The first two chapters have been concerned with preliminary issues: the poems that will be covered in this book and the vocabulary they used. We can now turn to a detailed study of a single poem in order to look at some basic features that I shall explore throughout this book, and to do so I take up the most familiar and best-loved of all alliterative narratives, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Alliterative poetry is pre-eminently the poetry of narrative: the characteristic unrhymed alliterative poem tells a story of incident and adventure. Yet it is also, more than any other kind of medieval verse, remarkable for passages of vivid description, taking advantage of the extraordinary rich verbal resources of the alliterative poets. There is here a seeming contradiction, or at least a tension. A descriptive passage is a digression that interrupts the narrative; the story must pause to take in a visual effect. How the poet handles the relationship between static description and active narrative is what I shall explore here.

The opposition between description and narrative is not actually as stark as I have set it out. There can be no narrative without description, though an example of narrative with virtually no description is the list, a feature of alliterative poetry, such as the twenty-two lines at the end of the incomplete text of The Wars of Alexander enumerating the sixty-five places conquered by Alexander, including ‘Ingland, Italie and Yndee, and Ireland costis, / Meede and Mesopotayme and Massedoyne eke’ (5789–90). However, most description involves a degree of narrative and nearly all narrative includes description. The Gawain-poet is particularly good at combining the two with no sense of interruption in the story, as in the graphic account of Gawain's lonely wandering through the frozen wilderness of Wirral:

This depiction of winter misery defines the hero's predicament as much as it illustrates the plight of the birds, and so in no sense can it be seen as digressive.