SOURCE: Spearing, A. C. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” In The Gawain-Poet, pp. 171-91. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

[In the following excerpt, Spearing contends that three plot-elements—the Beheading Game, the Temptation, and the Exchange of Winnings—are fundamental to understanding the meaning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.]

The Story

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Gawain-poet's best known and most admired work, differs from his other three poems in being more essentially a narrative than they are. It is not an exemplum set in a homily, or a vision with explicit and detailed doctrine at its heart, but a story. Like Patience and Pearl, it has its tail in its mouth; but what it emerges from and returns to is not a moral truth but the process of legendary British history, that larger tale of alternating ‘blysse and blunder’ (18) in which it is only an incident. This essentially narrative quality of the poem gives it a self-sufficiency, and independence of moral schemata, whose consequences we shall have to examine later. For the moment, let us consider the story which is the poem's principle of structure or, in Aristotelian terms, its ‘soul’. This story is made up of a number of traditional elements—the Beheading Game, the Temptation, the Exchange of Winnings—which can be traced back over several centuries, but it is generally agreed that these elements are not found linked together in any possible source for the poem.¹ It may be, of course, that the poet was using a lost source in which they were linked, and that we should take literally his claim to be repeating the story ‘as I in toun herde’ (31) or ‘As hit is breved in the best boke of romaunce’ (2521). Perhaps some such source may one day be brought to light out of the tangled forest of medieval French romance. But it is perfectly possible that it was the poet himself who first brought the plot-elements together. As we shall see later, the skill with which he employs his narrative structure to convey his meaning makes this more likely. At any rate, in reading his poem, we are not in a position, as we were with Purity, Patience and Pearl, to compare it line by line with an immediate source. It stands by itself, and it is generally agreed to stand as an excellent story, admirably told: the finest of all the romances in Middle English. The poem offers no problems of structure, and its division into four ‘fitts’, indicated by large decorated initials in the manuscript, seems satisfactory and has usually been retained by editors.² No reader could possibly have any difficulty in following the beautifully articulated plot; and when the plot is complete, so is the poem.

But though Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is essentially a story, it is not purely a story. Reading it for the first time, we are eager to know ‘what happens next’, but we also delight to read it again and again, long after the mere sequence of events is well known enough to surprise us no more. In part this lasting fascination of the poem is due to the satisfaction its plot gives as an aesthetic structure, in which the three main plot-elements are ingeniously linked together, and certain patternings recur throughout. Many of these are threes of one kind or another: three days' hunting, three meetings of the Lady and Gawain in Gawain's bedroom, three axe-blows at the Green Chapel, and many other minor groups of three.³ Other patternings involve the recurrence of certain colours: green, predominantly, but also the gold with which it is often intertwined, and the red of blood.⁴ Others again involve the repetition of events such as the two Christmas feasts, the two halves of the Beheading Game, the kisses Gawain receives from the Lady and passes on to her husband, and so on. Such effects, involving repetition and variation, are regularly found in oral literature, or literature with an oral basis, such as chansons de geste and ballads, and we whose training is with written literature may need reminding not to underestimate their power. But Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, though it belongs to a tradition with its roots in oral poetry, is far from being a ballad or chanson de geste. These are what we might call ‘pure’ narratives: works which are narratives and nothing else, in which the burden of interpretation, of finding meaning and coherence in the events narrated, is thrown entirely upon the audience. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a romance, and it possesses those characteristics which Professor Vinaver has seen as fundamental to the genre:

romance was primarily a literary genre in the strict and perhaps somewhat narrow sense of the term: it was the product of trained minds, not of an uncritical and ingenuous imagination. To such minds an event in a work of narrative art could not be expressed merely by a plastically significant gesture or scene: it called for description and elaboration, it had to be related to its context and given its proper place in a sequence of co-ordinated occurrences. It was not enough for it to be impressive: it had to be made fully intelligible.⁵

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight offers its own detailed commentary on the story it tells, a commentary which both elaborates and interprets, in such a way as to make the story at once more specific and more general in its significance. This fact seems often to have been disregarded by those who have offered their own interpretation of the poem in terms of the primitive origins, real or supposed, of its plot-elements. Such interpreters will see in Gawain, ‘the traditional Gawain who … was the hero, the agent who brought back the spring, restored the frozen life processes, revived the god—or (in later versions) cured the king’, and will see in his pentangle ‘an ancient life-symbol’,⁶ before they have exhausted or fully come to terms with the commentary included in the poem on the hero and his token. Gawain is a thoroughly self-conscious and articulate hero. His articulateness indeed is an essential part of his traditional virtue of courtesy, and his self-consciousness is used at crucial points in the poem to throw a clear light upon his feelings and motives. Thus when the Lady of the castle first comes creeping into his bedroom and he pretends to be asleep, we are left in no doubt as to what is going on in his mind:

The lede lay lurked a ful longe quyle,
Compast in his concience to quat that cace myght
Meve other amount—to mervayle hym thoght,
Bot yet he sayde in hymself, ‘More semly hit were
To aspye wyth my spelle in space quat ho wolde.’
Then he wakenede, and wroth, and to hir warde torned,
And unlouked his yye-lyddez, and let as hym wondered,
And sayned hym, as by his sawe the saver to worthe. (1195-1202)

That conscience (self-awareness) of Gawain's is an essential part of the poem, and it has nothing to do with his supposed origin as a sun-god. In the passage just quoted, several different techniques—what Gawain says to himself, how he would have appeared, or wished to appear, to the Lady, what the omniscient narrator knows of his consciousness—are run expertly together to give a complete picture of his inner and outer behaviour. The narrator has no hesitation in telling us from his omniscience what feelings and principles Gawain is motivated by, when this is necessary for our understanding of the action's significance. For instance, at the evening meal in the castle after the second day's hunting, we are not left merely as observers of the behaviour of the Lady and Gawain, but are taken into Gawain's consciousness and given a most detailed and subtle account of the eddying conflict in his feelings:

And ever oure luflych knyght the lady bisyde.
Such semblaunt to that segge semly ho made
Wyth stille stollen countenaunce, that stalworth to plese,
That al forwondered watz the wyye, and wroth with hymselven,
Bot he nolde not for his nurture nurne hir ayaynez,
Bot dalt with hir al in daynté, how-se-ever the dede turned towarst. (1657-63)

That nurture which prevents Gawain from repelling the Lady's forwardness, though it is characteristic of him, is not a quality peculiar to himself. It is good breeding: a quality widely understood in medieval courtly society, and one that we too can feel our way into with only a little trouble (the trouble largely of reading this very poem). Thus the significance of the scene is extended; it takes on a relevance to its audience's own lives, and in entering into Gawain's situation they are reassessing their own values. Here we have a conflict involving both values and impulses (‘wroth with hymselven’ suggesting that it is not a simple case of one against the other). At other points, values are in conflict among themselves in Gawain's mind, so that the whole system of Christian courtliness to which he is committed—a commitment which the poem's audience no doubt shared—is put under strain. This is so on the next day, when the Lady renews her assault, and Gawain's cortaysye, chastity and loyalty are set at odds among themselves:

For that prynces of pris depresed hym so thikke,
Nurned hym so neghe the thred, that nede hym bihoved
Other lach ther hir luf, other lodly refuse.
He cared for his cortaysye, lest crathayn he were,
And more for his meschef yif he schulde make synne,
And be traytor to that tolke that that telde aght. (1770-5)⁷

The pentangle, too, is used by the poet to articulate the involvement of the story in moral issues of general relevance. I shall have more to say later about its significance, but here it is worth at least remarking that it is not left as ‘an ancient life-symbol’, but is given a detailed symbolic interpretation which shows how Gawain goes forth on his quest as the representative of a delicate complex of civilized and religious values.⁸ They may be summarized in the terms of the fifth and last of the pentangle's fives: fraunchyse, felawschyp, clannes, cortaysye and pité.

Gawain is not the only character whose motives and values are in this way made explicit. Whether or not the poet applies his omniscience to them, they are all splendidly articulate. Arthur, for example, plays only a minor part in the poem, but nothing could be clearer than the complicated sequence and synthesis of motives revealed in the economical little scene immediately after the Green Knight has galloped away from Camelot, carrying his head in his hand:

Thagh Arther the hende kyng at hert hade wonder,
He let no semblaunt be sene, bot sayde ful hyghe
To the comlych quene wyth cortays speche,
‘Dere dame, today demay yow never;
Wel bycommes such craft upon Christmasse,
Laykyng of enterludez, to laghe and to syng,
Among thise kynde caroles of knyghtez and ladyez.
Never the lece to my mete I may me wel dres,
For I haf sen a selly, I may not forsake.’
He glent upon Sir Gawen, and gaynly he sayde,
‘Now sir, henge up thyn ax, that hatz innogh hewen’. (467-77)

Here the combination of narratorial penetration and the Gawain-poet's usual gift for imitating tones of voice catches and crystallizes a whole range of varied motives as they stream past. First there is Arthur's bewilderment, then the courage and sense of kingly responsibility that enable him to keep it to himself. He is hende, a man of cortays speche (that is why the cortays Gawain can fitly take his place as the representative of Camelot), and he therefore turns first not, as we might expect, to Gawain, the main participant in the extraordinary scene which has just been transacted, but to Guinevere. An event of disturbing abnormality has occurred, and Arthur's first concern is therefore to reassure the queen and the courtiers by pushing it into the realm of the normal. And so, with sang-froid and a quick wit, he immediately classes the scene they have witnessed among the usual courtly entertainments of the Christmas season, and recaptures the situation before the Green Knight's entry by admitting with rueful irony that now at last he cannot deny that he has seen the wonder he was waiting for. Now he can eat, and the feasting can be resumed, as if nothing untoward had happened. Only after this, having done what he can to re-establish an atmosphere of normality, does he turn to Gawain, and address him with an appropriate manly brevity. This brevity is one kind of cortaysye; the loquaciousness of Gawain, master of ‘the teccheles termes of talkyng noble’ (917), and especially admired by ladies, is another. Arthur is generally a man of few words—this is his longest speech in the poem—and he is evidently given to this masculine curtness especially when addressing someone like Gawain, who is at once his vassal and his kinsman. We remember the forceful advice he gave Gawain earlier—perhaps out of the corner of his mouth, certainly in confidence—when he was about to strike his blow at the Green Knight:

‘Kepe the, cosyn,’ quoth the kyng, ‘that thou on kyrf sette,
And if thou redez hym ryght, redly I trowe
That thou schal byden the bur that he schal bede after.’ (372-4)

His words now are similarly packed with meaning. Once more his aim is to absorb the abnormal into the normal, and so, with a reassuring joke which is at the same time a skilful compliment, he classes the all-too-real axe he is holding with the metaphorical one of the proverb ‘Hang up thine axe’, meaning ‘Have done with this business’.⁹ Gawain's axe, however, is to be ‘hung up’ as a trophy over the dais. Even now we have by no means exhausted the implications of these lines, for they have their part to play not only in making this scene as fully comprehensible as possible, but in enriching the meaning of the whole poem. Thus Guinevere's fear, which is implied by the promptness with which Arthur reassures her, will be useful two thousand lines later in rendering more plausible the Green Knight's explanation that Morgan la Fay sent him to Camelot

For to haf greved Gaynour and gart hir to dyye
With glopnyng of that ilke gome that gostlych speked
With his hede in his honde bifore the hyghe table. (2460-2)

Again, Arthur's classification of the entry and beheading of the Green Knight with the enterludez appropriate to the Christmas season has a wider significance than might appear, for it seems likely that such pageants really could have formed part of the Christmas festivities in the court for which the poet wrote.¹⁰ Arthur's words thereby help to reinforce the ambivalent suspension of the action between jest and earnest which is found throughout the poem. After all, the Green Knight announced that he had come to Camelot to seek ‘a Crystemas gomen’ (283).

We may surely say that in this little scene the Gawain-poet has succeeded in what Vinaver sees as the romance-writer's aim of making the event ‘intelligible’, and that he has done so with an economy that puts to shame the diffuseness of the kind of commentary that is necessary to bring out all its implications. And throughout the poem the Gawain-poet employs his exquisitely clarifying art to the same purpose: sometimes by the means we have been discussing, of revealing speech and explicit analysis of motive, at other times by other means that Vinaver mentions, such as description. Description is an essential part of the medieval ars poetica, and it is used with great skill in passages describing persons (such as the Green Knight at lines 137-220 and the old and young ladies at 943-69), seasons (the cycle of the year at 500-33), or places (the castle at 781-802, the Green Chapel and its surroundings at 2163-84).¹¹ But it cannot be said that the poem as a whole is rendered ‘fully intelligible’ in this way. Not everything in it is equally clear. On the one hand, for example, we are never given any external description of Gawain's appearance, comparable with that of the Green Knight just mentioned or that of the lord of the castle at lines 843-9. On the other hand—and this is a lack we feel much more sharply—the motives of the Green Knight in either of his roles are never laid bare in the way Gawain's are, and those of his accomplices are left in similar obscurity. We are occasionally given an insight into his wife's motives, of a delicacy comparable with that employed on Gawain or Arthur, with the outward appearance shown to conceal a complex inner experience. This occurs, for example, towards the end of her first visit to his bedroom, when she seems almost to give up hope of tempting him:

And ay the lady let lyk as hym loved mych;
The freke ferde with defence, and feted ful fayre.
‘Thagh I were burde bryghtest,’ the burde in mynde hade,
‘The lasse luf in his lode’—for lur that he soght
boute hone. (1281-5)¹²

But such insights are rare in the case of the Lady, and altogether absent in the case of that puzzling character, the guide, who gives Gawain what appears to be a quite false account of the Green Knight, when they are on their way to the Green Chapel (2097-2109). And so far as the Green Knight himself is concerned, though he, like all the other characters, is thoroughly articulate in speech, there are only two points at which we are given even a hint of his inner thought and feelings. One is in his Sir Bertilak role, when Gawain arrives at his castle and discloses who he is, and Sir Bertilak gives a loud laugh, ‘so lef hit hym thoght’ (909). The other is in his Green Knight role, when Gawain, having received the slight cut in his neck at the Green Chapel, leaps up to defend himself, and the Green Knight sees his fearlessness and ‘in hert hit hym lykez’ (2335). Elsewhere, the Green Knight's inner life is left in complete darkness, and when, towards the end of the poem, Gawain attempts to pierce this and asks who he really is, he gets an answer concerning Morgan la Fay which has been widely felt to be nothing more than a sop to prevent him (and us) from asking more questions—‘a bone for the rationalizing mind to play with, and to be kept quiet with’.¹³ Moreover, the Green Knight is provided with no equivalent to Gawain's pentangle—no explicit indication of the values to which he is committed.

One consequence of this failure of the poet to clarify the inner life or the ethical goals of the Green Knight in the way he does with Gawain and Arthur is that modern scholars and critics have felt the need to ‘interpret’ the Green Knight from outside, in much the same way that they have tried to interpret the central symbol of Pearl. It is on the face of it needless to interpret Sir Gawain in any other terms than those that are so abundantly supplied in the poem (though this has not stopped some modern readers from seeing him as a ‘youthful hero whose task it is to bring back life’ and who is tested ‘to find out whether or not [he] is a fit agent to bring back the spring’, or, more simply, as Everyman).¹⁴ But there might seem to be more justification for finding an identity for the mysterious Green Knight, by relating him to symbolic systems outside the poem. The ‘meanings’ that have been found for the Green Knight have been almost as abundant and various as those that have been found for the pearl. Thus John Speirs has seen him as ‘a recrudescence in poetry of the Green Man … a descendant of the Vegetation or Nature god of almost universal and immemorial tradition … a reappearance in poetry of an old vegetation god.’ L. D. Benson sees him as a combination of this Green Man with another figure in medieval iconology, the ‘wild man’ or ‘wodwose’, but he insists that the Green Man who appears in the poem as the Green Knight is not the pagan, folkloric figure Speirs describes but a courtly derivative, who had become fully acceptable to Christianity. By way of contrast with Speirs, who asserts that the Green Knight ‘is life’, and relates his greenness to vegetation, Heinrich Zimmer identifies him as death, and associates his greenness with that of corpses. A similarly total contrast may be found between B. S. Levy who sees him as the Devil and Hans Schnyder who identifies him as Christ.¹⁵

There have also been, as with the pearl symbol, attempts to ‘explain’ the Green Knight in biographical terms, by identifying him with some fourteenth-century nobleman, such as Amedeo VI of Savoy, known as the Green Count.¹⁶ There can clearly be no reconciling of such divergent views, and, as with the symbolism of Pearl, the very variety of modern interpretations makes one inclined to doubt the validity of any claim to achieve a greater certainty of interpretation by studying external evidence than simply by reading the poem. As C. S. Lewis has written, with specific reference to the attempt to interpret the Green Knight in terms of pagan ritual, ‘the surviving work of art is the only clue by which we can hope to penetrate the inwardness of the origins. It is either in art, or nowhere, that the dry bones are made to live again.’¹⁷ It seems at any rate that there are dangers in beginning one's study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by asking ‘Who is the Green Knight?’ and expecting an answer to that question will somehow ‘solve’ the poem. It is true that many critics find him more interesting than any other character in the poem, ‘more human, more alive’, as one of them has written, ‘than Arthur and even Gawain’, but I believe, and have tried to show elsewhere,¹⁸ that this may be partly due to the predilection of modern criticism for concreteness and muscularity in poetry, and to a consequent failure to respond to the power of the different kind of poetry associated with Gawain. Without wishing to deny the fascination of the Green Knight or his poetic vitality, I prefer to begin studying the poem not with him, but with the story in which he plays a part, and with the poet's way of telling it.

The Linked Plots

We have seen that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is made up of a combination of three plot-elements: the Beheading Game, the Temptation, and the Exchange of Winnings. The poet has often been praised for the skill with which he links these elements together, but he has not perhaps been sufficiently praised for the way in which he makes this linkage itself convey the meaning of his poem. It is not simply a case (as often with medieval romances) of a given narrative having a new meaning imposed on it by such devices as those Vinaver mentions as typical of romance, and which we have just been examining at work in the poem. It is rather that the story is so arranged that it is the poem's meaning; or, to put it differently, meaning is not only defined by style, analysis of motive, characterization, and so on, but is enacted by the shape of the narrative itself. If the plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was found rather than invented, it was even better chosen for the poet's purpose than that of Patience. In consequence, the poem affords a degree of satisfaction arising from economy almost unparalleled in medieval romance. It will be remembered that the plot-elements are not linked consecutively, but inserted one into another. Thus the Temptation is inserted into the Beheading Game, and is completed between the blow Gawain gives and the blows he receives. In the same way, the three parts of the Temptation are each inserted inside one of the hunting scenes and thus the Exchange of Winnings is intertwined with the Temptation, not consecutive with it, and it too is inserted into the Beheading Game. We know of course that the Temptation and the Exchange of Winnings are linked, or at least we come to know by the end of the first day of Temptation; but it is very important that we do not know until almost the end of the poem that these two elements have any connection with the Beheading Game.

The action of the poem begins with the Beheading Game, but first we are given a picture of the court which the Green Knight is to disrupt. The Camelot of this poem is a young Camelot, a place of gaiety and elegance, where a ‘fayre folk in her first age’ (54) is ruled over by a ‘childgered’ king (86), who cannot bear to do any one thing for long, ‘So bisied him his yonge blod and his brayn wylde’ (89). It is a delightful place, an innocent version of the ideal aimed at by any of the great courts of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages. It combines the religious and the secular virtues, and when we first see it, it is celebrating the Christmas and New Year festival first with Mass and then with presents and kissing games. When the Green Knight abruptly enters this festivity, just as the first course of the feast has been served, his challenge sets up a test which is in itself sufficiently difficult and exciting to engross our interest. The Green Knight announces that he has been drawn to Arthur's court by its fame, and particularly by its ‘kydde cortaysye’ (263), to request a Christmas game. But the nature of this game is so horrific as to stun the courtiers into an even deeper silence than the Green Knight's extraordinary appearance, and he exults over their discomfiture and the injury done to their fame. But although the courtiers may be frightened, Arthur is not: he answers angrily, immediately takes up the challenge, and plays a few practice strokes with the unfamiliar axe, to get the feel of it. It is at this point that Gawain intervenes, and, in a speech of poised modesty, begs to be allowed to take Arthur's place. There has been a persistent feeling among recent critics that Arthur and his court show up rather badly in this initial encounter with the Green Knight; but this seems to me an exaggerated view. The courtiers perhaps are less heroic than they might be in their response to the Green Knight's entry, and in their silence there is a definite hint of fear:

As al were slypped upon slepe so slaked hor lotez,
in hyghe—
I deme hit not al for doute,
Bot sum for cortaysye—
Bot let hym that al schulde loute
Cast unto that wyye. (19) (244-9)

But Arthur's response is surely impeccable, despite the various criticisms that have been made of it. Baughan asserts that he strikes great blows at the Green Knight himself, but finds that they are in vain; this, however, is based on a misunderstanding of the text. Benson argues that ‘Arthur's failure is that when he does take up the challenge he does so in exactly the churlish manner that the Green Knight had demanded. His shame and anger lead him to forget his famous courtesy entirely’. But Arthur's initial greeting of the stranger is highly courteous, and he answers him angrily only after receiving from him a number of unprovoked insults. Moorman suggests that we are encouraged to compare Arthur's court with Sir Bertilak's, to the detriment of the former, because better hospitality is offered to Gawain on his arrival than had been offered to the Green Knight; but to say this is surely to forget that Gawain does not offer any insults to his hosts—quite the reverse—nor is he ‘half etayn’ and bright green.²⁰ In general, it is surely the case that Arthur performs very creditably in the face of a quite unfamiliar physical danger. Still more admirable is the performance of Gawain, once he has stepped forward to beg that he may be substituted for Arthur as the respondent. Gawain addresses his plea to be allowed to take on the challenge not only to the king but to his council and to the queen. Arthur is no Renaissance tyrant but a medieval prince, ruling by the counsel of his nobles; and the queen is presumably added out of Gawain's famous cortaysye, which especially demands deference to ladies. The nobles agree that Gawain should take up the ‘game’ (365) the intruder proposes. Thus, when Gawain, with a formal gesture of submission, receives the Green Knight's axe from the king, he is becoming both his personal substitute and, in the most open and official way, the representative of the whole court, who is to redeem their initial hesitance. He then proceeds to ask the Green Knight what his name is and how to get to his court, so that he can present himself in a year's time to receive the return blow. It is clear that he sees the challenge he has accepted as being essentially a test of physical skill, strength and courage, and that he is so far responding to it honourably. He has promised to accept a return blow from the Green Knight's axe, and, though it will presumably kill him if he does not succeed in killing the Green Knight with his first blow, he is taking pains to find out where he must go to keep the appointment. It is clear that the onlookers see the test in this light. I have already quoted Arthur's advice to Gawain, to make sure of his opponent with his own axe-stroke, and then he will not need to worry about any return blow. The Green Knight appears to take the same view, because he says that he will give Gawain the information he needs after receiving his axe-stroke,

And if I spende no speche, thenne spedez thou the better,
For thou may leng in thy londe and layt no fyrre. (410-11)

In fact, contrary to all expectation, the Green Knight is able to speak again even after Gawain's aim has been so good that he has completely sliced his head off; and when he speaks, he once more emphasizes this straightforward physical test:

To the grene chapel thou chose, I charge the, to fotte
Such a dunt as thou hatz dalt—disserved thou habbez
To be yederly yolden on Nw Yeres morn.
The Knyght of the Grene Chapel men knowen me mony;
Forthi me for to fynde if thou fraystez, faylez thou never.
Therfore com, other recreaunt be calde the behoves. (451-6)

What is demanded of Gawain, it seems, is a response in the tradition of heroic behaviour to which we have seen alliterative poetry characteristically giving expression. The situation belongs to romance rather than to the epic ethos of Old English poetry as continued in the alliterative Morte Arthure: Gawain has taken up the challenge in the first place for the honour of Camelot, rather than, for example, to protect the weak from physical harm by the strong. But the action demanded of him in confronting the monstrous Green Knight is approximately the same as that demanded of Beowulf in facing his monsters, or of Arthur in facing the Giant of St Michael's Mount. The worst that can happen to him is death by beheading—an honourable form of execution at least. When the time eventually comes for him to set off, this is what the courtiers fear on his behalf:

There watz much derve doel driven in the sale
That so worthé as Wawan schulde wende on that ernde,
To dryye a delful dynt, and dele no more
wyth bronde. (558-61)

Finally, at the very moment when the armed Gawain rides away on his quest, the poet, with a certain cynicism about human behaviour, lets us overhear the very courtiers who had earlier advised Arthur to allow Gawain to take up the challenge criticizing him for letting Gawain be ‘britned to noght, / Hadet wyth an alvisch mon’ (680-1).

In the light of all this, when Gawain is welcomed at the strange castle on Christmas Eve, neither he nor we have any reason to suppose that what happens there will have any connection with the Beheading Game. Throughout his stay there, he sees himself as enjoying a relatively pleasant interlude in the few days that are left to him before he is ‘britned to noght’ by the Green Knight. He cannot, of course, forget the terrifying goal of his quest, and this fact makes all the more impressive the display of the courtly virtues that he puts on for the sake of his host and hostess and their court. This is what they expect of him—‘Now schal we semlych se sleghtez of thewez’ (916)—and he does as much as any man could to be a pleasant guest. He eats, he drinks, he dances, he makes conversation, he plays games; but all the while there sits at his heart the knowledge that the real test still lies ahead of him. Here the poet uses his omniscience not only to render Gawain's behaviour ‘intelligible’ but to bring out most touchingly his genuine courage: not insensibility or forgetfulness, but a magnificent self-control. Gawain declines the lord's invitation to stay longer after Christmas because he knows where his duty lies: to reach the Green Chapel may mean death, but he would rather die than not reach it:

Naf I now to busy bot bare thre dayez,
And me als fayn to falle feye as fayly of myyn ernde. (1066-7)

After he has been informed that the Chapel is nearby, so that he can spend all three days at the castle, we are reminded on each of the three days of what lies ahead of him. I have quoted the first day's reminder, in the lines in which his hostess thinks to herself that even if she were the most beautiful of women, she would still be unable to gain Gawain's love, ‘for lur that he soght / boute hone’ (1284-5). On the second day Gawain begs to be allowed to leave for the Green Chapel at once, ‘For hit watz negh at the terme that he to schulde’ (1671), but his host assures him that it will be soon enough if he leaves at dawn on New Year's Day. And early on the next morning, that of the third day, we are told (so deep is the poet's penetration into his hero's experience) how even in his dreams the coming meeting was present to him:

In dregh droupyng of dreme draveled that noble,
As mon that watz in mornyng of mony thro thoghtes,
How that destiné schulde that day dele hym his wyrde
At the Grene Chapel, when he the gome metes,
And bihoves his buffet abide withoute debate more. (1750-4)

From these dreams he is awakened by his hostess's morning visit; and throughout the three days the actual trials of the Temptation have been intertwined with these thoughts of the Beheading Game. It is, of course, the thought of this crucial test lying ahead of him that persuades him to accept and conceal the Lady's gift of the green girdle, even though he has previously said that he will receive no gift,

er God hym grace sende To acheve to the chaunce that he hade chosen there. (1837-8)

When the Lady explains that the girdle will preserve his life,

hit come to his hert

Hit were a juel for the jopardé that hym jugged were.

(1855-6)

After this, ominously, we are told that he went to confession and was absolved as completely as if ‘domezday schulde haf ben dight on the morn’ (1884)—and again we think of the ordeal that lies ahead of him. At the end of fitt iii the poet reminds us of it once more, in a way which is all the more sinisterly suggestive because this time he declines to use his omniscience and in effect invites us to imagine Gawain's thoughts for ourselves:

Yif he ne slepe soundyly say ne dar I,
For he hade muche on the morn to mynne, yif he wolde, in thoght.
Let hym lyye there stille,
He hatz nere that he soght;
And ye wyl a whyle be stylle,
I schal telle yow how thay wroght. (1991-7)

With this minstrel-like intervention, the poet makes it clear that he is deliberately winding up the tension, and pointing his audience's expectations ahead to the completion of the Beheading Game.

In fitt iv the poet redoubles this effort to keep his audience on the edge of their seats, waiting for the climax of the story. In the early hours of the next morning, he does dare to tell us whether Gawain slept soundly. He did not: snow fell, the wind blew it into great drifts, and:

The leude lystened ful wel that ley in his bedde;
Thagh he lowkez his liddez, ful lyttel he slepes;
Bi uch kok that crue he knwe wel the steven. (2006-8)

After he is dressed and armed, he engages in another brilliant display of courtesy before leaving the castle, and then rides away in the company of the guide,

That schulde teche hym to tourne to that tene place
Ther the ruful race he schulde resayve. (2075-6)

The guide warns him, with detectable relish, of what a terrible monster the Green Knight is: he is bigger than any man on earth (so was Beowulf's opponent, Grendel),²¹ he kills everyone who passes by his Chapel, and Gawain does not stand a chance against him. The guide then proposes that Gawain should ride away, and he will keep his secret, an episode which (though it has other purposes, to which I shall return) certainly has the effect of heightening the tension still further by introducing delay and indecision. When Gawain indignantly rejects the proposal, the guide gallops wildly away, shouting that he would not accompany Gawain a foot further for all the gold on earth. Gawain, left alone, arrives at the Chapel at last, and finds it as sinister as we could possibly expect—or, one feels inclined to add, hope, for the guide's relish in the horror of the situation is clearly shared by the poet, and transmitted to us. Once again we enter into Gawain's very mind, and share his fears, as he insists with almost hysterical emphasis that the Devil himself must be at hand, waiting to destroy him:

‘Now iwysse,’ quoth Wowayn, ‘wysty is here;
This oritore is ugly, with erbez overgrowen;
Wel bisemez the wyye wruxled in grene
Dele here his devocioun on the develez wyse.
Now I fele hit is the fende, in my fyve wyttez,
That hatz stoken me this steven, to strye me here.
This is a chapel of meschaunce, that chekke hit bytyde!
Hit is the corsedest kyrk that ever I com inne!’ (2189-96)

Here, as is usual with the Gawain-poet's psychological realism, there is the most delicate touch of exaggeration, which gives the mimicry of Gawain's thoughts, however fundamentally sympathetic it may be, a definite comic edge. One is reminded of the moment in Patience when we entered Jonah's thought and learned directly, what the Bible did not explain, why he was fleeing from the Lord. In both cases, we observe a single fearful thought rapidly growing until its branching detail dominates the mind: in Patience that Jonah will be captured by the Ninevites, here that Gawain's adversary is really the Devil. The situation is terrifying, and Gawain has perhaps more right to his fear than Jonah has, for Gawain has received no direct command from God; indeed the courtiers at Camelot had suggested that the Green Knight's challenge had only been accepted ‘for angardez pryde’ (681). But we are not quite so terrified as Gawain is: the hint of exaggeration in his thought enables our sympathy to be accompanied by a certain detachment. We certainly share his expectation, however, that the goal of his adventure lies immediately ahead. It is at this point that he hears the terrible noise, ‘As one upon a gryndelston hade grounden a sythe’ (2202)—not just an axe this time. Gawain is startled—his sudden ‘Bi Godde!’ (2205) suggests something like a nervous leap—but then he summons up the last ounce of courage left to him after all that he has gone through, and calls out his challenge aloud:

Who stightlez in this sted me steven to holde?
For now is gode Gawayn goande ryght here.
If any wyye oght wyl, wynne hider fast,
Other now other never, his nedez to spede. (2213-16)

The movement of these lines seems to impose a quiver on one's voice as one reads them; and the implication of the emphasis on speed in the courageous shout is very clear. Now or never: if the challenger fails to answer on the instant, Gawain will feel he has done his duty and will be off like lightning. Significantly, the answer he gets, without a moment's pause, is one that mocks him for his apparent impatience:

‘Abyde,’ quoth on on the bonke aboven over his hede,
‘And thou schal haf al in hast that I the hyght ones!’ (2217-18)

We and Gawain are made to wait a moment longer still, both by the Green Knight's determination to finish grinding his blade and by the poet's own delaying tactics in supplying information, before we find with relief that the challenger is the Green Knight, exactly as before, not even the more hideous monster described by the guide:

Yet he rusched on that rurde rapely a throwe,
And wyth quettyng awharf, er he wolde lyght;
And sythen he keverez bi a cragge, and comez of a hole,
Whyrlande out of a wro wyth a felle weppen,
A denez ax nwe dyght, the dynt with to yelde,
With a borelych bytte bende by the halme,
Fyled in a fylor, fowre fote large—
Hit watz no lasse bi that lace that lemed ful bryght—(22)
And the gome in the grene, gered as fyrst … (2219-27)

It will be noted that only after the fearsome weapon has been fully described does the poet disclose who it was that was carrying it. Now the tension is wound up once more as the two knights carry out the second part of the Beheading Game. The tenseness of this scene is so obvious as to need no detailed comment. First Gawain ducks as he sees the axe-blade descending on him ‘as marre hym he wolde’ (2262), and the Green Knight halts his stroke and pauses to taunt Gawain. We enter fully into Gawain's situation, seeing the descending axe-blade from the viewpoint of one underneath it.²³ Next the Green Knight deliberately feints at him, and Gawain irritably tells him to get on with it. Then at last the genuine blow is struck, and cuts Gawain only slightly. The tension that has been built up throughout the whole episode between Gawain's eagerness to get the Game finished and the slowness with which events have actually proceeded (a slowness enacted by the lingering detail in which they have been described) is at last released, and Gawain leaps up and away with an energy that expresses our relief as well as his. Up to this point; though Gawain's honour has sometimes seemed balanced on a knife-edge, it has always been possible that he would come successfully through the test of the Beheading Game. Now at last it seems that he has done so. He draws his sword and challenges his opponent to a fair fight if he wishes—only to find, to our astonishment and his, that the Green Knight is not preparing to strike a fourth blow. He is standing aside, resting on his axe, looking at Gawain; and, with an almost vertiginous shift of perspective, instead of seeing the Green Knight through Gawain's eyes, as we have done all through this last scene, for a brief moment we see Gawain through the Green Knight's. The effect is as disturbing as if an Italian Renaissance picture had somehow been turned inside out; though it must be remembered that such shifts of perspective were still possible within the freer spatial conventions of medieval art. What the Green Knight sees is:

How that doghty, dredles, dervely ther stondez
Armed, ful awlez; in hert hit hym lykez. (2334-5)

That pleasure of the Green Knight's is not entirely flattering to Gawain. He is pleased with him, from the same standpoint of superiority that might enable one to be pleased with a small boy or a pet dog that showed fighting spirit. His first words express an almost teasing reproof:

Bolde burne, on this bent be not so gryndel.
No mon here unmanerly the mysboden habbez (2338-9)

and they strikingly echo God's words to Jonah at the end of Patience:

Be noght so gryndel, godman, bot go forth thy wayes:
Be preve and be pacient in payne and in joye. (524-5)

One might well ask, what else could Gawain do? For it soon appears that he has been conspired against not just by the Green Knight but, in a sense, by the plot of the poem and by the poet who contrived it. He learns that the Green Knight was the lord of the castle; that he knew of all Gawain's dealings with his wife, including his secret acceptance of the girdle; and that the conclusion of the Beheading Game functioned not as the supreme test Gawain had to face, but as a symbolic representation of a test which had already taken place, and which Gawain had already failed. The three axe-blows which made up the second part of the Beheading Game were only symbols of the three days of the Temptation, and in this sense the Beheading Game was a game indeed: it was a way of enacting in play a quite different form of challenge. What makes this dénouement all the more galling is that it is delivered by the Green Knight as something absolutely matter of course, as if Gawain might have known about it all along. This is particularly true of the disclosure that the Green Knight and the lord of the castle were the same person in different forms, a fact which is never formally disclosed at all, but simply implied by the we of ‘the forwarde that we fest in the fyrst nyght’ (2347). Gawain feels himself to have been made the butt of a cruel and unfair joke, and he gives vent to violent anger and shame.

I have been tracing out this thread of plot in such detail, trying to recapture the reactions of someone hearing the poem read for the first time, in order to emphasize what seems to me a crucial point. This is that the audience of the poem, along with Gawain himself, have been led all the time to look forward to the conclusion of the Beheading Game as the true climax of the poem, in the form of a test of Gawain's physical skill, strength and courage; but that, quite unexpectedly, they are then brought to understand that what had seemed the climax was only an anticlimax, that what had seemed an interlude was the main subject of the poem. The crucial test Gawain had to undergo was not the test at the Green Chapel but a test in the castle: a moral test, not a physical test, a test not outside but inside the bounds of courtly society. What the conclusion of the Beheading Game brought was not the expected climax, but only knowledge of what had happened already, and consequent self-knowledge. If we accept this, then a question immediately presents itself. It was very clear what was tested by the Beheading Game: it proved that Gawain was not a ‘recreaunt’ (456) or a ‘knyght kowarde’ (2131) but truly, if only just, ‘gode Gawayn’ (2214). But, if not the Beheading Game but the Temptation was the crucial experience Gawain had to undergo, what was tested by that? What qualities in Gawain were tested during his stay at the strange castle?

Notes

1. Source studies have exercised a peculiar, and perhaps unjustifiably great, fascination over students of Gawain. For accounts of analogues and possible sources, see L. H. Loomis, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R. S. Loomis (Oxford, 1959), pp. 530-7; Norman Davis, ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, pp. xv-xxi. …

2. But cf. above, p. 43, n. 2 [in A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet, London: Cambridge University Press, 1970].

3. J. A. Burrow (p. 96, n. 29) notes that ‘All threes in the poem are connected with Hautdesert’, and lists a number of other threes.

4. See J. F. Eagan, ‘The Import of Color Symbolism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, St Louis University Studies, series A, Humanities 1, 2 (1949), 11-86; William Goldhurst, ‘The Green and the Gold: the Major Theme of Gawain and the Green Knight’, College English, xx (1958), 61-5; and Burrow, pp. 14-16 and 39-40.

5. Eugène Vinaver, ‘From Epic to Romance’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, xlvi (1963-4), 476-503; p. 488.

6. John Speirs, Medieval English Poetry: the Non-Chaucerian Tradition (London, 1957), pp. 220, 230.

7. For more detailed comment on the meaning of this passage, see Burrow, p. 100. …

8. It is fair to add that Mr Speirs admits that in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ‘the pentangle has acquired a Christian significance’ (p. 230), but he thereafter disregards that significance as completely as if it were not there. For my further comments, see below, pp. 196-8 [in A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet, London: Cambridge University Press, 1970].

9. See Davis, ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, note on lines 476-7, p. 87.

10. See Elizabeth Wright, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, JEGP, xxxiv (1935), 157-79, p. 158, followed by Speirs, Medieval English Poetry, p. 219. On the appearance of the somewhat similar ‘wild man’ figure in pageants, see Benson, pp. 79-80.

11. See D. A. Pearsall, ‘Rhetorical Descriptio in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’.

12. It is not clear whether ‘for lur that he soght / boute hone’ is part of the Lady's thought or an explanation added by the poet. I believe the ambiguity to be intentional (as it could easily be in a poem written for reading aloud), and therefore revert to the punctuation of J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, corr. edn (Oxford, 1930), which brings it out better.

13. Speirs, Medieval English Poetry, p. 218.

14. For the former view, see Speirs, Medieval English Poetry, pp. 229, 236; for the latter, H. Schnyder, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Bern, 1961), and B. S. Levy, ‘Gawain's Spiritual Journey: Imitatio Christi in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Annuale Mediaevale, vi (1965), 65-106.

15. Speirs, Medieval English Poetry, pp. 219, 225, 226; Benson, pp. 56-95; Zimmer, The King and the Corpse (New York, 1956), 76-7 (a similar view is expressed by A. H. Krappe, ‘Who was the Green Knight?’, Spec, xiii [1938], 206-15); Levy, ‘Gawain's Spiritual Journey’ (and see also D. B. J. Randall, ‘Was the Green Knight a Fiend?’, Studies in Philology, lvii [1960], 479-91); Schnyder, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, p. 41.

16. See J. R. Hulbert, ‘Syr Gawayn and the Grene Knyȝt’, MP, xiii (1915-6), 689-730, pp. 716-28; and S. R. T. O. D'Ardenne, ‘“The Green Count” and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, RES, n.s. x (1959), 113-26.

17. C. S. Lewis, ‘The Anthropological Approach’, in English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Norman Davis and C. L. Wrenn (London, 1962), pp. 219-30; p. 223.

18. D'Ardenne, ‘“The Green Count” and Sir Gawain’, p. 120; Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry, pp. 38-45.

19. Borroff points out (p. 119) that the narrator's defence of the court against the imputation of cowardice actually has the effect of suggesting that they were afraid. A similar narratorial ‘smear’ technique is commonly found in Chaucer, especially directed against Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde.

20. D. E. Baughan, ‘The Role of Morgan le Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, ELH, xvii (1950), 241-51, p. 246 (Baughan's error was pointed out by G. L. Engelhardt, ‘The Predicament of Gawain’, Modern Language Quarterly, xvi [1955], 218-25); Benson, p. 216; Charles Moorman, ‘Myth and Mediaeval Literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, MS, xviii (1956), 158-72, p. 167.

21. Compare Gawain, 2100: ‘And more he is then any mon upon myddelerde’, with Beowulf, ed. Klaeber, line 1353: ‘Næfne he wæs mara þonne ænig man oðer.’

22. Editors normally explain this line as referring to a lace or thong similar to that mentioned in line 217. But the Green Knight now has a new axe, the former one having been hung up as a trophy at Camelot, and, as Gollancz remarks, ‘one hardly expects the present weapon to be in any way ornamental’ (I. Gollancz, ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, EETS OS 210 [London, 1940], note on line 2226, p. 127). Gollancz continues, ‘The only lace that has been recently mentioned is the one worn by Gawain himself (2037-9)’—i.e. the green girdle—but he goes on to suggest a different solution. I am attracted, however, by the suggestion of S. Malarkey and J. B. Toelken, ‘Gawain and the Green Girdle’, JEGP, lxiii (1964), 14-20, that the line does refer to the green girdle, and means ‘the gleaming girdle that Gawain wore had no effect in making that horrible four-foot blade seem any smaller’ (p. 16). The slightly detached irony of the narrator's remark, thus interpreted, is perfectly in keeping with what I judge to be the tone of the scene.

23. Noted by Borroff, pp. 126-7.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in footnotes:

Benson: L. D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New Brunswick, 1965).

Borroff: Marie Borroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study (New Haven, 1962).

Burrow: J. A. Burrow, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London, 1965).

EETS ES: Early English Text Society, Extra Series.

EETS OS: Early English Text Society, Original Series.

JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

MLR: Modern Language Review.

MP: Modern Philology.

MS: Mediaeval Studies.

PL: Patrologia Latina.

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.

RES n.s.: Review of English Studies, new series.

Spec: Speculum.