The Green Knight- mediaeval faery mystery…

Although I’ve had the film sitting on Amazon Prime since the start of the year, I’ve only just got round to watching The Green Knight– and then only because I was given it as a DVD (yes, indeed) for my birthday last month. Anyway, it’s a good film- if strange- and though only bears a remote relationship to the original poem on which it’s based.

Having watched the film, I went back to my copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (as the Middle English poem is called today). This I bought second hand back in about 1985, when it cost me all of 25p. My version is the 1976 reprint of the Penguin Classics edition, originally retailing at the handsome price of 50p in those days.

I’m not sure I had read it again since I first bought it, but the story of Sir Gawain has had a special resonance with me since the late ’70s, primarily because of the 1973 film version of the story that I saw on TV at some point a few years after it was released. That impressed me hugely, because it created a magical, mystical atmosphere that- I have to say- was not so pronounced in the 2021 film with Dev Patel.

For me, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is very evidently a faery text. We start, of course, with the knight himself, whose colour alone seems enough to scream out not just his supernatural but his fae nature. The knights of King Arthur’s court certainly call him that when he appears before them at New Year: “a phantom from Fairyland the folk there deemed him” (for fantoum and fayryȝe þe folk þere hit demed).

The Green Knight presents a challenge- to receive a blow with an axe from any present, on the understanding that he will be able to return that blow a year later. Gawain accepts the wager and chops off the knight’s head. That ought to be the end of that deal, except that the knight calmly picks up his head and declares that he’ll see Gawain at the Green Chapel next New Year. Then he vanishes and “What place he departed to no person there knew.” Not only does this “unearthly being” magically survive a fatal blow but- just like a faery- he disappears into thin air.

Gawain is renowned for his knightly and Christian virtues. He has made a promise and he must keep his word. Therefore, the following December he sets out to find the mysterious Green Chapel. The poem is written in a north western dialect of Middle English and Gawain’s journey takes him through the north west of England, around the Wirral, the Mersey, Cheshire and Lancashire and thereabouts. He wanders day after day through rocky landscapes, past groves of oak, hazel and hawthorn (three magical and faery trees) searching for the unknown chapel. Lost in an icy landscape, he finds a castle which takes him in and gives him shelter. Better still, it turns out he is very near to his destination and can stay with the household celebrating until the very morning of New Year’s Day.

His host is the affable Sir Bertilak. He goes out hunting everyday, striking another bargain with Gawain: Bertilak will give him whatever he’s caught during the day in return for whatever Gawain wins that day in the castle. This is a second test, because Bertilak’s wife three times tries to seduce him, although all that’s exchanged are a hug and a kiss. These he passes on to Bertilak, not naming the lady but implying she’s a lady in waiting. However, at his last meeting with the lord’s wife, she gives him a magic belt to protect him from the Green Knight’s axe. Gawain accepts this- because he’s afraid- and conceals it from Bertilak, because it would give away its source. He therefore breaks his word.

On New Year’s Day Gawain rides to the Chapel. It is “a smooth faced barrow on a slope beside a stream… All hollow it was within” (A balȝ berȝ bi a bonke þe brymme bysyde… And al watz holȝ inwith.” For regular readers, this will look unavoidably like a faery knoll, a sithean as they’d call it in the Highlands. The Green Knight, as a faery, is bound to be connected to such a site. He aims three strokes of the axe at Gawain; the first two do not touch him; the third lightly nicks his neck. This reflects his encounters with the wife: twice Gawain politely refused her but a third time he did not act entirely properly nor openly.

Then, the Green Knight is revealed as being Bertilak- and his wife, we discover, is actually Morgan le Fay who used her magic powers to create the illusion of the knight beheaded and then revived. Her motivation seems to be her longstanding feud with her brother Arthur and his court, and a wish to expose and humiliate his most noble and honourable knight. Gawain, though, maintained his virtue. This test completed, the knight vanishes again- “To wherever he would elsewhere,” another example of nhis mysterious glamour.

In fact, it seems as though Morgan the Goddess (Morgne þe goddes), as the poem terms her, is actually present in the castle in two forms: temptress and scourge. She is the young and sexy seductress and she’s also an ‘old crone’ perhaps representing all the power and wisdom that she learned from Merlin. Elsewhere in the Arthurian romances, Morgan builds a chapel from which none who have been unfaithful in love may escape. The punishment of untrue lovers is a faery trait that I’ve discussed before.

There are, in truth, many layers to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, many themes and subtexts. I’ve just highlighted the aspects of most direct interest to this blog. As for the 2021 film, it’s well worth seeing; it’s its own story, with its own plot and denouement, different from the fourteenth century poem.