Two Notes on <i>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</i>: l. 34 ‘Lel Letteres’ and l. 193 ‘Dok’

Much debate has been occasioned by the poet’s reference, at the start of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to the form of his ‘laye’ as he alleges both to have heard it recited ‘in toun […] With tonge’ and to have received it as it is set down ‘In stori stif and stronge, | With lel letteres loken’.1 A number of readers have taken the reference to ‘lel letteres’ as an allusion to the poem’s alliterative verse form: Christine Chism, for example, finds here a suggestion of ‘the antiquity of the meter as a native tradition’.2 The edition by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon supports such a reading by glossing ‘With lel letteres loken’ as ‘linked with true letters’; the editors comment that ‘[t]his [phrase] seems to refer to the alliterative staves’.3 John Burrow interprets the passage similarly, translating it in the notes to his edition as ‘made firm with true alliteration as has long been the custom in the land’.4 Other scholars, however, have cautioned against assuming here a self-conscious allusion to the poem’s metre: Derek Pearsall observes that ‘it would be more usual for the narrator to be referring, conventionally, to the veracity and antiquity of his story’.5 P. J. Frankis notes that two instances of phrases involving ‘lel letteres’ in fifteenth-century Scottish poetry offer no support for the view that the expression contains a reference to alliterative verse technique; instead, he concludes, ‘what little evidence there is supports the meaning “enclosed in true letters, embodied in truthful words”’.6 Andrew and Waldron, citing Frankis, translate ‘With lel letteres loken’ as ‘enshrined in true syllables’.7 Ad Putter and Myra Stokes offer in the footnotes to their edition the translation ‘set and embedded in record firm and solid, soundly enclosed in trustworthy words’.8 In a previous issue of this journal, Jason Herman emphasizes that ‘loken’ implies ‘“fastness” or “fixity”’; rejecting Tolkien and Gordon’s gloss ‘linked’, he argues that the line about ‘lel letteres’ may be understood not as an allusion to alliterative form but rather as ‘a reference to the power of writing to fix the story in its present form’.9