For Wednesday: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Fit II

SUMMARY OF FIT II: A year passes, and Gawain is nervously awaiting his departure. No one wants him to leave, but he knows he has to go. Not much else happens here, so note how the poet describes Gawain, Camelot, and the world he travels through. Gawain journeys for a long time and has many adventures, all of which are glossed over. He finally reaches a castle where a beautiful woman lives, the wife of a gracious lord. They put him up in fine style and the wife is clearly more than a little in love with him. The host says that they should play a game (uh-oh): that whatever one gets during the day, they have to give to the other at night. So the lord will go hunting and share with Gawain whatever he captures. But what will Gawain give him in return???

Answer TWO of the following as before: 

Q1: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is very conscious of nature: we always know what season it is, and the poem indulges in poetic descriptions of Gawain's travels. Why is this? What effect does this have on the poem, that it has a "place" rather than just a "setting"?

Q2: What do you make of the description of the pentangle on Gawain’s shield on page 22 (lines 620 onward)? Is this similar to the poet’s description of Camelot’s perfection in Fit I? Or is he setting up Gawain for a fall? How can we tell

Q3: Somewhat related to Q2, does Gawain seem to be an ideal, chivalric knight? Does he display proper values and humility (especially with the Lord's wife)? Is the poet using him as the paragon of knightly virtue, or do his actions belie his reputation?

Q4: Stanley Abrams, writing in A Glossary of Literary Terms, defines “allegory” as “a narrative fiction in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived to make coherent sense on the “literal” or primary, level of signification, and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of agents, concepts, and events.” Where might some aspect of Fit II fit this definition of allegory? In other words, where do we see the poet working on two levels with his plot?