The Journey of Gawain

After finishing the three tales of Sir Gawain in The King and the Corpse, I thought that I would share some thoughts about my own interaction with the text. I realize it’s been more than a week since I last posted so hopefully anyone who thought that my posts were worth reading have not migrated to greener pastures. Either way here goes.

For those of you who don’t know, the tale of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is rather simple, at least on the surface, and elaborates on a challenge set forth by a strange green man to the men of Arthur’s castle. The challenge is that whoever is brave enough should step forward and, with the axe that the Green Knight holds, strike the large man one blow. The stipulation is that the next New Year the man should find the knight at the Green Chapel and receive one blow in kind. Gawain takes up the contest in order to protect the honor of his lord and delivers a blow that knocks the head from the Green Knight’s shoulders. Problem solved right? Wrong! The giant then picks up his head, gore dripping from the wound (I imagine he blew the larger debris and germs off as well, because who wants to reattach their head to their body  only to get an infection from some unseen piece of detritus.) The allotted year passes and Gawain goes in search of the Knight. Nearly dead, he prays to God and Mary for a safe place to stay the night on Christmas Eve and lo and behold a castle appears. Being the trusting man that he is, Gawain enters the castle and is greeted as a great lord. He learns that the Green Chapel is not far from his current location and agrees to stay the remainder of the time before his appointment with the Lord and Lady of the realm. The next three days involve a wager set between Bertilak and Gawain that the former will go out and hunt and whatever he catches he will bring to Gawain whiled the latter remains at rest within the castle. Gawain agrees and the first two days go by smoothly, each with one more kiss from the Lady to Gawain which the knight promptly bestows upon the Lord. It is on the third day that Gawain breaks his vow for the Lady, attempting to bestow upon Gawain a token that will somehow bind him to her, gives to Gawain a girdle of green cloth that protects the wearer from harm. Thus Gawain, withholds the belt from Bertilak and, though he is troubled by the deceit, goes on his way the next morning to the Green Chapel. There he is confronted by the Green Knight who, after two feinted swings, the first of which makes Gawain flinch and the second to test his resolve to remain still despite impending death, makes only a small cut in the other man’s throat. It is after this trial that the Green giant is revealed to be no other than Bertilak himself, and the man also reveals that Gawain has been tested for the last three days, failing only slightly in that he took the belt from the mistress of the castle. In the end, however, Gawain is permitted to go on his way and chooses to wear the belt as a sign of his newfound knowledge the rest of his days.

This is the story, in quite a hurried fashion, as told by Zimmer. The man does an excellent job of not only passing on the tale but then unburying many of the secrets that lay beneath. I had not thought, for example, that the Green Knight was death incarnate, but the knowledge now makes since. It is also interesting to note that, though this may be true, there is another, more obvious guise that the transformed Bertilak assumes, that of the well named Green Man. The Green Man in Celtic lore was a fertility god. He was of the Otherworld, and thus only interacted with people on the most menial of bases, only coming forth from his evergreen kingdom when men or women needed to learn a lesson. What Zimmer does not add to the axe in the tale is that the man also held a bundle of holly, important in that it is the only plant native to England that grows green in the depths of winter. Zimmer does state later that he sees a union between life and death in the marriage of the Lady of the Castle to her husband Death. Yet I would take the metaphor one step further and say that the Green Knight himself is a unification of both the aspects of life and death. He is, in other words, what Gawain may seem to become at the end of the poem (though we will come to that shortly). Thus it is the wielder of death, the carrier of the axe who is also, in many ways the one who offers life in the depths of winter, apparent death in its physical manifestation.

As Gawain sets out, we come across another form of apparent death, for to all eyes that witness the departure, even to Gawain himself, the brave knight is going to his death. He made the wager with the demon specter and so must go to pay his due, and the only outcome that can be seen by the party is that he will never return from his quest. Thus Gawain has essentially become the walking dead, a figure whose last days are numbered. As Gawain journeys into the wilderness, he is assailed by the world around him, caught in the storms of the wide world which he must overcome in order to make his final destination. Yet, near death, the flame of his life nearly spent in a quest that has lead him across the vast landscapes of England to no avail, Gawain finds himself in a dark forest and prays for deliverance if only for the night that he might worship Christ on the eve of the Lord’s Mass (Christ-mass). Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a castle looms before him. No doubt weary and not thinking straight, Gawain enters the castle with little regard as to from where it might have come. 

It is here that Zimmer makes the second error in his abridgements from the tale, for when Gawain passes into the realm of Bertilak, he is instantly stripped of his armor. As a knight, this is much the same as stripping the man of his identity. The images of death are all about us now. Gawain has, as in the later story of his journey into another castle, crossed into the land of the dead (though at one time it would have been Otherworld, the land of the faeries, but that is a topic for another argument and blog altogether). Here he makes a final descent and loses his very identity, an occurrence that greatly interests Northrop Frye who sees the loss or stripping of identity as one of the tell-tale signs of a fall or descent from a higher plane of existence to a lower one. Thus, Gawain, though he may not yet know it, is charged with literally finding himself again, with rediscovering who and what he is.

Here enters, then, the Lady of the Castle, charged, in no small part, with seducing Gawain, with testing the virtues to which he so adamantly clings. Despite all of her efforts, Gawain remains faithful to his lord, his duty, and, perhaps most importantly, to his host. Yet, he is not completely immovable, and when the Lady offers him a token that could perhaps save his life, the young man takes hold of it, sensing, no doubt, an opportunity to thwart death and return from his once seemingly final quest. The belt, as we learn, is nothing more than a final rouse to tempt the doomed man, a spider web dangling above a cavernous pit that offers to pull the doomed man to safety if he will but reach out and grab it. Bertilak, is none other than the Green Knight himself, and it was his test that the young knight fails. 

Yet, all is not lost for Gawain, as Zimmer notes, for he is eventually given the very belt that offers protection, a symbol of his journey through death into immortality. I am somewhat loathe to argue with a figure such as Zimmer, who no doubt has forgotten more than I will ever know on the subject about which now I type, yet I cannot help but see the belt as not an image of the gained immortality that Gawain first sought, but still as nothing more than the spider web. In other words, I would argue that the belt was nothing more than a gift from the Lady that would make Gawain forget the one thing that he was supposed to remember, his faith in God. Though this may be an uncomfortable subject for some, still I cannot help but see an indictment of any attempts to circumvent the natural order of things. Gawain, in leaving for the Green Chapel is given back his arms (on the inside of his shield by the way is the Virgin to whom he prayed for relief from his suffering before entering Bertilak’s castle. It is to this figure of womanly virtue and to her son that Gawain is supposed to look for comfort in a world of death, and, yet, his faith is marred by the addition of a green girdle that offers no more safety than the strand of web over a chasm. Gawain returns home, not with a mark of immortality, but with a brand that he will ever wear in shame, a reminder that his faith wavered in the face of utter annihilation.

As I write this, however, I am struck by the fact that the man’s faith did not go unanswered. He was saved from the very brink of death by an otherworldly power that he could not comprehend. Who is to say that this power was not in league with his faith? What then can we learn from Gawain, or what were the poets attempting to convey as they concocted such a story? Gawain passed through the fires of death into the very domain of the thing which he sought to avoid only to pass out again later, marked for all time as one who stood in contest with death and was rewarded for his bravery. There can be no doubt that he was transformed, utterly, as marked by the green belt later worn as a sash and reminder of his time within the halls of Life and Death.

In romance, at least, we can see the necessity for the hero to pass through perils that would destroy other men, to brave the deepest darkness in search of some truth that has eluded so many. It is only once he has finally emerged from all these trials, changed from what he once was, that the hero can take up his role and live, in the end happily ever after, but that is a story for the next blog.