the attribution to the poet of 'a wholly conscious effort to remind his audience of the confessional'. (7) The pentangle is a symbol of human perfection, not an iconographic call to repentance. The suggestion that Mary Braswell makes, that the pentangle somehow embodies 'penitential doctrine', jumps too readily to an interpretation that the poet is far from forcing upon us. (8)
Secondly, the connections Ackerman proposes between the five senses and the third and fourth pentads, the five wounds of Christ and the five joys of the Virgin, are tenuous to say the least and scarcely provide convincing evidence that these three pentangle elements feature together in penitential literature. In the cases of the Vernon manuscript, the penitential sermons, and the Cursor mundi, the co-occurrence of such material may be nothing more than accidental, and with regard to Mirk's Instructions for Parish Priests, the relationship Ackerman proposes simply does not exist.
Moreover, in spite of the undisputed evidence that 'fyue wyttez' can, in penitential literature, refer to the five senses, the question remains...
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