A Different look at the Mid English poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Introduction
The usual interpretation of the poem is seeing in it a test for chivalry for one of King Arthur’s most prominent knights, Sir Gawain. My contention is that behind the mask of Christian chivalry lies an idea based on pagan ritual. It is possible that this basis was not only familiar to the initial readers, but perhaps even in actual use at the time among the populace, camouflaged by ideas more acceptable to the authorities.
I. The Poem
It may be helpful to take a look at the main points of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (s. links below) in order to clarify the idea presented in the Introduction. The poem tells us that, on New Year’s Day, while the knights of King Arthur’s court are celebrating under the auspices of Queen Guinevere, a giant knight appears dressed all in green. He challenges the knights at court to behead him, claiming it would cause him no harm; in return, he demands to do the same to his beheader on the next New Year Day. Sir Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew, volunteers for the task, holds the great axe the Green Knight hands him and cuts off his head. Instead of dying, the knight picks up his head and rides away, after reminding Sir Gawain his promise for next year, and appointing their meeting at his dwelling place in a Green Chapel.
Toward the end of the year, Sir Gawain rides in search of the Green Chapel. On his way he meets many adventures and many dangers until, at Christmas, he arrives at a castle. The Lord of the Castle, Bertilak, who is an avid hunter, welcomes him with courtly manners; he introduces him to his wife, the Lady of the Castle, who is a beautiful young woman; and to her companion, who is old and ugly. The Lady flirts with Sir Gawain in the absence of her husband on his hunting trips, and gives him a green belt to guard against being killed.
At the end of the poem, a few mysteries are solved. It seems that the castle is actually the sought-for Green Chapel, and the Lord of the Castle is the Green Knight himself. Sir Gawain, who had been made a fool of over the green belt and his flirting with the Lady, is courteously sent home, unharmed.
II. Sir Gawain
The figure of Sir Gawain is crucial for the story, as no other knight would have gone through the improbable task demanded by the Green Knight. Who was he, then, to take such a prominent part in Arthur’s court? In a genealogical table from a site about the figures featuring the Arthurian legends (s. link below), it can be learned that Gawain has been seen by some scholars as the representative of the Solar God.
In the Welsh legend, Gawain was known as Gwalchmei or the “Hawk of May”. Gwalchmei appeared not only as a hero and a nephew of Arthur, he was also son of the goddess Gwyar. In his seasonal interpretation of Celtic myths, presented in his book The White Goddess, Robert Graves sees the life of the Hero as symbolizing the course of the sun through one year. That heroic divinity was born at Christmas (25 December), soon after the birth of the sun at the shortest day of the year (21 December); in the spring month of May, when the sun has climbed higher in the sky and gained enough strength, the young Hero flies up to the sky in the shape of a hawk.
Gwalchmei had also been compared to the greatest Irish hero, Cu Chulainn, who was the son of the Sun god Lugh. (A “son of god” would usually symbolize the god’s younger version). In the tale of Culhwch and Olwen, Gwalchmei was the hero who “never returned without fulfilling his quest” – the quest being the completion of the Year’s full circle, as represented by Gawain’s wanderings. It was known that Gawain’s greatest strength in duels would always be shown at noontime, when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. In the Mid English poem, then, Sir Gawain represents the mythological figure of the Sun god.
III. The Course of Seasons
The seasonal atmosphere of the poem is strongly marked, a fact that adds to the character of the hero as a seasonal Sun god. Thus, the poet describes what happened with Sir Gawain after the Green Knight had left the festivities, and before he sets on his quest for the Green Chapel; Gawain is given “a year and a day” for this purpose, as the Irish year is counted: 13 months of 28 days plus one day to complete the official number of 365 days.
These are the seasons mentioned in the original poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: It begins with the festivities on New Year Day because, although the Sun god is born on Christmas eve, the lengthening of the days becomes evident only around New Year Day. After that comes the season of late winter called Lent, when the earth is bare and the sun is cold and ineffective. As the days get longer and the sun gets stronger, what happens in the poet’s words is that: “The cold withdraws itself, the clouds uplift, and the rain falls in warm showers on the fair plains.” That is when the Hawk of May spreads its wings and flies to the sky. Then, “the flowers come forth, meadows and groves are clad in green, the birds make ready to build, and sing sweetly for solace of the soft summer that follows thereafter… The blossoms bud and blow in the hedgerows rich and rank, and noble notes enough are heard in the fair woods.“ Strangely the poet is silent about what happens when the sun reaches its peak at Midsummer – perhaps because in ancient days, unspeakable things happened at that time, which might included human sacrifice (as will be seen below). After Midsummer, the year turns, “harvest comes and hardens the grain, warning it to wax ripe ere the winter… The drought drives the dust on high, flying over the face of the land.” Autumn comes, and “the angry wind of the welkin (=sky) wrestles with the sun; the leaves fall from the trees and light upon the ground, and all brown are the groves that but now were green, and ripe is the fruit that once was flower.” This description of the dying of the year fits the closing circle of the sun’s travels. That is the time when people begin to wait for the darkening of winter.
At Michaelmas (29 September), with the onset of autumn gloom, Sir Gawain begins to think about his coming journey. On the Day of All Saints, after the Autumn Equinox, in a mournful mood in expectation of his coming execution, Sir Gawin sets on his adventurous way to look for the Green Chapel and the Green Knight. By Christmas Eve, he arrives at the beautiful castle surrounded by a green park, where begins the next stage of his adventures.
IV. The Figure of the Goddess
The Goddess is the one who rules life and death and all things of Nature, including the seasonal course of the sun through the year. The three women in the poem represent her three aspects, according to pagan theories: Queen Guinevere, who presides at King Arthur’s court over the festivities of the birth of the Sun god (whose Christian name is Jesus), represents the Goddess as the Sun Hero’s Mother. The Lady of the Castle, young and beautiful, elegantly dressed with her neck and bosom exposed, flirts with Sir Gawain and would have chosen him for a husband were she not married; she represents the Goddess as a Spring Bride, who each year makes her choice of a Hero to be her lover for the season. In some cultures she is the sister and lover of twin-brothers, who between them symbolize the waxing and the waning year. Her old companion, who is described in the poem as “wrinkled, stocky, hairy, black-browed”, covered entirely in clothing, represents the Goddess at the end of the year, when she causes the death of the Hero symbolizing the death of the Sun. These are the three aspects of the Triple Goddess, who appears as Bride, Mother and Crone.
V. The Green Man
The person who, more than anyone and anything else shows the pagan basis for the poem, is the “Green Knight”, who represents an ancient but well established figure called the Green Man. The green color appears consistently in the poem, in the Green Knight, the Green Chapel, and the green belt given by the Lady to Sir Gawain as protection against being killed. This green color, which does not have much to do with Christianity, more than anything else hints at ancient pagan times. In those times many rituals would take place in field and forest, and not under the roofs of church, palace or castle, where chivalrous manners are so important. The Green Chapel itself points out to the forest, with its green canopy, where unheard of savage rituals took place in olden times. The Green Man was part and parcel of those wild rituals.
In an article called ‘The Green Man – Variation on a Theme’, which appears at a site called Edge (s. link below), Ruth Wylie says that “the mighty questions of who, what and why” concerning the figure of the Green man “have no answer yet”. However, in her own article she manages to give quite a few answers to those questions. The idea and figure of the Green Man, as Ms. Wylie states, is spread all over England. It is “a mediaeval image usually found in churches… He can be recognized as a face, often grotesque, with foliage sprouting from his mouth, nose, eyes or ears. Alternatively, he may be a face composed entirely of leaves… The earliest known examples are in the art of Classical Rome, from where the idea seems to have moved northwards, to be adopted by Christianity and spread far and wide along the pilgrimage routes. The Green Man vanished with the ‘Old Faith’ after the Reformation…”
The expression of “Old Faith” is the answer to those questions initially brought in by Ruth Wylie. This obviously the pagan religion spread all over Europe before the advent of Christianity. Referring to the same wide occurrence of the Green Man, the Mything Link site (s. link below) states plainly: The Green Man was the god Pan – dweller of the forest, dressed in its leaves and ruling over all kinds of wild rituals.
But according to other sources, the god Pan had a double in the better known, more widely spread and powerful god, Dionysus. In his book The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer says about Dionysus that he was a god of trees in general, sacrificed to by all Greeks as Dionysus of the Trees, sometimes represented as just an upright post (which is considered a phallic symbol). Dionysus assumed the form of a goat, as was Pan, and was worshipped under the title The One of the Black Goatskin; he himself was sacrificed in the shape of a kid in the autumn festival (which marks the end of the year in Mediterranean countries). As God of the Forest, Dionysus can be identified with the King of the Wood at Nemi. At Diana’s grove there, he was her mate and her yearly sacrificial victim, because “some peoples preferred to kill the king while he was still in the full vigor of life.”
In an elaborate site explaining the essence of some Greek deities (s. link below), it is said about Dionysus: He was associated with death and rebirth; (the Great Goddess) Hera arranged for the Titans to kill him and they ripped him to pieces, while the (Earth) goddess Rhea (also known as Cybele) brought him back to life, and he was raised by the mountain nymphs. The followers of Dionysus worshipped him in the woods, working themselves up into mad states of frenzy and ecstasy, and any animals (or people) they came upon would be ripped apart in sacrifice, their flesh eaten raw. In art he is depicted wearing a crown of ivy, and covered in vine leaves and grapes, a typical image of the Green Man. He is a God of Nature and Lord of the Harvest, a God of the Underworld, a Son/Lover of the Goddess, a Child of Promise, the Green Man and the Horned God, all combined into one. The Green Knight of the poem, then, represents this ancient God of the Forest, who was sometimes brother to the Sun god. His being torn to pieces in his sacrifice is symbolized in the poem by being decapitated; his staying alive shows him as the dying and resurrected god in the figure of Dionysus.
In a site by that name (s. link below), it is claimed that The Green Man makes his appearance in the Morris Dancers of England as Jack-In-The-Green. His is a disruptive character that attempts to distract the dancers from their dancing by playing the fool, as well as by breaking away from the dance troupe and accosting the onlookers. This description is evidence to the appearance of the Green Man, not only in Medieval England, but even in these days.
Conclusion
The main points connecting the Green Man with the Green Knight of the poem are, firstly, the widespread figure of the Green Man in England, enough to be familiar to the listeners of that medieval poem. Secondly, the character of the Green Man, which is evident in the figure of the Green Knight: he lives in the forest and takes part in uncivilized customs not known in King Arthur’s court; he takes part in a dismemberment, which does not kill him. He is definitely connected with the seasons of the year, making a point at his ritualistic dying taking part at Midwinter, with the death and rebirth of the sun. As the Lord of the Castle, he is obviously connected with the Nature goddess as a Bride, who can bring dying things back to life with the help of a “green belt”. Both heroes of the poem, who vie for the Lady’s love and for their right to live, represent the twin Sun gods in the manner of many known pagan gods and heroes of ancient days, and the story revealed behind the mask of a poem of test for chivalry, is the story of their birth, love, death and revival from ancient days, when that pagan religion ruled everywhere.
Links:
www.lib.rochester.edu/CAMELOT/sggk.htm – English Translation in Full
www.sparknotes.com/lit/gawain/section1.html – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
www.timelessmyths.com/arthurian/roundtable.html – Knights of the Round Table
www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/greenmen.htm – Edge, The Green Man as a mystery
http://www.controverscial.com/Greek%20Mythology.htm – Description of Dionysus as a Green Man
http://thegreenman.net.au/mt/archives/2003_06.html – Jack in the Green
www.mythinglinks.org/ct~greenmen.html – Comments on ideas and customs of the Green Man
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