On Monday I awoke to a beautiful
spring day, and with intellectual prospects to match it. My project for the next little bit is the
polishing of an essay about “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a wonderful poem
by the only medieval English poet who can be regarded as Chaucer’s peer both in
his manner and his matter. Unfortunately
the works of the anonymous “Gawain-Poet”
are even less known to general readers than the poetry of Chaucer. The Gawain-Poet
wrote in the old alliterative style and in a difficult Midlands dialect replete
with unfamiliar words, many of Scandinavian origin, that found no permanent home
in Modern English. Even so, many people
know the outlines of the mind-boggling story: a beheading contest initiated by
a ferocious green knight who appears on
horseback (horse also green) in King Arthur’s dining room. Needless to say beneath the exciting surface
story lurks a complex moral allegory.
Sir Gawain, who rather rashly puts himself forward as the champion of
the Round Table, undergoes a series of related tests, though critics can agree
neither on what the tests test, exactly, or on what grades to assign Gawain for
his efforts.
The Gawain-Poet was a learned theologian, with a sub-specialty in
architectural mathematics. All of his
poems are “numerological” in structure, a feature of especial importance in his
conception of this great romance. If
there is a single key number it is five. The poem is composed of 101 stanzas, each ending in a five-line "tail", and with a total line count of 2530. The stanzas vary in length, but they average jut over 25 lines each. The interior of Gawain's shield bears a private devotional image of the Virgin. Its exterior is decorated with a pentangle, or
five-pointed star, the moral meaning of which is developed by the poet at some
length. One thing the poet is covertly
conveying is that he has constructed his poem ad quadratum—an architectural term I shall explain in a moment.
The once-magnificent medieval
cathedral of Trondheim (Niardos) in Norway was by the middle of the nineteenth
century in very bad shape. The Norwegian
government decided, out of national historical rather than religious piety to
restore it, and in this regard they sponsored an architectural competition to
come up with a plan. It was in this
context that a quasi-mystical architectural scholar, Fredrik Lund (1863-1943),
undertook through archival study and on-site investigation to attempt to
discover the precise original plan of the building.* Though still regarded as kooky by many sober
architectural historians, his book is full of golden nuggets strewn among the
pyrites. Ancient Latin architectural
manuscripts speak of building ad
quadratum. The verb quadro meant to square or give regular
shape to, and a quadrum was a
square or other regular rectangular solid, in masonry a precisely squared
stone. But Lund deduced that by the
technical phrase ad quadratum the
master masons meant construction according to certain precise geometrical
principles of proportion deriving from ancient Pythagorean mathematicians and
visually evident in surviving examples of the sacred architecture of both the
Greeks and the Romans. It included
prominent exploitation of the “line of beauty” or “golden ratio” mathematically
achieved in an irrational number (now known as phi, 1.16803…) by the
procedure of division of a line in mean and extreme ratio. Concrete manifestations of phi exist throughout created nature, and
are closely related to the spatial representations of the famous numerical
“series” identified by the thirteenth-century Italian mathematician, Leonardo
Fibonacci: the “Fibonacci numbers”.
Though the
literary applications of architectural harmonies are necessarily limited,
obviously artistic use of the golden ratio is found in many places in ancient,
medieval and especially Renaissance European poetry. It is an artistic commonplace. But I think the Gawain-Poet took matters a step further, recognizing in the
pentangle a “natural” and universal emblem of artistic harmony and, by
extension, moral order itself. “The
temple was supposed to be the material image of the mystery of existence”
writes Lund. “Its proportioning was
therefore established according to an irrational measure, in an ascending,
harmonic, geometrical progression, from the unit to the totality as this
progression appears in the pentagram,
which was the symbol of the harmonious system of the Cosmos, the masterpiece of
the universe”. The master builders
knew, as the Gawain-Poet knew, that
the geometric construction of the pentangle within a regular pentagon would
unleash cascades of ascending visual harmonies corresponding to the
mathematical laws within which they are based.
According to Lund’s theory, the architects’ ascending harmonic,
geometrical progressions in stone were structural in both concrete and ideal
expression.
In the
Christian era, Scriptural exegesis joined with Pythagorean number theory to
form a single stout cord of meaning. The
poet tells us that the pentangle was devised by Solomon, builder of the
biblical Temple, as a “token of truth”.
The poetic connection between stone-masonry and the philosophical quest
would eventually become widespread in the secular world through the Free Masons
of the Enlightenment. Such theories were
“esoteric” not because they involved magic or the supernatural, but because
they dealt with an inner knowledge of
Nature possessed only by a learned few.
Every Christian could claim the protection of the Virgin, whose image
adorns the inner face of Gawain’s shield.
The pentangle is inscribed on its outer side, its public side so to speak, and like Gawain the reader must come to know its deeper meaning by trial and error.
Few of us
when invited to examine the delicate loveliness of a nautilus shell, are likely
to think, “O, sure, 1.16803 and all that.”
A normal response is the enjoyment of thrilling beauty. In like manner only the leaden hand of an
intrusive literary analysis could encourage a reader to a mathematical first response to Gawain. What the reader sees
is a beautifully crafted, brilliantly plotted, structurally precise,
suspenseful and action-packed story. As
its “meaning” is debated by the romance’s characters themselves, the reader
surely has no obligation to have a single fixed opinion. But whether in the nautilus shell or in the
construction of the poem, there is a there
there. According to Shelley, poets were
the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
But the medieval poet could rightly hope to surpass even that grandiose
claim. The medieval poet could claim to participate, in howsoever small measure, in the artistic activity
of the divine Creator of all things visible and invisible.
*
Fredrik Macody Lund, Ad Quadratum: A
Study of the Geometrical Bases of Classical & Medieval Religious
Architecture (London: Batsford,
1921)
