Pentangle Symbolism In 'Sir Gawain And The Green Knight'

Chandler Monroe
Mr. Brown
British Lit
January 25, 2016

Morgan, Gerald. "The Significance of the Pentangle Symbolism in 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'." The Modern Language Review 1979: 769. JSTOR Journals. Web. 26 Jan. 2016.
The article I read focuses on the symbolism of the girdle, the pentangle. Also we will take a quick glimpse of the relation between the hunts and the encounters between Sir Gawain and Lady Bertilak. Through out parts 3 and 4 of the story you see a lot of this symbolism take place.
The girdle has a few symbolic meanings. One of symbolic meanings is a sexual meaning. That the girdle is a trophy, it is not clear who the so called “winner” of the trophy is. Lady Bertilak gave Sir Gawain the girdle for protection. So when Sir Gawain faces the Green Knight he will not die.
The second symbolism the

article talked about is the pentangle. The pentangle that is on Gawains shield is seen by many as a sign of power over evil and perfection. There is 46 lines that describe the pentangle. There is no other object described in that much detail. The pentangle is described as a “ sign from Solomon”. Solomon, in 10 BC was the third king of Isreal, Its said that Solomon had a pentangle on his ring to save him from demons.
Scholars have created a parallelism between the 3 hunts and the 3 encounters between Lady Bertilak and Sir Gawain.

The first hunt is of the deer. In this time period deer hunting had to be done by rules just as courtship. The story describes the deer hunt has non violent and with a air of relaxation. The first seductive seen is the same way. Nothing really goes on and its not intense. Moving on to the second hunt, the boar. A boar hunt is more challenging than the deer hunt. They run the boar until its cornered and expect a fight. The boar is aggressive and forward about not going down with out a fight. Lady Bertilak like the boar is more forward about sexual relation with Sir Gawain. The last hunt is of the fox. The fox is one of the hardest animals to hunt. The same way a fox looks for ways to save his life so does Gawain. This is why Gawain takes the girdle. Also a fox uses different tactics to avoid hunters that can be unpredictable. In the third seductive scene gawain finds lady Bertilak unpredictable and challenging to resist her. Her dress shows more skin in this scene this is one of her tricky tactics to try and win Gawain

over.
Throughout Sir Gawain and the Green Knight we see many more symbolic meanings. You could pick this story apart for days to reveal all these meanings but the ones I've chosen from the article seem most crucial for a discussion in class.