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English Chivalry and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the most artistically accomplished and most singular Arthurian poem in Middle English. It has no obvious immediate source, either in French or English; although it contains plot elements and motifs found elsewhere in Arthurian romance, its combination of them is unique. Indisputably English in its language, its characterization of its protagonist, and in its frame, Sir Gawain relies for much of its literary effect on its audience’s knowledge of French Arthurian tradition and of the habitual behavior of the main characters in the Arthurian intertextual universe.
As a romance Sir Gawain reproduces the ideology of English chivalry, rooted in a learned understanding of Arthur as the heir of Aeneas and of Brutus, drawn from the Galfridian account of the kingdom’s foundation, and the chronicles that depend on it (Moll 2003). Beyond this formulation of its own non-Anglo-Saxon history, the English aristocracy was nevertheless imaginatively integrated into French chivalric practice; the English nobility read and enjoyed French chivalric romance, peppered its speech with courtly French expressions, and employed a largely French lexis in its definition of what constitutes chivalric behavior. English and French traditions thus play out in Sir Gawain to construct a uniquely hybridized version of insular romance. Though apparently straightforward in the trajectory of the plot (the action more or less contained within the space of a year, and in three locales), Sir Gawain has, by virtue of its “exquisitely clarifying art” (Spearing 1970: 177), its ambiguities, and its hybridity, generated varying and contested interpretations. Most recently a different kind of hybridity, a reading of the poem inflected by post-colonial theory, focusing on its origins in the English–Welsh borderland, has been adumbrated (Ingham 2001; Arner 2006).
Manuscript and Provenance
Sir Gawain is preserved in a single manuscript, British Library Cotton Nero A.x, dating from the late fourteenth century. The manuscript is written in a single hand in the dialect of the south Cheshire–north Staffordshire area; Sir Gawain occupies folios 95–128v (see Edwards 1997 for a full discussion of the manuscript). Three other poems in the same dialect precede Sir Gawain in the manuscript. All three have religious subjects; the first, Pearl, is a dream-vision in which the dreamer encounters his dead daughter and learns some truths about salvation. The other two poems are biblical paraphrases: Cleanness (Purity in older editions) yokes together biblical stories under the rubric of sexual and ritual purity; Patience, directly preceding Sir Gawain, retells the story of Jonah. It is now generally accepted that the four poems are the work of a single author. Sir Gawain was first edited along with a number of other English Gawain poems in 1839, and again for the Early English Text Society in 1864; this edition was revised several times in the nineteenth century. Tolkien and Gordon’s edition first appeared in 1925; all quotations here are taken from Davis’s revised second edition of this text (Tolkien & Gordon 1967).
Nothing is known of the author of the four poems, though a number of candidates, patrons, and contexts have been suggested (Andrew 1997). Sir Gawain revels in magnificent description and flaunts its knowledge of the technical vocabulary of armor and hunting, suggesting that its clerical author was indeed “a sympathetic and knowledgeable observer of aristocratic life” (Putter 1995: 195). He wrote for an audience for whom chivalric ideology needed no explanation; whether author and audience regarded chivalry as immune from criticism is a different question. Thus the poems, particularly Pearl and Sir Gawain, demand a courtly context; that the author was a chaplain attached to the household of a great regional magnate is both plausible and attractive (Bennett 1997: 81–90). Although they are recorded in a regional dialect, the poems need not necessarily have been composed in Cheshire. As Jill Mann has argued, the poet may have worked in the London household of a Cheshire noble (Mann 1986). Familiarity with the merchant culture of the metropolis might explain the poem’s marked interest in value, price, and bargains (Trigg 1991; Putter 1995: 191–4).
Sir Gawain consists of 101 stanzas of varying numbers of alliterative lines, traditionally divided into four sections or “fitts.” Each stanza is linked by a short one- or two-stress “bob” to a rhyming three-stress, four-line stanza (the “wheel”). The bob initiates the rhyming pattern, so that bob and wheel rhyme ABAB; these sections often provide authorial comment on the action of the preceding stanza.
The Plot
The poet introduces his narrative by reminding its audience of the legendary history of Britain; as Geoffrey of Monmouth recounts in the Historia Regum Britanniae, the kingdom was first settled by Felix Brutus, the descendant of Aeneas, and thus inherits the civilization of Troy. Since then, Britain has been a land renowned for the marvels that occur there. One such occurrence, an outtrage awenture of Arthurez wonderez (“an outstanding adventure of Arthurian wonder,” line 29), is the subject of the poem, which the poet will narrate with lel letteres loken (“with faithful letters locked together,” line 34), usually understood as a reference to the alliterative meter. The action of the poem proper opens at Camelot on New Year’s Day; feasting and revelry are in full swing. Arthur maintains the custom, familiar from earlier tradition, of refusing to eat on high feast days until some marvel occurs. As the court chatter, the hall doors swing open and in rides a huge figure, half-man, half-giant. Both he and his horse are bright green. The Green Knight addresses the court brusquely, offering a Crystemas gomen (“a Christmas game,” line 283). He will give the enormous green axe he carries to any man who will strike him a blow with it, and who will promise to accept a matching blow from him in a year’s time. The court is stunned into silence and an embarrassed Arthur steps forward to take up the challenge. He is pre-empted by Gawain, who modestly claims that his life is of little value and undertakes to present himself for the return blow at next New Year. He strikes off the Green Knight’s head, but the figure picks it up and announces that Gawain must seek him at his Green Chapel. The headless knight rides off, leaving the court to their feasting.
The second fitt begins with a lyrical description of the passing of the seasons; the poet warns that the end of the year often does not match its beginnings. On All Souls Day (November 2) Gawain arms himself for his adventure. The poet lingers on a description of Gawain’s shield; painted red, with an image of the Virgin Mary on the inside, the shield bears a golden pentangle. Gawain’s device, we learn, alludes to five different sets of fives: faith in the five wounds of Christ and the five joys of Mary, faultlessness in the use of his five fingers and his five wits, and his adherence to five particular virtues. These are fraunchyse, felaZschyp, cortaysye, pité, and clannes, roughly translatable as independence/generosity, sociability, courtesy, compassion/piety, and purity, respectively (lines 652–4). Thus equipped, he sets off in search of the Green Chapel with no very clear idea of where it can be found, journeying through a bleak wintry landscape along the Welsh–English borders.
On Christmas Eve he anxiously prays to the Virgin for a lodging where he can keep the Christmas feast. Immediately he catches sight of a splendid castle; he is warmly welcomed by its inhabitants and their lord. They are delighted to learn that it is Gawain who will be spending Christmas with them. The lord introduces Gawain to his extraordinarily beautiful wife, and to her companion, an ugly, but greatly respected, elderly woman. When the main Christmas feast is over Gawain says he must continue his quest, but his host reveals that the Green Chapel is only half a morning’s ride away, and presses his guest to stay until New Year’s Day. The lord plans to spend the next three days in hunting; since Gawain is still recovering from the rigors of his journey, the host suggests that he remain in the castle in the company of the women. By way of amusement, the lord proposes that he and Gawain should exchange what they win during the course of the next three days: Gawain will take whatever the lord manages to catch in his hunting, while the lord will receive Gawain’s gains – whatever they might be – from the castle. Gawain readily agrees.
On the first morning the lord sets out early in pursuit of deer, while Gawain lies late in bed. He is surprised and abashed when the lady of the castle quietly lets herself into his bedroom and engages in a flirtatious conversation in which she suggests that she sexually desires him. After some deft and (on Gawain’s part, defensive) verbal exchanges, the lady kisses Gawain and departs. When the husband returns home with the deer he has caught, he formally awards them to Gawain, who in return gives him the kiss. He refuses, however, to say where he got it, since this was not part of the covenant. The pair agree to play the game again the following day. Once again the lord sets out early, this time in pursuit of a wild boar; once again Gawain is visited by the host’s wife in his chamber. Gawain continues politely to resist, but accepts two more kisses, bestowed on the lord at the end of the day in exchange for the captured boar. On the third day Gawain comes nearest to succumbing to the lady’s advances, while the lord spends his day in pursuit of a worthless fox. When the lady finally realizes that she cannot break down Gawain’s resistance, she persuades him to take a gift from her – a green and gold girdle. When Gawain tries to refuse, mindful of the exchange agreement, she reveals that it is magical. No one can dismember, tohewe (line 1853), the man wearing it, she says. In the light of his forthcoming meeting with the Green Knight, Gawain willingly takes the girdle; later he seeks out a priest and makes his confession. When the lord returns, Gawain hurries to give him the three kisses he has received that day, but neglects to pass on the girdle. In return, the lord hands over the fox pelt, the paltry result of his day in the field.
Next morning Gawain puts on his armor and wraps the girdle over his surcoat. Then, in the company of a guide, he sets out for the Green Chapel. The guide gives a frightening account of the ferocity of the figure who haunts the Green Chapel, and advises Gawain to ride away, promising never to reveal that he did not keep the appointment. Gawain proudly refuses and makes his way down a steep hillside to a strange mound, nobot an olde caue (“nothing but an old cave,” line 2182), identified by the guide as the Green Chapel. When the Green Knight appears, Gawain bends his neck for the blow, but flinches a little as the blade comes down. The Knight checks his stroke and reproves him. Gawain promises to stand firm, and the Knight brings down the axe again, stopping at the last moment when he sees that Gawain is now resolute. At the third attempt the axe nicks Gawain’s neck, but does no further injury.
The Green Knight reveals that he and Gawain’s recent host are one and the same. Gawain played the Exchange Game faithfully on the first two days, but lakked a lytel (line 2366) on the final day by withholding the girdle: that is why he received the nick. Praising Gawain, the Knight makes him a gift of the girdle as a souvenir of his adventure. Gawain is mortified by the uncovering of his deception; although he permits himself an outburst against the perfidiousness of women, he largely castigates himself for his cowarddyse and couetyse (“cowardice and covetousness,” line 2374). The Knight identifies himself as a certain Bertilak of Hautdesert, and explains that the plot was undertaken at the behest of Morgan le Fay, the elderly woman in the castle. Gawain declines an invitation to celebrate the New Year at Hautdesert, and makes his way back to Camelot, where he receives a joyful welcome. Gawain refuses to understand his safe return as a triumph, continuing to blame himself for his lack of integrity, his vntrawþe (line 2509). The court adopts the green girdle as a sign of honor. The poem ends with the theme of the opening lines, the founding of Arthur’s kingdom by Brutus after the fall of Troy. In the manuscript in the same scribal hand follows the legend “HONI SOYT QUI MAL PENCE,” close to, but not identical with, the motto of the Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III probably in 1348 (see Ingledew 2006 for a provocative discussion of the connections between poem and order).
Critics have often commented on the symmetricality of the plot and structure of Sir Gawain (see Hanna 1983: 289 for bibliography). The events of the poem, framed by the Galfridian introduction and conclusion, take place as part of a typical Arthurian quest; a stranger comes to Camelot offering a challenge and a member of the Round Table responds. The plot is driven by the Beheading Game, a motif which occurs in a number of other medieval texts (Brewer 1992). Typically the Beheading Game is a straightforward test of courage and promise keeping; having beheaded a (usually) supernatural opponent, the hero simply has to present himself for the return blow in order to win. What is ingenious about Sir Gawain’s use of the motif, and unparalleled in the analogues, is the modification whereby the outcome of the Beheading Game is made dependent on two other games, one of which Gawain perceives as a game, and one which he does not (Spearing 1970: 180–91). So Gawain’s injury is caused by his failure, a minor one according to Bertilak, in the Exchange Game, when he does not hand over the girdle on the third day. That Bertilak does not behead Gawain is his reward for coming through the Temptation Game, resisting the lady’s sexual advances during the three encounters in the bedchamber. It is only now, as Spearing comments, that Gawain, and the audience, realize that the poem’s climax is in fact an anticlimax; the real trial was elsewhere in what seemed to be a mere interlude on Gawain’s journey (1970: 190–91).
English Chivalry – French Romance – British Otherness
As noted, Sir Gawain begins by invoking the history of Britain as mediated by Geoffrey of Monmouth. The first Britons were of Trojan descent, transmitting the civilization of their lost city, but also, the first stanza makes clear, originating the complex interweaving of truth and treachery which is the poem’s theme. Paradoxically, Aeneas, Brutus’s ancestor, who in Troy was þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroZt (“the man who made the machinations of treason there”), manifested a tricherie (“treachery”) that is somehow þe trewest on erthe (“the truest/most patent on earth,” lines 3–5). The Gawain who steps forward at the New Year’s feast to relieve Arthur of the axe and the challenge of the Green Knight seems to belong to this English chronicle tradition, in which Arthur’s eldest nephew Gawain is also his closest ally and best knight (Moll 2003). Although sometimes impetuous, he is famed for his courtesy – mentioned by Chaucer and repeatedly invoked by the lady (Spearing 1970: 202–6) – his prowess and his faithfulness. Gawain is modest too: if he loses his life in the adventure, that is only a little loss, for, he maintains, I am þe wakkest … and of wyt feblest (“I am the weakest and feeblest in intelligence”). In fact his only merit is that Arthur is his uncle: no bounté bot your blod I in my bodé know (“I know of no goodness in my body besides your blood,” lines 354–7).
The detailed catalogue of the pentangle’s symbolic values, even if these are quite arbitrarily assigned to the symbol by the author (Heng 1991: 505), describes the five knightly virtues, which define a Europe-wide conception of essential chivalric values. “Loyalty and truth, hardiness, largesse and humility will be the principal qualities of character that we ought to expect in him,” Maurice Keen writes of the ideal knight (1984: 10). Fraunchyse, freedom of action, possessing the virtues necessary for rule (Keen 1984: 149), pité, Christian piety and compassion, felaZschype, the keeping of promises sworn in homosocial lateral bonds, the courtly virtue of courtoisie, and the apparently clerical value of clannes, the eschewing of lechery and adultery for a moderate practice of service to women – the five points of the pentangle epitomize the chivalric–clerical qualities that the knight should possess (on clerical efforts to refine martial masculinity, see Putter 1995: 209–20).
Armored with this understanding of chivalry, and protected by his private devotion to the Virgin, who appears on the inside of his shield, Gawain rides away on his adventure as the finest representative of the Arthurian court. Indeed, the sorrowing courtiers he leaves behind criticize Arthur for allowing him to take Christmas games so seriously, suggesting that it would have been better to promote Gawain, and haf dyZt Zonder dere a duk (“and have made that beloved man a duke,” line 677) than to send him off to certain death. Their criticism raises questions about the poet’s view of the Arthurian court, considered further below. Gawain rides away through the land of Logres and on to North Wales, into a border landscape where the hardships of journeying through winter, of sleeping in one’s armor among icy rocks in peryl and playne and plytes ful harde (line 733), are worse than the opponents, dragons, wild men, bulls, and giants who harass him on his route; their hostility Gawain takes in his stride. It is piety, not feebleness, which makes him pray for shelter at Christmas; when the castle appears so promptly it seems that his prayers have been answered. Gawain’s petition concludes with the good English Cros Kryst me spede!, but when he catches sight of Hautdesert, he slips into French, Now bone hostel! The change of idiom marks a change of inflection in the understanding of chivalry and of Gawain’s character, which will dominate the poem’s next section.
The people of Hautdesert are already, it seems, familiar with Gawain and his reputation, but the man they expect to encounter is a rather different character from the honorable Englishman we have seen so far. Courtiers nudge each other excitedly: Now schal we semlych se sleZtez of þewez / And þe teccheles termes of talkyng noble (“now we shall see proper practice of knightly conduct / and flawless terms of noble speech,” lines 916–17), they murmur. Gawain is þat fyne fader of nurture (“the cultured begetter of civilized standards”) and those who listen to him will lerne of luf-talkyng (“learn about love-talk,” lines 919, 927). Yet these are not boorish provincials: all is courtly and luxurious in Hautdesert, competing with Camelot in the lavishness of provision. Even on Christmas Eve, a day of fasting, Gawain is impressed with the number and variety of fish dishes served for supper. In one respect indeed Hautdesert surpasses Camelot, for the lady of the castle is, in Gawain’s eyes, wener þen Wenore (“lovelier than Guenevere,” line 945).
The scene is set then for the kind of adventure which Gawain is prone to facing in French tradition (Spearing 1970: 198–200; Busby 1980). From Chrétien, where Gawain has a certain affinity with the fair sex, to the thirteenth-century romances in which he is a habitual seducer, Gawain is cast as the ladies’ knight par excellence. Typical is the episode in the Chevalier à l’épée, where, even when warned by the young woman with whom he is sharing a Perilous Bed that any sexual approach is likely to prove fatal, Gawain reflects that he would be ridiculed by his fellow knights if he were to spend a chaste night with one so beautiful; when he tries to embrace the girl, he barely escapes serious injury (Busby 1980: 248–57; Brewer 1992: 109–26). The plotters of Hautdesert – Morgan, Bertilak, and his lady – well-versed in French tradition since they spring from it, thus have good reason to think that Gawain can be compromised by sexual temptation; his eagerness to be introduced to the women even in the castle’s chapel and the warmth with which he kisses and embraces the younger one can only encourage them in their belief about his vulnerability. As expected, Gawain slips easily into the role of courtier, demonstrating the pentangle virtue of felaZschyp by humoring his host in his desire to enliven the last days in the castle with the Exchange Game and readily agreeing to remain in the castle with the women rather than participating in the quintessentially masculine aristocratic pastime of hunting.
Gawain thus finds himself in the hands of the women; although he understands the game he plays with the lord, he is not aware that the women are also playing with him. Though his masculinity is compromised by his confinement in “a tracery of spaces coded as feminine” (Heng 1991: 501), this domain offers much to the unabashedly heterosexual Gawain. As in French romance, the castle’s intimate female space must be negotiated by the hero if he is to succeed in his quest (Larrington 2006: 62–5). For despite the homosociality of the Exchange Game, including the man-on-man kisses which Gawain delivers to his host as sauerly and sadly as he hem sette couþe (“with as much relish and as vigorously as he was able to give them,” line 1937), it is the women who teach Gawain most about competing traditions of chivalry and about his role within them (Dinshaw 1994).
On her first visit to Gawain’s bedroom, the lady praises his reputation, his “honor” and hendelayk (“courtliness,” line 1228), and emphasizes his attractiveness to women. Gawain conventionally offers his service as her knight, but otherwise he ferde with defence (“he behaves cautiously,” line 1282). On her departure though, the lady shocks Gawain by doubting whether he really is Gawain, insinuating that the genuine (i.e. French) Gawain could not spend long with a woman without trying to solicit a kiss (line 1293). Alarmed by this challenge to his identity, Gawain accepts her kiss. The tactic is successful enough for the lady to employ it again the next morning, even slipping briefly into the familiar þou form in line 1485. Revealing herself to be a keen consumer of French romance, the lady contends that for true knights, þe tytelet token and tyxt of her werkkez (“the inscribed title and text of their deeds”) is the lel layk of luf, þe lettrure of armes (“the faithful game of love, the literature of arms,” lines 1513–15). Knightly deeds, she argues, are only the prelude to bringing blysse into boure (“joy into the chamber”); what women really want from knights is trweluf craftes (“true love’s pursuits,” line 1527), not just the love-talk which the people of Hautdesert associate with Gawain, but the satisfaction of sexual desire. Gawain ripostes by noting that he would waste his time, were he to trwluf expoun, / And towche þe temez of text and talez of armez (“to expound love / And touch on the themes of its text and its tales of fighting,” lines 1540–1), since the lady is a hundred times more versed in such matters than he is. On the third day the poet retreats from reporting the conversation verbatim, indicating that although Gawain “is indeed in a highly inflammable state” (Spearing 1970: 194), experiencing wiZt … wallande joye (“powerfully surging pleasure,” line 1762), he manages to resist the double-bind created by the pentangle nexus of clannes and courtayse, which would force him either to accept her love or to offend her by a clear rejection. Reflecting on his loyalty to the lord, the next day’s beheading test, his awareness of adultery as a sin, and his anxiety lest he offend his hostess, Gawain resists inscription into the romance text his opponent has in mind and successfully deflects the lady’s overtures until she abandons her attempted seduction and persuades him to take the girdle.
On New Year’s morning, Gawain is once more carrying his shield. Though Mary was mindful of her knight (line 1769) while he jousted metaphorically with the lady, Gawain seems to have forgotten his holy protectress, exchanging his faith in the chivalric values and divine protection depicted on the shield for the dubiously effective talisman of the girdle (Hanna 1983). Yet, armored once more and away from the discomfiting influence of the women, Gawain reverts to the straightforwardly courageous model of knightliness we saw at the poem’s outset. Courteously, but distantly gruchyng, he rebuffs the guide’s suggestion that he fail to keep his appointment; he bravely summons the knight with a loud vocal challenge on reaching the Green Chapel, and even manages a wisecrack as he bends his head to the fatal stroke, pointing out that his head is not replaceable as the Green Knight’s is. The shame that Gawain feels when he realizes the extent to which he has been duped is manifested by his extreme physical reaction: Alle þe blode of his brest blende in his face (“all the blood in his chest blended in his face,” line 2371) (for thoughtful comment on Gawain’s emotional state, see Pearsall 1997: 360–62). Although he blames the women for beguiling him, ultimately he realizes, as Bertilak spells out the identity and motivation of Morgan, that the very blood rising in his cheeks, the blood of Arthur, heir of Brutus and Aeneas, of which he is so proud, is also that of his aunt Morgan, who has both deceived and vindicated him. There is more bounté in Gawain than Arthur and Morgan’s blood, a bounté of deeds, not of lineage.
Bertilak’s account of himself and his lady confirms the French romance inflections of Hautdesert and its crew of plotters. Bertilak bears a French name, and his history of Morgan, her relationship with Merlin, and her motivation in setting up the adventure – to test the surquidré (“prowess”) of the Round Table, and, incidentally, to try to frighten Guenevere to death – are certainly intertextually related to, and most probably derive from, the French Lancelot (Rigby 1983; Larrington 2006: 60–68). In thirteenth-century French romance, Morgan is interested in testing the boundaries of chivalry and discovering where its values can be compromised, as well as acting as a spokeswoman for feminine desire within the chivalric system (Larrington 2006: 51–73). Morgan’s ugliness, described at some length in the poet’s bravura comparison of the two women, encourages both Gawain and the audience to underestimate her. But the unregarded old woman is responsible for the complex series of challenges offered not only to Gawain as the representative of the Round Table, but to the very institution of chivalry, reprising her role in the French romances with which Sir Gawain’s aristocratic audience would have been familiar.
Though Bertilak is sanguine about Gawain’s cowarddyse and couetyse (line 2374), as the knight himself defines his failure, Gawain cannot forgive himself so easily. He rehearses his mortification to the court, maintaining that he cannot undo, vnhap, his shame, and declaring that he must wear the girdle, the token of vntrawþe (line 2509) for the rest of his life. Gawain has learned, but cannot fully accept, that human perfection is not possible (Aers 1997). Morgan’s plan to test the reputation of the Round Table has found its representative to be on þe fautlest freke þat euer on fote Zede (“one of the most faultless men who ever walked,” line 2363), and thus the adventure may rightly conclude with the rejoicing of the court and its expression of solidarity with Gawain in agreeing to wear the green girdle, which they interpret as a sign of þe renoun of þe Rounde Table (line 2519). English chivalry has been tested against the values of French romance. One of the preoccupations of French Arthurian narrative – how to balance public honor-driven behavior, gendered masculine, and private, emotionally inflected courtliness, gendered feminine – has been interrogated and some provisional answers found (Larrington 2006: 51–73). Chronicle and romance, French and English tradition have fused in a hybrid masterpiece. Gawain’s victory is qualified, but although the kingdom of Britain itself may have been born out of truth and treachery in the poem’s opening stanza, the final stanza leaves little room for doubt that the girdle is euermore after a sign of honor, that Brutus was a bolde burne (“brave warrior”) and that many such adventures have occurred in Britain as related in the best boke of romaunce (lines 2520–21, 2524).
For some recent critics (Ingham 2001; Arner 2006) the hybridity of Sir Gawain is rather to be understood in terms of post-colonial theory. The argument hinges on the poem’s localization to the Welsh–English marches; it is a text which celebrates Angevin cultural and political hegemony at the same time as it expresses anxiety about the alienness and intractability of the Welsh. Ingham resolves the question by suggesting that the otherness of the Green Knight and the creatures of the borderlands, the exoticism of the contrayez straunge (line 713) through which Gawain moves on his journey, are subsumed by his arrival at Hautdesert. There the “multiplicity of region and ethnicity” is elided by “the doubleness of gender” (2001: 121). Though the Green Knight seems terrifyingly “other” at Camelot, and, Ingham argues, superior in virility to the “prodigious imbecilities” of Arthur and his youthful court, when it is established that he is simply the puppet of Morgan, Arthur’s authority is restored (2001: 124). The “ethnic heterogeneities finally modulate into nothing more than the differences of an extended family” (132), once Morgan is identified as Gawain’s aunt.
This rather cozy view of the effacement of ethnic difference by insisting that homosociality can resolve the issue and that English sovereignty and the autonomy of English knights are authorized precisely because they are gendered masculine is contested by Arner (2006). She argues that ethnicity does not simply disappear when the poem’s focus appears to move to gender, but “rather there is a rearticulation of ethnic difference at the site of gender.” Thus the women – both Bertilak’s lady and Morgan – remain recognizably Welsh in their hostility; indeed the lady’s feigned desire for Gawain masks an insistent colonial fantasy about the subjugated other (Arner 2006: 93).
Ingham banishes Frenchness from Sir Gawain, noting only that Felix Brutus founds Britain fer ouer þe French flod (“far over the English Channel,” line 13), distancing the kingdom’s origins from the post-Conquest royal dynasties. Arner makes no reference at all to the poem’s French idioms, inflections, and analogues. However, if Sir Gawain reflects the hybridity of insular culture in the late fourteenth century, as I have argued here, it is primarily a reflection of hybridized Anglo-French aristocratic culture to which the poem attends, rather than to the fleeting glimpses of a repressed and alienating Welshness.
Critiquing Chivalry
Had Sir Gawain not been preserved along with the other poems in Cotton Nero A.x, but simply been transmitted alone, we might well read it as a straightforward secular Arthurian romance, even as the work of a lay author. Given the company it keeps in the manuscript, however, readers have tended to pay particular attention to its religious elements, asking whether Sir Gawain in fact constitutes a clerical critique – if a humane one – of the chivalric and courtly values which romance purports to celebrate. There is some evidence for such a reading. Arthur is described as in his first youth, lively and sumquat childgered, (“somewhat child-like,” line 86), and, the Green Knight asserts, his court are bot berdlez chylder (“just beardless children,” line 280). Ingham suggests that Arthur’s youthfulness would engender anxieties about a boy-king, fears fully justified by Richard II’s troubled reign (2001: 126–7). However, as Sheila Fisher notes, Camelot is still a “prelapsarian court” (2000: 79); Gawain and his brother Agravain are Arthur’s highest-ranking knights; Lancelot, though present when Gawain departs, is barely mentioned, and the atmosphere in Camelot, in particular the relieved laughter as the Green Knight gallops out of the feast, suggests youthful high spirits rather than childish folly. Nor should the Green Knight’s comment be taken literally, since his intention is to insult and challenge the court. The mutterings of the courtiers when Gawain leaves on his quest may be more problematic. Yet their complaint that Gawain is taking a Christmas game too seriously raises questions about their understanding of games, rather than implying carelessness about promise-keeping and personal honor. Most intriguing is the court’s reaction on Gawain’s return; as Gawain tells his story, blaming himself for his failure, and shows the girdle, alle þe court als / LaZen loude þerat (“all the court too laughed loudly at it,” lines 2513–14). For some critics, this is a laughter of incomprehension, a flawed court’s failure to care about human imperfection, reflecting the “instability, immaturity, even the naiveté” of Arthur and his court (Ingham 2001: 133). In contrast, Spearing judges that “their reaction is a healthy one” (1970: 230); the laughter reintegrates Gawain back into his community (Aers 1997: 99–101). The multiple possible interpretations of the girdle are critical here; when the court appropriate this “slippery and equivocal” talisman (Hanna 1983, 290) as the badge of a chivalric order, can they totally recuperate the falssyng (“false thing”) as a sign of honor?
Assessing the poem’s final judgment on his hero and on Camelot depends on our construction of its author: whether we see him as a pragmatic man-of-the-world, as the humane author of Patience, with his keenly sympathetic eye for human weakness, or whether we read Sir Gawain in conjunction with the severe judgmentalism of Cleanness and envisage its author as a priest who sets demandingly high standards for his flock. Either interpretation is possible, as well as a range of positions in between. Some critics argue that Gawain becomes compromised by his retention of the girdle, particularly since this apparently leads to an insufficient confession on his final day at the castle (see bibliography in Wasserman & Purdon 2000: 662–3). Yet the language of confession is employed again by both Gawain and the Green Knight at the Green Chapel. Gawain acknowledges that his behavior has been wrong; Bertilak, laughing, observes that now Gawain is confessed clean, has admitted his faults, and has had his penance, so that he is now absolved, polysed, as if he had never forfeted syþen þou watz fyrst borne (“trespassed since you were first born,” line 2394).
Is the audience to concur with Bertilak that Gawain has atoned for his sin of couetyse in keeping the girdle, and for his cowarddyse? Gawain certainly does not think so, but the court agrees with Bertilak. David Aers robustly argues that the finer points of confession do not particularly matter for the honourmen, the nobility for whom the poem was composed; the details of sacramental obligation are for the clerics to take care of, not for secular men of action to fret about: “none of this is of much consequence since nothing will change anyway,” he concludes (1997: 99). For Aers, the moping Gawain overreacts to the games he has been playing; the court’s laughter models the appropriate reaction to the hero’s exaggerated self-castigation. Since the poem moves directly from the court’s laughter to its future adoption of the girdle as chivalric symbol, we do not discover whether Arthur is successful in comforting Gawain, and whether the unhappy knight comes round to the court’s view of his adventure. The poem returns us to the intertextual Arthurian universe, to þe best boke of romaunce (line 2521), where the many wonderful exploits of Arthur’s court are related, and where, both in chronicle and romance, the courteous and brave Gawain continues in his chivalric career until he meets his end at the hands of his half-brother, loyal to Arthur to the last.
Although Christianity was always an essential element in the ideology of chivalry, as Keen points out, “the virtue of the soldier was not the same as that of the priest” (1984: 178). The other poems in the manuscript provide, as Bennett notes, “work for reflection and discussion … Sir Gawain and the Green Knight … would have prompted a mixed audience to debate … the nature and degree of Gawain’s fault” (1997: 81). While the girdle may be adopted as a sign of worldly honor, of human imperfection, and the love of life, “the private desire that includes all others within it,” as Fisher notes (2000: 87), it is significant that the chivalric–clerical virtues of the pentangle, tested though they are to their limit, are not found wanting.
The Gawain of this poem is perhaps the first Arthurian character who understands, in the Socratean phrase, that the unexamined life is not worth living. Gawain, “a thoroughly self-conscious and articulate hero” (Spearing 1970: 173), has a psychology and an interiority unexampled in earlier Arthurian literature and equaled in his time only by Chaucer’s Criseyde. The poet charts Gawain’s reactions to the appearance of the castle’s two women and points up the gap between his expressions of joy and relief when he learns how close he is to the Green Chapel and his troubled sleep on New Year’s Eve. We perceive the lady of the castle through Gawain’s eyes, noting that she behaves, “ay … let,” as if she were in love with him; this leaves open the question of whether we and he are interpreting the situation correctly (Putter 1995: 140–48). And we share with him, on first reading of the poem, the appalled, embarrassed rush of blood to the cheeks when it becomes clear how skillfully the poet, Bertilak, and the women have misdirected us (Pearsall 1997: 361–2). This Gawain has, as Putter argues, internalized many of the qualities, including reflectiveness and self-analysis, which the clerical authors of Arthurian romance aimed to inculcate into the community of honourmen whom they entertained and instructed.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is deeply rooted in the European chivalric romance tradition, yet it finds its expression in an Englishness sprung from British pseudo-history, the north Midlands landscape bordering on the unstable country of Wales, and in a language which welds Old English, Old Norse, and the French phrases of courtliness and chivalry into a supple and vigorous idiom. Sir Gawain asserts the primacy of a considered set of chivalric values at the same time as it emphasizes that the exponents of martial masculinity and the pursuit of honor will always need to take account of the pleasures and emotions of the private domain, of that most deeply-rooted instinct in human nature, the desire for self-preservation, and, finally, to recognize the emergence of a new understanding of interiority and self-consciousness on the part of the Gawain-poet and in his all-too-human creation.
References and Further Reading
Aers, D. (1997). Christianity for courtly subjects: Reflections on the Gawain-poet. In D. Brewer & J. Gibson (eds), A companion to the Gawain-poet. Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 91–101.
Andrew, M. (1997). Theories of authorship. In D. Brewer & J. Gibson (eds), A companion to the Gawain-poet. Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 23–33.
Arner, L. (2006). The ends of enchantment: Colonialism and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 48, 79–101.
Bennett, M. J. (1997). The historical background. In D. Brewer & J. Gibson (eds), A companion to the Gawain-poet. Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 71–90.
Brewer, E. (1992). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Sources and analogues, 2nd edn. Woodbridge: Brewer.
Burrow, J. A. (1971). Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain-Poet. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Busby, K. (1980). Gauvain in Old French literature, 2nd edn. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Dinshaw, C. (1994). A kiss is just a kiss: Heterosexuality and its consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Diacritics, 24, 205–26.
Edwards, A. S. G. (1997). The manuscript: British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x. In D. Brewer & J. Gibson (eds), A companion to the Gawain-poet. Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 197–219.
Fisher, S. (2000). Leaving Morgan aside: Women, history, and revisionism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In T. S. Fenster (ed.), Arthurian women: A casebook. London: Routledge, pp. 77–95. First published in C. Baswell & W. Sharpe (eds) (1988), The passing of Arthur: New essays in Arthurian tradition. New York: Garland, pp. 129–51.
Hanna III, R. (1983). Unlocking what’s locked: Gawain’s green girdle. Viator, 14, 289–302.
Heng, G. (1991). Feminine knots and the other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. PMLA, 106, 500–14.
Ingham, P. C. (2001). Sovereign fantasies: Arthurian romance and the making of Britain. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ingledew, F. (2006). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Order of the Garter. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Keen, M. (1984). Chivalry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Larrington, C. (2006). King Arthur’s enchantresses: Morgan and her sisters in Arthurian tradition. London: Tauris.
Mann, J. (1986). Price and value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Essays in Criticism, 36, 294–318.
Moll, R. J. (2003). Before Malory: Reading Arthur in later medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Pearsall, D. (1997). Courtesy and chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The order of shame and the invention of embarrassment. In D. Brewer & J. Gibson (eds), A companion to the Gawain-poet. Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 351–62.
Putter, A. (1995). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rigby, M. (1983). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Vulgate Lancelot. Modern Language Review, 78, 257–66.
Spearing, A. C. (1970). The Gawain-poet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tolkien, J. R. R. & Gordon, E. V. (eds) (1967). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (rev. ed. N. Davis). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trigg, S. (1991). The romance of exchange. Viator, 22, 251–66.
Wasserman, J. & Purdon, L. O. (2000). Sir Guido and the green light: Confession in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Inferno XXVII. Neophilologus, 84, 647–66.