Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Clerical and romance traditions meet in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the finest
English verse romance.Sir Gawain is found in a manuscript with three other poems,
Patience,Cleanness and Pearl, all in alliterative measures (Pearlis also stanzaic) and
a late 14th-century Cheshire dialect, presumably by the one author. Each poem is
strikingly original and intelligent, but Gawainmust stand here for all.
It has a typical romance opening, an outrageous challenge to the knights at
King Arthur’s court at Christmas; the challenge is accepted, and a knight of the
Round Table rides forth on his quest, surviving adventures and a fearful final
encounter, to return to Camelot a year later. The themes of prowess and gallant
conduct are combined with that of the Grail-quest, chastity.Gawainis a romance
ofrare economy and zest. It displays chivalry – brave knights and fair ladies,
magnificent hospitality in the castle, courage in the field and fine language – in a
plot combining adventure, excitement and surprise. It is full of festive fun and
games, a masque-like entertainment, yet it raises questions about chivalry, that
bonding of a military code onto the Gospel, which maintained Christendom. The
preaching of the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries refined the ethic of
chivalry and consecrated it as a religious rule of life. The knightly code, devoted to
Christ, protecting the rights of the weak (especially ladies) and treating antago-
nists with honour, was a calling. Invoked in ceremony and literature, it often fell
short in practice.
The Green Knight, a green giant with a huge axe, offers to take a blow from the
axe – in exchange for a return blow in a year’s time. Gawain volunteers, to save the
honour of his uncle Arthur and of the Round Table. Beheaded by Gawain, the Green
Knight picks up his severed head from among the feet of the diners, and remounts
his green horse, causing consternation:
For the hede in his honde he haldes up even,
Toward the derrest on the dece he dresses the face;
And hit lyfte up the yye-lyddes, and loked ful brode,
And meled thus much with his muthe ...
For he holds up the head upright in his hand, he turns the face to the highest on the dais;
and it lifted up the eye-lids and looked broadly, and spoke as follows with its mouth ...
The mouth now tells Gawain to keep his bargain at the Green Chapel on New
Year’s Day, or be a coward. By the following Christmas, Gawain has made his way
through the wilderness. He fights bulls, bears, boars and giants (all in one line), but
finds the cold worse: ‘Near slain with the sleet, he slept in his irons’. The running
water ‘hanged high over his head in hard iisse-ikkles’. He pra ys to Mary, and a
wonderful castle appears, so battlemented and pinnacled ‘That pared out of paper
purely [exactly] it semed’. Gawain, who has a reputation as a gentleman, especially
with the ladies, is welcomed to the castle by its hearty lord. The host proposes that
while he hunts in the mornings, Gawain should sleep in to recover his strength; in
the evenings they shall exchange their winnings. Early each morning the radiant lady
ofthe castle comes to Gawain’s chamber and locks the door after her. She flirts with
him, pressing him to take a kiss and other tokens of love. Gawain plays well, declin-
ing without refusing; but is obliged to take a kiss, and the next day two kisses. These
he giv es to the lord in exchange for the deer and a boar the lord has won in his hunt-
ing. On the third day Gawain is persuaded to take three kisses – and also a sash from54 2 · MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: 1066–1500