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Introduction

It has often been said that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1380) is one of the two great long poems in Middle English, the other being Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385). Yet the experience of the two poems in the history of English literature could hardly be more different. Ever since his own writing lifetime in the last third of the fourteenth century, Chaucer has been a major, documented presence in that history. Gawain survived by chance, when many anonymous poems of the same kind did not, and was hardly mentioned – or read – until the nineteenth century when it was first printed. Yet its appeal for a modern readership is unfailing. The poem’s voice, like the narrator’s voice in Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605, 1615), is immediately recognizable to us: ironic, commonsensical and realistic.

How can such terms apply to a marginal poem by an unknown poet in Middle English, written in a language which is a great deal less familiar to us than Chaucer’s? In many passages of the poem it is not an exaggeration to say that its language sounds wholly foreign to modern English speakers. For this reason, a readable modern English translation (and there are several of them already) is essential if we are to encounter the ironic common sense of the original poem. This is a pity, it must be conceded at once, because the graphic and fluent alliterative language of the original is one of its greatest strengths. For that reason I have put in an appendix here – one of the most admired passages in the poem, with an analysis of the form of the original language.

THE MANUSCRIPT

The poem survives in a single manuscript, now held in the British Library, which has been dated to around 1400, the year of Chaucer’s death. It is a small, unprepossessing manuscript book, written in a clear hand, in a language which is hard to place exactly, but which has usually been localized somewhere in the north-west English Midlands, on the borders of Staffordshire, Cheshire and Derbyshire. There are three other poems in the manuscript, in broadly the same language or dialect, and resembling Gawain in form to varying degrees. They are all much more evangelically Christian than Gawain, which is to say religious to an extent typical of many medieval Arthurian romances (some of which of course are very religious indeed). Of the other three poems, the most celebrated is the poetic elegy Pearl, the story of a dream-encounter between a narrating ‘jeweller’ and his lost pearl, which symbolizes a daughter who died at the age of two. The other two poems are Bible stories, also told in the brilliantly graphic language of the manuscript: Patience the story of Jonah, in the whale and elsewhere, and Cleanness (which used to be called Purity, for alliterative classification with the other two), which is made up of versions of three biblical narratives. The most successful attempts to find common thematic elements have suggested that the poems are all concerned, more or less, with acceptance of the will of God by a protagonist who is initially resistant to it. All four poems have usually been taken as the work of a single poet, the ‘Pearl’-poet or the ‘Gawain’-poet, but there is no evidence for authorship, despite a number of attempts to find an author over the past fifty years. The strongest case for single authorship rests on a common dialect and a shared formal brilliance of language, far beyond the reach of most surviving contemporary poems. A fifth poem, not in the manuscript, is sometimes added to this putative corpus, St Erkenwald, written in the same dialect and about the miracles attending the exhumation of a Roman saint in London in the course of the building of St Paul’s Cathedral.

THE POEM’S PLACE OF ORIGIN

It is always hard to say exactly where a poem like Gawain, from an outlying area of England and without a known date or author, comes from. In this case, there is clear evidence (in the way of textual corruption) that the dialect of the scribe is not exactly the same as the poet’s. On the other hand, remarkably plausible efforts have been made to identify precisely two of the three central locales in the poem, the Green Chapel and Bertilak’s castle. In particular, the work by R. W. V. Elliott in localizing the castle in the area around Leek in Staffordshire is enormously interesting.¹

THE ATTRACTIONS OF GAWAIN

Whatever claims can be made for the other poems in the manuscript – and Pearl especially has always had enthusiastic advocates – it is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that makes this group of poems a documentary survival of the first importance. So, while the likelihood that the unknown author of this brilliant romance was also the writer of a group of accomplished poetic narratives on biblical themes is highly significant, I will not discuss those other poems in detail. In Gawain the hero undergoes a set of experiences which, despite an incredibility acceptable in romance (he encounters a green man who can survive decapitation), have a remarkable psychological familiarity for us. The poem’s modernity has been repeatedly acknowledged and reproduced. The story has frequently been retold for children; there is one remarkably effective film version (and one not so effective); there is a related novel The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch; and there is a superb opera by Harrison Birtwhistle to a libretto by David Harsent.²

The story is well known so it can be told briefly. One New Year’s Day, a day particularly devoted to festive celebration in late-medieval England, Arthur and the company of the Round Table are celebrating the season at Camelot when a huge, green knight – ‘you’d think that he was some kind of half-giant’ (l. 140) – rides into the hall on a green horse. He wants to make a deal: he will have his head cut off here and now with the axe he is carrying, on condition that his decapitator will come to his domicile, his ‘Green Chapel’, to have his head cut off in return in a year’s time. Gawain takes on his challenge, and the Green Knight rides off, gruesomely holding his speaking head. At the end of the year Gawain sets off to keep the agreement, with no very clear idea where he is going, travelling on a northerly route through some familiar real places set in the romance environment. He spends the next Christmas period at a wonderful northern castle, where for three days the beautiful wife of the lord of the castle attempts to seduce him. Finally, he is directed to the Green Chapel, where he receives his fate at the hands of the Green Knight, and returns to Camelot to file his report, a sadder and wiser man.

Why is it so appealing, this story of Gawain, ‘Mary’s knight’, who has taken a vow of chastity and who bears an image of the Blessed Virgin inside his shield, but makes an improbable pact of mutual decapitation – mutually assured destruction, it would seem? The rationale offered at the end – that the whole thing was conjured up by Arthur’s malevolent half-sister Morgan Le Fay to scare his queen, Guinevere, her traditional enemy, to death – is flimsy in the extreme and, like the moral of many medieval poems, does not seem to meet the case. In several ways, the beauty is in the detail. The Vivaldi-like sequence of the seasons at the start of the second of the poem’s four sections, before Gawain sets off to keep his bargain, is incomparably evoked, from the ‘crabbed Lent’ to the warm showers that make the birds hasten to build ‘for solace of the soft summer’, to the hardening harvest whose:

… dryness makes the dust swirl around

and fling up high off the face of the earth.

(II. 523–4)

On his winter northward journey Gawain sleeps in his iron armour, nearly slain by the sleet, where the birds pipe piteously for pain of the cold. When he sees the castle that he thinks will be his salvation, it looks as if it is ‘cut out of paper’, like the French castles that illustrate fifteenth-century Books of Hours like that of the Duc de Berry (whose January miniature features a particularly Gawain-like New Year’s feast). Perhaps as memorable and striking as anything for the blood-sickened reader in the twenty-first century is the panic of the wild animals as the hunt attacks them: ‘They screamed and they bled and they died on the hills’ (l. 1163).

But the distinction of the poem is far from confined to the observed minutiae. The writer’s overall grasp of the narrative shows great imaginative control. Three pre-existing stories are woven together, as far as we know for the first time: the decapitation agreement; a familiar temptation scene in which a knight is amorously tempted by the wife of his host; and an ‘exchange of winnings’ in which two characters agree to exchange what they gain at the end of the day (or the ends of three consecutive days here). To link these separate stories together effectively would be impressive in itself; but in Gawain this linking is done with a clear, sustained purpose, to ask a question about romance and its often uncomplicated assumptions. The poem seems to ask (and the poem’s best critic, John Burrow,³ says the same kind of generically searching questions are asked by this writer’s poetic contemporaries in the age of Richard II – Chaucer, Gower and Langland): what happens if the perfect knight, the hero of romance, has divided loyalties? He has to show perfect Christian chivalry, but also to be perfectly courteous to ladies; he has to be faithful to his word, but also to be uncompromising in action. How does Gawain square his necessity to be chaste with a courteous response to his temptress? How, at the end of each day, can he exchange the kisses he wins from her for her husband’s winnings at hunting? And how above all can he, with his human, bodily frailty, face having his head cut off in exchange for the Green Knight’s?

Another major critic of this poem, L. D. Benson,⁴ called it ‘a romance about romance’; that is to say, it is the very form, romance itself, that is being tested. It is being tested for its adequacy as a literary form: for its right to be taken seriously by a serious audience. The most miraculous achievement of the poem is that none of its elements is betrayed. Gawain may look foolish at the end, but the genre has survived. The qualities of romance, which Gawain possesses pre-eminently, are all shown to be worthwhile: courtesy, amorous language, religious fervour of course, generosity, love of fellow men, and – above all – fidelity to one’s given word. Burrow says that, if the poem had a single-word title to bring it in line with the other poems in the manuscript, it would be ‘truth’, in the sense of fidelity.⁵ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shows above all, in the words of Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, that ‘Truth is the highest thing that man can keep’.

Between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, from Borges to Eco, from Montaillou to Heaney’s Beowulf, the Middle Ages have been much in vogue recently. Indeed, romance never lost its appeal after its revival in the nineteenth century. But the attractions of this poem are far beyond the popular, or beyond the romantic. Certainly it has noble and fearless knights, and beautiful, seductive ladies; it has magic and castles and threatening monsters (Ted Hughes’s ‘wodwos’), and marvels of all kinds. But its appeal has a sophistication and maturity well beyond such traditional romance trappings. The writer keeps us aware of this ambition to write something beyond the ordinary: at the beginning of the second of the poem’s four sections, before Gawain sets off to meet his fate, we are warned that the outcome may be more serious than he has (or we have) bargained for. ‘[A] year passes quickly and changes its moods; the end rarely matches the spirit it starts in’ (ll. 498–9). The poem presents us with classic romance travails and trials: seduction and physical threat. But – for the first time, it seems, in the annals of romance – it asks us to imagine what that is really like. You are tempted by your host’s wife, as in several earlier romances, and now in the most compromising and attractive and explicit terms. How do you really feel? And, more importantly, how do you behave? Gawain is worried about his courtesy, ‘lest crathayn he were’ (‘in case he’d seem boorish [towards the lady]’, l. 1773), but he is more anxious not to ‘betray that good lord whose castle it was’ (l. 1775), her husband and his generous host, just as the morally responsible hero of a serious nineteenth-century novel would be. He is expressing the same concerns as Macbeth’s duties of hospitality towards Duncan.

There are other aspects to this narrative that have an obvious modern appeal too. The first is its nature as a ‘whodunnit’. It is as important reading Gawain not to know what is going to happen at the end as it is in a story by Poe or O. Henry or in a contemporary crime novel. The passage quoted in the previous paragraph makes this clear: it is indeed true of this poem that the state of things at the end is not the same as at the start. (As has also often been acknowledged, this makes it difficult to write an introduction without giving away some part of what the reader must not know until the end.) What is held back is not kept hidden only for suspense, however; it is integral to the serious meaning of this poem, which is finally serious to the point of life and death, despite its wonderful grace and lightness.

Such scruples are new in the romance. For as long as Tristan and Iseult, or Lancelot and Guinevere, could persuade the ladies’ husbands that the evidence of adultery that they saw with their own eyes was false, neither they nor their stories were problematic. To be seen as guiltless was to be guiltless. But of course without those great adulterers, there would have been no supreme romances. The particular distinction of Gawain is to remain true to the spirit and narrative of such romance (it would be easy to dismiss that spirit as beneath serious or realistic consideration), while scrutinizing the form for its moral adequacy. If Gawain fails in the end, he fails in defence of the literary world he operates in.

And it is that world that triumphs at the end. It is not presented with the irony – however affectionate – of Don Quixote, even if the narrative voice occasionally recalls Cervantes’s novel in its attitude to the hero. This is a seriously desirable and admirable world. The people in it are happy in the early Christmas scenes; it is a wonderful midwinter poem, celebrating the warmth of the indoors. The poem is of its age, but represents its age at its finest. And it succeeds by the finest poetic technique. The physical temptation of Gawain by the beautiful lady (the adjective is inadequate) is made real – we are returning to the minutiae after all – by the extraordinarily precise, tactile skills of the poetry. The mixture of erotic frisson and paralysed panic felt by Gawain when she suddenly sits on the edge of his bed is unsurpassed even in our age, which gives a lot of thought to such effects and fantasies. Sitting in her déshabillé, described in insinuating detail, she tells Gawain ‘Ye are welcum to my cors’ (l. 1237). Some rather bowdlerizing attempts have been made to interpret this as a defused metaphor, meaning ‘I welcome you’, and it has been noted that it occurs in the less narratively significant rhyming ‘wheel’ (the four-line brief quatrain that occurs at the end of each more substantial stanza). But the fact remains that what she says, sitting on the edge of his bed, literally means ‘You are welcome to my body’. Furthermore, this suggestive innuendo is totally in keeping with the lady’s attitude throughout her three visits to Gawain’s bedside, evoking states of mind with an exactness that seems astonishingly contemporary to us.

It is important to emphasize that this psychological naturalness is entirely in keeping with much of the literature of the high Middle Ages, with the European courtly love writings by the Provençal troubadours and the German Minnesänger of the period around 1200. There has been some rather pointless critical argument about whether Chaucer or the writer of Gawain is more ‘English’. In some ways this poem is a particularly brilliant exercise in the principal genre of medieval literature, well beyond the compass of other writers of romance in England. But there seems something prophetic of the later English literary tradition in the pragmatic way that the poem refuses to leave unexamined the conventional donnée that a knight can be perfectly Christian and expert at love-talking at the same time. This practicality too is part of what the modern reader responds to in Gawain.

ANALOGUES, SOURCES AND TRADITION

The poem begins and ends with the idea of the ‘Brut’: that Britain, like Rome, was founded by Felix Brutus, a descendant of the Trojans after the fall of Troy. But this elegant framing has little to do with the substance of the story. Gawain is a new and complex romance that is made up of several familiar elements, such as the three stories I have mentioned already: the decapitation bargain, the exchange of winnings and the feminine temptation. Several parallels have been found for the decapitation contract, particularly the Irish Cuchulainn story Fled Bricrend,⁶ and the originally Welsh story of Caradoc, perhaps known to this poet (who is clearly well read, on various evidence) as the Livre de Caradoc, a section of what is called the First Continuation of Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, in which the attention shifts from Perceval to introduce a whole new Gawain romance.⁷ Parallels for the temptation scenes are also very strong, especially the French romance Le chevalier à l’epée (‘The Knight of the Sword’, before 1210),⁸ whose correspondences are stronger than has often been claimed. But in general it is not wise to tie down Gawain to particular influences, or to see it as a departure from a particular source, as has sometimes been done in relation to the Fled Bricrend. None of the story elements is very unexpected in the romance world; it is their intricate joining together by this poet which is so remarkable (the kind of literary conjoining that medieval commentators called ‘antancion’ or ‘conjunctura’). Like Chaucer and Shakespeare, this medieval romance writer did not make up stories or adapt existing single narratives in any simple way.

Apart from the poem’s clear relations in the world of romance, one other set of cultural relations has been suggested for Gawain, in a series of interpretations that were collectively dismissed by C. S. Lewis and others as ‘the anthropological approach’. An extreme version of this was proposed by John Spiers,⁹ who saw the poem’s more profound meaning to lie in its links with the natural world’s yearly cycle, connected with such seasonal things as mummers’ plays, in which allegorical figures acted out the events associated with the changing seasons. Interpretations along these lines were founded in such canonical works as Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which suggested that the deeper meanings of literary works with links to a folk tradition, as romances have, are to be sought at a subliminal, sub-textual level. The Green Knight as a midwinter vegetation figure, it is suggested, somehow links with Gawain as a sun god (Gawain did have some such associations with an earlier avatar, the Welsh semi-divinity Gwalchmei),¹⁰ and the story in the poem connects with the killing of the old year and the revival of the new. Some of the most appealing things in the poem link to the seasons and the life principle: in the great passage describing the stages of the year when Gawain is setting off on his quest, the autumn warns the grain to harden before the trials of winter; at the end, Gawain’s attachment to his life wins him the Green Knight’s approval. But such links, suggestive though they are, have little to do with the concerns or appeal of the poem as it stands, even if such vestiges feed an important vein of life in the poem. Gawain is as independent of those distant sources as of its more proximate ones. Although operating with paralleled story elements, and keeping faithful to the spirit of the romance world, it stands outside its traditions as a work of imaginative originality that speaks to all ages.

NOTES

1. R. W. V. Elliott, The ‘Gawain’ Country (Leeds, 1984), and especially ‘Landscape and Geography’ in the most valuable collection of essays on this poem and the others in the manuscript A Companion to the ‘Gawain’-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 103–17.

2. For a good summary of modern versions, see Barry Windeatt and David J. Williams in Brewer and Gibson, Companion.

3. J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry (London, 1971).

4. L. D. Benson, Art and Tradition in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (New Brunswick, 1965).

5. J. A. Burrow, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London, 1965), p. 25.

6. G. Henderson (ed. and trans.), Fled Bricrend: Bricriu’s Feast (London, 1899).

7. For an excellent detailed account and translated texts of some important sources and analogues of Gawain, see L. E. Brewer, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’: Sources and Analogues, Arthurian Studies 27, 2nd edn (Woodbridge, 1992), and the same writer’s chapter ‘The Sources of Sir Gawain’ in Brewer and Gibson, Companion, pp. 243–55. The First Continuation of Perceval was edited by W. Roach (Philadelphia, 1949); see p. xiii for parallels with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

8. L. E. Brewer, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’: Sources and Analogues, pp. 109ff.

9. John Spiers, Medieval English Poetry, The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (London, 1952), pp. 215ff.

10. Described by R. S. Loomis in Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (New York, 1949), pp. 146–8.

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE BEGINNING

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

Translated and Introduced by Bernard O’Donoghue

Contents