22. On Sir Gawain and The Green Knight.

Nearly Beloved,*

When our children were young we would celebrate Christmas by reading Sir Gawain and the Green night, an ancient story which takes place between Christmas and the new year and which is redolent with strange people, ancient castles, knights, magic, vivid pictures of the hunt, and Christian references. When we heard that a film had been produced based on the story our interest was rekindled and we purchased a translation of the original text by Simon Armitage who has retained the wonderful alliteration which powers the rhythm of this many faceted story.

The author is unknown but the poem is believed to have been written in about 1400. The core of the story is a bizarre challenge by a green knight; skin, hair, beard, clothes and horse are all green. He alarms the knights of King Arthur's court by stomping on his horse into the middle of the hall where Arthur, his knights and their ladies are celebrating the feast of Christmas. The challenge, which is called a game, is for someone to wield the huge axe he carries for one blow at his neck, but that the person who wields the axe must return the challenge after 12 months have passed at the New Year. Gawain takes up the challenge and cuts off the Green Knight's head with a single blow which also chips the floor. Rather unexpectedly the Green Knight's body retrieves its head which tells Gawain that he must meet him at the Green Chapel to complete the game on New Years day, a year hence.

Gawain sets off on All Saints day to find the Green Chapel and the Green Knight. At Christmas, exhausted after many adventures, he comes across a strong castle where he is generously received but he is also morally tested. He reaches an agreement with the Lord of the Castle that he can have a lie-in in the morning whilst the Lord goes hunting and that whatever the Lord gains during the day he will give to Gawain and in return Gawain must give his winnings to his host, the Lord. There are two notable ladies living at the castle, one is very old and the other, the Lord's wife, is young and beautiful. Gawain is tested by the Lord's wife who appears at his bedside every morning for what turns into a second game. As Armitage's text says:

“That lovely looking maid,

She Charmed him and she Chased,

But every move she made,

He countered case by case.”

This is a game with chivalric rules and Christian rules. Gawain has to honour the hospitality of his Lord under Chivalric rules, so cannot seduce his wife, but as he knows his life is at risk when he will meet the Green Knight and receive his axe blow on New Years day, so he needs to have avoided Christian sin too although it seems deceiving his Lord is the sin rather than the adultery itself, so again the chivalric code dominates. Part of the game is that the Lady mocks him for not being a proper knight because he will not pleasure a Lady who desires him.

So the battle goes on for three mornings and each evening the Lord bestows on Gawain the products of the hunt, a mass of deer, then an enormous wild boar and finally, on the third day, a mere fox. In return Gawain bestows on the Lord the One, two and three kisses that he has received on each day. The fox turns out to be symbolic because the Lady has persuaded Gawain to take her green girdle which she has promised will protect him from any blow by an adversary. Gawain shows his weakness by accepting the gift because he fears for his life when he reaches the Green Chapel, but he fails to declare it to the Lord as he had agreed.

There is some Christian context, as it takes place at Christmas, the court of the Lord all go to mass before breakfast, Gawain calls upon the Virgin Mary to direct him when lost and he has a picture of the Virgin on the inside of his shield to give him confidence during battle. On the other hand the outer side of his shield bears, not the red cross we might expect, but a gold pentangle on a red ground. The pentangle is more associated with witchcraft than it is with Christianity; it is associated with King Solomon and protection from magic and spirits. In Goethe's Faust the learned doctor has painted an incomplete pentangle on his floor. That flaw allows Mephistopheles (the devil by any other name) into his lodgings but will not allow him to exit, so Mephistopheles calls upon rats to gnaw the floorboards, destroy the pentangle, and let him out. The Gawain poet spends many lines explaining and justifying why Gawain has adopted the pentangle, so that one is led to wonder if he was challenged by those who, in 1400, said a pentangle was not a Christian symbol so he felt a need to justify the choice for the shield of a Christian knight.

The denouement is the revelation that the Lord of the castle is also harbouring the famous witch and magician Morgana Le Fay – the old woman who accompanies his wife in the story. Morgana has put the Lord up to the task of discombobulating her rival Guinivere, wife of king Arthur, by taking the form of the Green Knight to enact the shocking beheading game at her Christmas feast.

In the Gawain poem there is an underlying moral evasion in the form of misogyny. Men are misled by women as if those men had no independent moral compass or self control. Solomon by his wives, Adam because of Eve, Samson by Delilah and “David was bamboozled by Bathsheba and bore the grief... Excellent they were and beyond all others... Yet all were charmed and changed by wily womankind”.

Overall my feeling was that this wonderful and complex story is a reaction to the Black Death, a pandemic which had killed between a third and half of the population of Britain only fifty years before the Gawain Poet is thought to have written this story. It looks back to a golden era, a time eight hundred years before of bold and honest knights following a code of chivalry and honour, rather than a time of Christian culture. Surely the Christian tropes are mere add ons and do not go to the centre of this tale of games? The tale is an escape from the grim reality of a pandemic still haunting peoples' lives, into a brilliant, mythic, past.

Peace,

Paul.

*Nearly Beloved - sent but not published by St Clement's.

Completed: 30 September 2021


Morgana Le Fay

Frederick Sandys (1829-1904), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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