Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, page 11
which I intend not this time in my tale to recount.
The hurt was healed that he had in his neck,
and the bright-hued belt he bore now about it
obliquely like a baldric bound at his side,
under his left arm with a knot that lace was fastened
to betoken he had been detected in the taint of a fault;
and so at last he came to the Court again safely.
Delight there was awakened, when the lords were aware
that good Gawain had returned: glad news they thought it.
The king kissed the knight, and the queen also,
and then in turn many a true knight that attended to greet him.
About his quest they enquire, and he recounts all the marvels,
declares all the hardships and care that he had,
what chanced at the Chapel, what cheer made the knight,
the love of the lady, and the lace at the last.
The notch in his neck naked he showed them
that he had for his dishonesty from the hands of the
knight in blame.
It was torment to tell the truth:
in his face the blood did flame;
he groaned for grief and ruth
when he showed it, to his shame.
101‘Lo! Lord,’ he said at last, and the lace handled,
‘This is the band! For this a rebuke I bear in my neck!
This is the grief and disgrace I have got for myself
from the covetousness and cowardice that o’ercame me there!
This is the token of the troth-breach that I am detected in,
and needs must I wear it while in the world I remain;
for a man may cover his blemish, but unbind it he cannot,
for where once ’tis applied, thence part will it never.’
The king comforted the knight, and all the Court also
laughed loudly thereat, and this law made in mirth
the lords and the ladies that whoso belonged to the Table,
every knight of the Brotherhood, a baldric should have,
a band of bright green obliquely about him,
and this for love of that knight as a livery should wear.
For that was reckoned the distinction of the Round Table,
and honour was his that had it evermore after,
as it is written in the best of the books of romance.
Thus in Arthur his days happened this marvel,
as the Book of the Brut beareth us witness;
since Brutus the bold knight to Britain came first,
after the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy,
I trow,
many a marvel such before,
has happened here ere now.
To His bliss us bring Who bore
the Crown of Thorns on brow! AMEN
HONY SOYT QUI MAL PENCE
W.P. KER MEMORIAL LECTURE ON SIR GAWAIN
It is a great honour to be invited to lecture in this ancient university, and under the illustrious name of W. P. Ker. I was once allowed to use for a time his copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It showed clearly that he had – as usual, in spite of the enormous range of his reading and experience of literature – read this work with close attention.
It is indeed a poem that deserves close and detailed attention, and after that (not before, according to a too common critical procedure) careful consideration, and re-consideration. It is one of the masterpieces of fourteenth-century art in England, and of English Literature as a whole. It is one of those greater works which not only bear the trampling of the Schools, endure becoming a text, indeed (severest test) a set text, but yield more and more under this pressure. For it belongs to that literary kind which has deep roots in the past, deeper even than its author was aware. It is made of tales often told before and elsewhere, and of elements that derive from remote times, beyond the vision or awareness of the poet: like Beowulf, or some of Shakespeare’s major plays, such as King Lear or Hamlet.
It is an interesting question: what is this flavour, this atmosphere, this virtue that such rooted works have, and which compensates for the inevitable flaws and imperfect adjustments that must appear, when plots, motives, symbols, are rehandled and pressed into the service of the changed minds of a later time, used for the expression of ideas quite different from those which produced them. But though Sir Gawain would be a very suitable text on which to base a discussion of this question, that is not the kind of thing about which I wish to speak today. I am not concerned at this moment with research into the origins of the tale or its details, or into the question of precisely in what form these reached the author of this poem, before he set to work on it. I wish to speak about his handling of the matter, or one particular aspect of this: the movement of his mind, as he wrote and (I do not doubt) re-wrote the story, until it had the form that has come down to us. But the other question must not be forgotten. Antiquity like a many-figured back-cloth hangs ever behind the scene. Behind our poem stalk the figures of elder myth, and through the lines are heard the echoes of ancient cults, beliefs and symbols remote from the consciousness of an educated moralist (but also a poet) of the late fourteenth century. His story is not about those old things, but it receives part of its life, its vividness, its tension from them. That is the way with the greater fairy-stories – of which this is one. There is indeed no better medium for moral teaching than the good fairy-story (by which I mean a real deep-rooted tale, told as a tale, and not a thinly disguised moral allegory). As the author of Sir Gawain, it would seem, perceived; or felt instinctively, rather than consciously: for being a man of the fourteenth century, a serious, didactic, encyclopaedic, not to say pedantic century, he inherited ‘faerie’, rather than turned deliberately to it.
Out of all the many new things, then, upon which one might hope to say something new – even now, when this poem has become the subject of several editions, translations, discussions, and numerous articles – such as the Beheading Game, the Perilous Host, the Green Man, the Sunlike mythical figure that looms behind the courteous Gawain, nephew of King Arthur, as certainly if more remotely as the Bear-boy lurks behind the heroic Beowulf, nephew of King Hygelac; or such as the Irish influence on Britain, and the influence of both on France, and the French return; or coming down to our author’s own time: the ‘Alliterative Revival’, and the contemporary debate about its use in narrative, almost lost now save for brief echoes in Sir Gawain and in Chaucer (who, I think, knew Sir Gawain, and probably the author also) – out of all these and other matters which the title Sir Gawain and the Green Knight might suggest I wish to turn to one, more neglected, and yet, I think, more fundamentally important: the kernel, the very nub of the poem as it was finally made, its great third ‘fit’, and within that the temptation of Sir Gawain and his confession.
In speaking of this matter, the temptation and confession of Gawain, I must rely, of course, on a knowledge of the poem as a whole, in itself or in a translation. Where quotation is essential, I will use a translation which I have just completed, since I have made it with two objects (to some extent, I hope, achieved): to preserve the original metre and alliteration, without which translation is of little value except as a crib; and to preserve, to exhibit in an intelligible modern idiom, the nobility and the courtesy of this poem, by a poet to whom ‘courtesy’ meant so much.
Since I am not speaking of the poem as a whole, or its admirable construction, I need only indicate one point in this, which is for my purpose significant. The poem is divided into four fits or cantos; but the third is much the largest, much more than a quarter of the whole (872 lines out of a total of 2530): a numerical pointer, as it were, to the real primary interest of the poet. And yet actually he has tried to conceal the numerical evidence by attaching, skilfully yet artificially, part of what really belongs to the situation of the Third Fit to the Second Fit. The temptation of Sir Gawain really begins as far back as the beginning of stanza 39 (line 928) (if not earlier) and lasts for more than a thousand lines. All else is by comparison, even when highly pictorial, perfunctory. The temptation was to this poet the raison d’être of his poem; all else was to him scenery, background, or else machinery: a device for getting Sir Gawain into the situation which he wished to study.
Of what lay before, therefore, I need only briefly remind you. We have the setting, with a brief sketch of the magnificence of the Arthurian court in the midst of the highest festival of the year (to the English), the feast of Christmas. At dinner on New Year’s Day there rides into the hall a great Green Knight on a green horse, with a green axe, and issues his challenge: any man in the court that has the courage may take the axe and strike the Green Knight a single unopposed blow, on condition that he promises after a year and a day to allow the Green Knight to give him one unopposed blow in return.
In the event it is Sir Gawain that takes up the challenge. But of all this I wish only to point out one important aspect. From this very beginning we can already perceive the moral purpose of the poet at work, or we can do so at a re-reading, after consideration. It is necessary to the temptation that Gawain’s actions should be capable of moral approbation; and amidst all the ‘faerie’ the poet is at pains to show that they were so. He takes up the challenge to rescue the king from the false position in which his rashness has placed him. Gawain’s motive is not pride in his own prowess, not boastfulness, not even the light-hearted frivolity of knights making absurd bets and vows in the midst of the Christmas revels. His motive is a humble one: the protection of Arthur, his elder kinsman, of his king, of the head of the Round Table, from indignity and peril, and the risking instead of himself, the least of the knights (as he declares), and the one whose loss could most easily be endured. He is involved therefore in the business, as far as it was possible to make the fairy-story go, as a matter of duty and humility and self-sacrifice. And since the absurdity of the challenge could not wholly be got rid of – absurdity, that is, if the story is to be conducted on a serious moral plane, in which every action of the hero, Gawain, is to be scrutinized and morally assessed – the king himself is criticized, both by the author as narrator, and by the lords of the court.
One further point, to which we shall return later. From the beginning Gawain is tricked, or at least trapped. He accepts the challenge, to deal the blow quat-so bifallez after (‘whatever the consequences’) and in a year’s time to present himself, without substitute or assistant, to receive a return blow with whatever weapon the Green Knight chooses. He is no sooner involved than he is informed that he must seek out the Green Knight himself, to get his ‘wages’ where he lives in some region unnamed. He accepts this onerous addition. But when he had delivered the stroke and beheaded the Knight, the trap is sprung; for the challenger is not slain, he picks up his own head, strides back onto his horse, and rides off, after the ugly severed head, held aloft in his hand, has warned Gawain to be true to his vow.
Now we, and no doubt many of our poet’s audience, may not be surprised by this. If we are introduced to a green man, with green hair and face, on a green horse, at the court of King Arthur, we expect ‘magic’; and Arthur and Gawain should have expected it also, we think. As indeed most of those present seem to have done: ‘a phantom and fay-magic folk there thought it’ (11.240). But this poet was as it were determined to take the story and its machinery for granted, and then examine the problems of conduct, especially as regards Sir Gawain, that arose. One of the things that he will be most concerned with is lewté, ‘keeping faith’. It is therefore highly important from the outset to consider precisely the relations of the Green Knight and Gawain, and the exact nature of the contract between them, just as if we were dealing with a normal and possible engagement between two ‘gentlemen’. Thus the poet is at pains, I think, to indicate that the ‘magic’, though it might be feared as a possibility by the challenged, is concealed by the challenger in the drawing up of the agreement. The king takes the challenge at its face-value, a piece of folly: that is, asking to be slain on the spot; and later, when Gawain is preparing his blow:
‘Take care, cousin,’ quoth the king, ‘one cut to address,
and if thou learnest him his lesson, I believe very well
that thou wilt bear any blow that he gives back later.’
(17.372–4)
And so, though Gawain’s good faith is involved – by his own words: quat-so bifallez after – his opponent has actually concealed the fact that he could not be slain in this manner, being protected by magic. And Gawain is now pledged to a perilous quest and journey the only probable end of which will be his death. For he has not (yet) any magic; and when the time comes he must set forth, the deliverer of his king and kinsman, and the upholder of the honour of his order, with unflinching courage and lewté, alone and unprotected.
The time does come at last, and Sir Gawain prepares to depart in search of the Green Knight and the Green Chapel where the tryst has been set. And then at least the poet allows no room for doubt, whatever you may think of my introduction of ethical considerations into the First Fit, and the fairy-tale scene of the Beheading. He describes the armour of Sir Gawain, and though we now may be caught rather by the contrast of his glowing scarlet and glittering gold with the green of the challenger, and ponder its possible inherited significance, the poet’s interest is not there. He gives in fact all told only a few lines to all the gear and the colour red (red and goulez) is only twice named. It is the shield with which he is concerned. The shield of Gawain he uses indeed to blazon forth his own mind and purpose, and to that he devotes three whole stanzas. Upon the shield he imposes – and we may deliberately use this word, for here beyond doubt we have an addition of his own – instead of the heraldic charges found in other romances, lion, eagle, or gryphon, the symbol of the pentangle. Now it does not greatly matter what significance or significances are elsewhere or earlier ascribed to this symbol.1 Just as it does not matter greatly what other or older significances were attached to green or red, to holly or to axes. For the significance that the pentangle is to bear in this poem is made plain – plain enough, that is, in general purport2: it is to betoken ‘perfection’ indeed, but perfection in religion (the Christian faith), in piety and morality, and the ‘courtesy’ that flows therefrom into human relations; perfection in the details of each, and a perfect and unbroken bond between the higher and lower planes. It is with this sign upon his shield (and as we later learn embroidered also on his coat-armour), imposed there by our poet (for the reasons that he gives for the use of it are in themselves and in the style of their enumeration such as Sir Gawain himself could not possibly have had, still less openly asserted, for the adoption of this charge) – it is with this sign that Sir Gawain rides forth from Camelot.
His long and perilous journey in search of the Green Chapel is briefly, and in general adequately described. Adequately, that is, if in places perfunctory, and in others obscure to the commentators, for the purpose of the poet. He is anxious now to reach the castle of the temptation. We need not concern ourselves on this occasion with any further points until the castle comes in sight. And when it does, we shall be concerned with what the author has made of it, not with the materials, wholly different in purport, out of which he may be thought to have built it.
How does Gawain find the castle? In answer to prayer. He has been journeying since All Hallows. It is now Christmas Eve, and he is lost in a wild strange country of tangled forest; but his chief concern is that he should not miss Mass on Christmas morning. He was
troubled lest a truant at that time he should prove
from the service of the sweet Lord, who on that selfsame night
of a maid became man our mourning to conquer.
And therefore sighing he said: ‘I beseech thee, O Lord,
and Mary who is the mildest mother most dear,
for some harbour where with honour I might hear the Mass
and thy Matins tomorrow. This meekly I ask,
and thereto promptly I pray with Pater and Ave and Creed.’
(32.750–8)
It is when he has so prayed, and made an act of contrition, and blessed himself thrice with the sign of the cross, that he suddenly catches sight through the trees of the beautiful white castle, and rides on to a courteous welcome, and the answer to his prayer.
Out of whatever more ancient stones may have been built the gleaming but solid magnificence of this castle, whatever turn the story may take, whatever details may be discovered that the author inherited and overlooked or failed to accommodate to his new purpose, this much is clear: our poet is bringing Gawain to no haunt of demons, enemies of human kind, but to a courteous and Christian hall. There the Court of Arthur and the Round Table are held in honour; and there the chapel-bells ring for Vespers, and the kind air of Christendom blows.
On the morn when every man remembers the time
that our dear Lord for our doom to die was born,
in every home wakes happiness on earth for His sake.
So did it there on that day with the dearest delights.
(41.995–8)
There Gawain was to feel and be ‘at home’ for a short while, to find himself unexpectedly in the midst of the life and society that he most liked, and where his very skill and pleasure in courteous converse would ensure him the highest honour.
Yet his temptation has begun. We shall not appreciate it at a first reading perhaps, but any reconsideration will reveal it to us that this strange tale, this mayn meruayle (whether we believe in it or not), has been carefully re-drawn by a skilled hand directed by a wise and noble mind. It is in the very setting to which Gawain is used, and in which he has hitherto achieved the highest repute, that he is to be tested, within Christendom and so as a Christian. He himself and all that he stands for are to be assayed.
And if the pentangle with its touch of learned pedantry, at war it seemed with the artistic instinct of a narrative poet,3 may for a moment have made us fear that we were going to lose Faerie only to gain a formalized allegory, we are now swiftly reassured. ‘Perfection’ Gawain may have been given as a standard to strive for (for with no less ideal could he achieve a near-perfection), but he himself is not presented as a mathematical allegory, but as a man, an individual human being. His very ‘courtesy’ proceeds not solely from the ideals, or the fashions, of his imagined time, but from his own character. He enjoys the sweet society of gentle ladies intensely, and he is immediately moved deeply by beauty. This is how his first meeting with the fair Lady of the Castle is described. Gawain had attended Vespers in the chapel, and when they are over the lady comes forth from her private pew.
