Stanza-Linking in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Phenomenology of Narrative

Abstract

Stanza-linking, also known as concatenation, is a stylistic flourish drawn into English from French and Welsh poetry. The poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight makes extensive use of stanza-linking and turns it to unusual poetic effects, principally montage and dialogue. In some twenty-six cases, one stanza overlaps diegetically with the next, with or without repeated words. This article enumerates and discusses these stanzaic junctures, concluding that the poet uses stanza-linking to make Gawain both less and more than the continuous romance narrative that it appears to be.