Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an Arthurian romance that was most likely passed down orally shortly after Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, tugging at the very fabric of understanding the century prior. The poem is written in alliterative verse, giving cadence and direction to the story that in its entirety would most likely had to have been remembered. The anonymous poet, also referred to as the Pearl Poet, explored multiple different tensions between ideals that existed in the Arthurian English world while also questioning the values of civility, pragmatism, and Christianity among others in order to entice his most likely young listeners to understand and chew on the downfall of a seemingly perfect knight: Sir Gawain. His listeners would have perhaps looked at the era prior as a time of excess, folly, youth and denial in disdain, or otherwise look at it as a time worthy of nostalgia, beholding a world in which courage and fidelity were held high above any other values or temptations. Throughout the romance, the pearl poet creates a tension between Christianity and paganism in order to test and question the very values that the perfect knight Gawain holds dearest. This opposition gives insight into human nature’s inability to cooperate with some of the high spiritual demands that Christianity and the Arthurian court have on Sir Gawain, as he represents all the best that his God and his king has to offer.
The very start of the story creates a complementary comparison between Christianity and knightly values, suggesting that they live in tandem. Sir Gawain’s shield has adorned on it “A figure formed of five points/And each line is linked and locked with the next,” (Borroff 627-628) which forms a pentangle that represents all of the knightly values that Sir Gawain holds dear. This symbolizes the protection that his knighthood gives him against any foe that may cross his path. On the reverse side of the shield, there holds a portrait of “the high Queen of heaven” (Borroff 647) which is meant to symbolize that should all else fail God will protect him in his quest. This forms the bulwark defense of the mortal Sir Gawain, a combination of utmost respect, bravery and fidelity in tandem with an undying faith to the Christian God. Sir Gawain holds these virtues dear to his heart, and so every action he makes is carefully weighed against the demands of the court and the demands of Christ. From him standing against the Green Knight for the first time to “beseech, before all here that this melee may be [his]” (Borroff 341-342) in order to defend his King’s honor to his request of absolution for his sins at the end of the lay, his actions reveal his due sense of commitment to God. However, as the lay goes, Sir Gawain fails in many ways in completing his quest, especially to his God. This serves as the main framework for the poem’s meaning.
Gawain leaves the court to go face the Green Knight, but is brought upon numerous challenges along the way. The world is wild and seems out to kill him, be it by “serpents,” “savage wolves,” and “wild men of the woods,” (Borroff 720-721) or be it by the deep hunger and freezing cold working against him along the way. These are pagan representations of chaos, characterized by natures inability to see fairness and virtue but rather making itself naked to the mortality of Sir Gawain. They are not the noble challenges that a knight would normally have to face, but rather very raw assaults on his person. He nears death when he clutches upon his God to save him from this humiliating end, and thus stops riding across the country to “pray with all his might/that Mary may be his guide” (Borroff 737-739). Immediately thereafter, Gawain finds himself upon a “wondrous dwelling” (Borroff 764) that rivals even his own King’s, and thusly the poet makes clear that Gawain’s faith is to thank for saving him when his mortality dared to falter, and recognizing it, Gawain bade thanks to “Jesus and Saint Julian” (Borroff 774).
If Gawain represents Christianity’s most faithful knight, their best and brightest, then the Green Knight who opposes Gawain represents the rawest values of paganism that tense with Christianity directly. Christianity is young in the span of time whereas nature and its pagan followers have, in one way or another, always been. Nature is older, wiser, and more powerful than Christianity and this fact is symbolized by the Green Knight’s power and age. The Green Knight had “a beard big as a bush on his breast” (Borroff 182) which is to portray a gap of age between him and the court, mostly comprised of young “beardless children” (Borroff 280). Furthermore, when Gawain makes the first blow to the Green Knight on conditions of playing the game, his head falls to the ground, yet he merely just plucks it up, a metaphor for the regenerative properties of nature, further touting his pagan magic in front of Christians who only know of mortality. It frightens them, and even the King himself “at heart had wonder” (Borroff 467), as for them it was the first time that something had genuinely challenged the contemporary knowledge of Christian miracles directly with a sort of witchcraft akin to the rebirth of Christ himself. Furthermore, the stark green hue of the Green Knight can be interpreted as a deliberate color choice in the sense that around the 14th century Christian literature would have the Christian believe that the devil was green of color—this associates the Green Knight with not only paganism and nature, but also with the antithesis to the Christian religion in its entirety. The undertone of this encounter is that this is the first real challenge to Gawain’s beliefs, as when the devilish Green Knight makes his challenge known, he tells Gawain that if he fails to uphold his end of the game’s bargain, he will “be counted as a recreant knight” (Borroff 456), putting immediately Gawain’s faith into jeopardy and interwoven with the assumed future demise of himself at the hands of the Green Knight.
Before Gawain meets the Green Knight at the green chapel, he is given several temptations that he ultimately fails upon which forms the crux of the poem. The lord of the castle’s wife tries to “entice him to sin” (Borroff 1550) by sleeping with her, entering his bed nightly and giving him a kiss, and yet he is able to hold firm his stance of Knightly honor. While he may have been able to succeed in the most trivial of primal temptations, he was unable to replicate the resolve when he is offered a girdle “Of a gay green silk, with gold overwrought” (Borroff 1832) which would allow “For the man that possesses this piece of silk/If he bore it on his body… there is no hand under heaven that could hew him down” (Borroff 1852-1854). This pagan magic would prevent him from dying in his encounter with the Green Knight, and offers him a solution to his predicament. When he accepts the girdle and wears it to the final confrontation, he ultimately chooses pagan magic over the supposed miracle of Christianity and God’s salvation to help him survive. He chooses to not rely on the most important part of his knightly figure—his faith, and it is a terrible sin that causes his downfall as a hero. He valued his life more than he valued his knighly honor and his spiritual creed, and is the single most important takeaway from the lay. While Gawain may be a noble, perfect knight and the most devout of Christians, nature forces him to confront his mortality and question what it meant to have faith and fidelity.
Knowing at the end of the lay that the Green Knight was in fact Lord Bertilak, the owner of the castle in which Sir Gawain stayed, it wouldn’t be far outlandish to contend that the girdle’s gift was in fact a deal with the devil. He bargained with the Green Knight in all of his pagan and natural power to protect his life. Bertilak “made trial of a man most faultless by far” (Borroff 2362) and he faltered. The point that Bertilak was trying to prove to the knight in setting up this game was that the girdle’s “tenderness entices the foul taint of sin” (Borroff 2437). Nature is bound in the human experience and bound to the human existence, and no amount of denying the ultimate need to survive will ever elevate a man beyond his humanity. Understanding this truth, to deny the pressure of spirituality in favor of a more mature and nuanced understanding of God holds, to Lord Bertilak, Sir Gawain as “polished as a pearl” (Borroff 2393). Sir Gawain finds that nuance indeed, and ultimately becomes a knight errant, trying to find his way past the failures of his quest. The poet brings end the tale of Sir Gawain in the “wild ways in the world our worthy knight rides” (Borroff 2478), as he sets off for Camelot to reveal his discoveries. The listeners of the poem are left to chew on the idea that any idealism of the past could be exactly that—idealism, in all unattainable. They will bring to life the nostalgia of the high tales of romance and adventure of the honorable knights, but they’d keep in the back of their minds the reality of nature’s fierce victory over any spiritual virtue that one may believe is perfection. In all, they’d realize that there is no escaping the fact that all Christians and all men are susceptible to sin.
Zackary
Works Cited
Borroff, Marie. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. New York: Norton, 1967. Print.
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