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How is nature represented in Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? What is nature's relationship with humanity?
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The two texts present very different representations of nature. The Arthurian court views natural surroundings as a source of beauty and food, while Beowulf presents a dark and hostile landscape in which mankind cannot thrive except in the protection of man-made structures.
Both Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, although composed about four to five hundred years apart, include heroes who must confront and overcome nature in one form or another. In Beowulf, the hero must not only defeat several monsters—the sea monsters in the Breca episode, Grendel, Grendel's mother, and finally the dragon—but also must do so in a landscape and seascape that are cold, dark, and hostile to mankind. In the Pearl Poet's great medieval romance, Sir Gawain fights nature in the form of the Green Knight, related to the pagan Green Man of Celtic Britain, and Gawain undergoes a strenuous and dangerous journey to find the Green Knight's chapel so that the Green Knight can chop off his head.
The nature Beowulf confronts is hostile in two important ways: the landscape is harsh and cold, and, perhaps more important, monsters are at home in this desolate...
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territory. When the Beowulf poet first describes Grendel, he notes that God has banished Grendel, as the kin of Cain (the world's first murderer), away from mankind:
That fiend from Hell,
that grim spirit, was called Grendel . . .
at home on the moors,
the fens and fastness. With fulsome monsters
this sorrowful man had stayed awhile. (ll. 102–105)
In Beowulf, Grendel, his mother, and other monsters (orkneys, eotens, and elves) are at home in a hostile natural environment, a nature that can kill men with cold or through the agency of monsters like Grendel. One can argue that, for Beowulf and the other Geats and Danes, nature is their enemy, a constant threat to their existence. Their refuge is in the works of men—Heorot, for example.
Sir Gawain, unlike Beowulf, lives in King Arthur's England during the golden age of the Round Table. Nature is described in sublime terms:
After the season of summer with its soft breezes,
when Zephyr goes sighing through seeds and herbs,
right glad is the grass that grows in the open . . . (ll. 23–25)
The natural world of Sir Gawain is only several hundred miles (and a few centuries) from Beowulf's dark and dangerous landscape, but it is a world away in terms of how Arthur's court perceives its natural surroundings. In Sir Gawain's world, nature is a source of beauty and sustenance, not a source of death and misery as it is for Beowulf and his men. That is, until nature asserts itself in unexpected ways.
When the Green Knight appears at Arthur's New Year celebration, the court is astounded:
for at the hue men gaped aghast
in his face and form that showed;
as a fay-man fell he passed,
and green all over glowed. (stanza 7)
The Green Knight heralds the arrival of nature in a dangerous form. When the beheading game is completed, Sir Gawain, who valorously took the challenge from King Arthur, realizes not only that the Green Knight has survived the beheading but also that Gawain is obligated to meet him a year after to yield his own head to the Green Knight's axe. The relationship between nature and Arthur's court has taken a dramatic detour into the unknown; benign nature has turned malignant, at least for a time.
Because Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a medieval romance, all turns out right in the end: the Green Knight is indeed a force of nature, but one with a good heart. Gawain's danger is not from the natural world but from the world of courtly love and its requirements. Beowulf, on the other hand, depicts a natural world that is a constant enemy of mankind—either in the elements of sea and land or in the form of monsters whose only goal is to end mankind's happiness.