A knight at the crossroads

What I learnt from the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Detail from an illustration in the manuscript of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (British Museum).

500 dollars

down, no questions, the rental car

stops at the highway intersection, a filthy

violent storm under the hood. It yields

to traffic from both directions.

It appears it could go either way.

Karen Solie, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out ¹

“The beginning full seldom matches the end.”

The Gawain-poet

In a recent (re)post, I wrote about one of those trials of life when, at least for a time, we have no idea what to do. I was on the road to Manta in Ecuador and lost in unfamiliar countryside, in the dark. In that essay, I reflected that my Catholic friends might pray to the Virgin Mary at such a point. As I also said in that piece, I didn’t pray.

But it was different for Gawain in the classic mediaeval alliterative romance poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.² His path towards glory was through bravery and humility, even vulnerability, and is bound up with the season of winter and, above all, the coming of the new year. And when Gawain got lost and was undergoing “in peryl and payne and plytes ful hard” ³ in the countryside looking for the Green Chapel as part of his quest, what did he do but pray to the Virgin Mary for guidance?

My own mishaps were simply caused by careless planning. No universal truths were invoked, other than the need to check your electrics before setting out on a long journey in a very old vehicle.

Gawain’s trials, however, could be seen as having religious, moral, or philosophical elements. Though they could also be seen as just a great game. Or a combination of those. The poem certainly provokes reflection upon those times when we are tested in life and how ambiguous the outcome of those trials might be.

It was Christmas at Camelot—King Arthur’s court,

where the great and the good of the land had gathered,

all the righteous lords of the ranks of the Round Table

quite properly carousing and reveling in pleasure. ⁴

The poem gets underway in midwinter. It’s a Christmas story. And it's a New Year story. But it actually starts in a wider frame than the season of the year, a frame that also reaches beyond its Christian framework. The poem opens (and closes) with the fall of Troy, a destruction that would lead in turn to the founding of Rome—a revolution of the wheel of fate that adds layers of meaning to the tale. And just as Romulus would go on to found Rome, so did one Felix Brutus go on (according to the legend of the time) to found England.

Now for the story of the poem (spoiler alert). Put simply, a mysterious and gigantic green knight appears at Camelot to disrupt the festivities and to challenge one of the knights to a contest or game. The knight from Camelot would have the first blow in the Beheading Game and cut off the head of the Green Knight. Then, within a year and a day, the knight from Camelot would receive the same treatment at the Green Chapel. There’s temporary confusion in the court as no one steps forward.

As readers, we can enjoy the rich sense of tension and even embarrassment when the Green Knight’s challenge goes unanswered at first.

Arthur expresses his anger for the stranger’s insolent behaviour (and perhaps because no one steps up to take the challenge) before Gawain, his nephew and one of the least regarded knights, asks leave to take up the challenge. He thereby saves the honour of Camelot (and the King from fighting). Gawain duly cuts off the Green Knight’s head. The Green Knight then picks up his head and makes the gruesome appointment with Gawain a year’s hence.

The story’s suspense is then built as the poet records the passing of the seasons until the winter, which marks the season for Gawain to begin his perilous quest:

The drying airs arrive, driving up dust

from the face of the earth to the heights of heaven,

and wild sky wrestles the sun with its winds,

and the leaves of the lime lay littered on the ground,

and grass that was green turns withered and gray. (523-7)

Finally, Gawain sets off, but not before a warning from the poet:

For though men be merry in mind when they have much drink,

yet a year runs full swiftly, and yields never the same;

the beginning full seldom matches the end.⁵

The travails of Gawain on his way to the Green Chapel are passed over quickly but are real:

So momentous are his travels among the mountains

to tell just a tenth would be a tall order.

Here he scraps with serpents and snarling wolves,

here he tangles with wodwos causing trouble in the crags,

or with bulls and bears and the odd wild boar. (718-22)

But the winter is worse, and the poet uses lovely language to describe it:

Clouds shed their cargo of crystallized rain

which froze as it fell to the frost-glazed earth. (727-8)

Gawain finally reaches a castle and is relieved to be told that the chapel he seeks is nearby. He’s invited to spend the time before his appointment with Sir Bertilak and his wife, whose castle it is. An agreement is made: the Exchange of Winnings. Bertilak, who will go out hunting each day, and Gawain, who’ll stay in the castle, promise to give each other what they receive during the day. Bertilak makes a present of an animal he has killed every day to Gawain.

Gawain himself appears more like prey than hunter as Lady Bertilak makes strenuous efforts to seduce him. Any weakness on the part of the knight in such a situation would be in strict violation of the chivalric code (as well as rules of hospitality). He receives a kiss each day from Lady Bertilak, which he dutifully gives to her husband each evening. But when he keeps the green girdle that Lady Bertilak gives him on the final day, telling him that it is a magical belt and will protect the wearer from death, he weakens, breaks his word, and says nothing about it to Bertilak.

The day of the appointment arrives. Scared but resolute, Gawain heads off to the Green Chapel, where he encounters the Green Knight once more. As he settles down to receive the monstrous axe on his neck, the Green Knight taunts him with a feinted blow, which makes Gawain flinch. The Green Knight laughs at this, but Gawain tells him to swing his axe again.

It comes down hard, but then the Green Knight holds back the blow at the last moment. This time Gawain does not flinch, but he’s furious as this toying with him. A third blow comes down hard and is carried through; it glances Gawain’s unwavering neck, drawing a little blood. Gawain springs up, ready to defend himself against further attack now that his debt is paid.

The Green Knight explains to Gawain that he has been tested and found worthy. But because he didn’t hand over the girdle, he received a slight wound as a minor punishment for his imperfection. We’re to understand that Gawain’s failing is that he loves life too much. Overall, in the words of the Green Knight, he’s shown himself to be “by the far the most faultless fellow on earth.”

If you like numbers, you’ll like how they recur in this poem. It is composed in four sections, or “fyttes.” There are 3 days of hunting, 3 axe blows, and 3 meetings between Gawain and Lady Bertilak in her room. There are also various pairs—two Christmases, 2 halves of the beheading game, and the pairing of the kisses (each kiss is from Lady Bertilak to Gawain, then given by Gawain to Sir Bertilak).

For the visual reader, there’s also a seasonal palette of colours—above all green, of course, but also gold and the red of Gawain’s blood. For readers who enjoy the sound of fine poetry, the alliterative style lends itself to being read aloud.

It’s a vivid, dramatic, but also highly structured poem. And scholars have puzzled over who or what the Green Knight might represent: the Green Man, a wodwose, an Everyman? Some see him associated with life, others with death. He’s also been said to represent the Devil or even Christ.

The poem begins and ends in winter, and the final scene at the start of the new year suggests a continuation, a renewing of the cycle of life. Meanwhile, Gawain, though treated with due honour by the court upon his return, cannot shake off his sense of shame and regret at his failings:

“Regard,” said Gawain, grabbing the girdle,

“through this I suffered a scar to my skin—

for my loss of faith I was physically defaced;

what a coveting coward I became it would seem.

I was tainted by untruth and this, its token,

I will drape across my chest till the day I die. (2505-10)

Gawain then ends his speech with a broad philosophical or theological statement, a comment perhaps from the anonymous poet on human weakness and the impossibility of perfect chivalric conduct:

For man’s crimes can be covered but never made clean;

once entwined with sin, man is twinned for all time. (2511-12)

The King comforts Gawain, and cheerfulness returns to the court. Deep in their winter revelry, the knights seem not to want to dwell on Gawain’s sombre message but instead turn the belt into a kind of badge of honour and get on with their feasting.

Is Gawain a sinner who made a bad decision or basically a good person? Is Camelot too smug to survive? Why did Troy fall? The mediaeval reader might well have pondered on these questions.

As we wonder what this new year will bring us, we have the poet’s warning words before us: the beginning full seldom matches the end. That wisdom’s embedded in the start of the poem, when we see King Arthur anxious for some action despite his pleasure in the feast enjoyed by his fellow knights:

what he liked the least

was to sit still watching the seasons slip by.

With the drama that would then ensue with the Green Knight’s dramatic entrance, there’s an unspoken admonition to Arthur (and to us): Be careful what you wish for.

As critics have pointed out, the poem is open-ended.⁶ And perhaps it reminds us that life is, too. Choices have to be made, just as Gawain made them, just as I did on that road to the Pacific coast many years ago (they were mostly bad ones). And to paraphrase the Karen Solie poem I quoted from in the epigraph: Things could go either way.

Now that the turning wheel of time has tipped over into the new cycle of a new year, it will continue to pose us its questions, but like the poem, it leaves us with the chance to create our own answers.

The poem ends as it began with the fall of Troy:

Since fearless Brutus first set foot

on these shores, once the siege and assault at Troy

had ceased,

our coffers have been crammed

with stories such as these. (2524-8)

The knights—and winter nights—carry on as before, but the warnings of this and other stories may soon be forgotten.

Troy fell. As will Camelot, along with other cities and even great empires.

But so too, the poem suggests, will winter end and a new cycle of life and death begin.

1. Karen Solie is a fabulous poet, and if you don’t know her work, I suggest you check out this book. You can read the poem I quote from here.

2. We don’t know who wrote the poem. The same person possibly wrote three other long poems, Pear, Patience, and Purity, all found in the same manuscript and probably composed in the second half of the 14th century in England. The poet is usually referred to as “the Gawain-poet.”

3. Literally, "in peril, and pain, and very hard plights." For the original text, I’ve used my battered copy of JA Burrow’s edition for Penguin English Poets (1972).

4. Unless stated otherwise, I’ve used Simon Armitage’s excellent 2009 verse translation for modern English quotations from the text. If you wish to read the poem, I suggest you use that version. These lines are 37–40 in the Kindle version.

5. This is the version by WA Neilson. Lines 497-99. I prefer this rendering of the pivotal line 499: “The forme to the fynisment foldes ful selden” (this is a good example of the alliterative style of the poem). However, Armitage’s line 498 is more evocative: "But each year, short lived, is unlike the last.”

6. For example, see The Gawain Poet by AC Spearing (Cambridge University Press, 1970). P.236