An allegory is a narrative in which the agents and action, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived not only to make sense in themselves, but also to signify a second, correlated order of persons, things, concepts, or events.

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With the waxing dominance of Christianity in late fourteenth-century England, the culture’s expectations had evolved to encompass new, more complicated views on human interrelations and the world view in general. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight represents a new conception of the heroic ideal, women, nature, and narrative technique. A comparison/contrast to Beowulf illustrates these changing ideals.

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Somewhere between the merry sensuality of Ovid and the ecstatic spirituality of Platonism is the tradition of Courtly Love. Courtly love resembles the Ovidian convention in that it is not supersensous: its aim is physical consummation, its object of love physical beauty. It differs from the Ovidian tradition in its interpretation of the nature of love. In the Courtly system, love is seen as an ennobling passion, the lady as an object of worship, and the conventions of courtship as religious rituals. The lady, furthermore, is venerated not simply as an ideal of physical beauty, but as an image or reflection of an ideal of spiritual beauty.

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Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, at least from a textual standpoint, remains unfinished. At least two tales are incomplete or interrupted, the Cook’s Tale and the Squire’s Tale, the order of the tales has been debated, and some of the tales are seemingly thrown in at the last minute. And within our current deconstructionist zeitgeist, critics like Catherine Belsey suggest that readers should not seek “the unity of the work, but the multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot describe, and above all its contradictions” (365). So despite the obvious textual flaws and a multiplicity of meaning and interpretation, many thematic functions of The Canterbury Tales are, however, complete — at least in an Aristotelian sense in that they imitate life and its contradictions. Life rarely suggests unity intrinsically, but must have unity imposed upon it for its denizens’ comfort. We, as humans, decide that we will take the pilgrimage of life to its ultimate conclusion. We decide to impose that order on our ostensibly quixotic existences — we decide to play the game.

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SGGK is written in long stanzas and short, metered and rhymed, couplets, called “bob” and “wheel,” at the end of each verse. The alliteration, free from rhyme and rhythm, in the long stanzas is obviously influenced by Old English, while the “bob” and “wheel” signifies a Middle English influence.

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