Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, page 14
We may observe that each of these ‘planes’ has its own court of judgement. The moral law is referred to the Church. Lewté, ‘playing the game’ when it is a mere game, as man to man, is referred to the Green Knight, who indeed speaks of the procedure in mock-religious terms, though (it may be noted) he applies these only to the game: the higher matters have been already judged; ‘confession’ and a ‘penance’ at the point of his edge. Courtesy is referred to the supreme court of such affairs, the Court of King Arthur of kydde cortaysye; and the case against the defendant is laughed out.
But there is yet another court: Sir Gawain himself, and his own judgement. Let us say at once that he is not competent to judge this case impartially, and his judgement cannot be held valid. He is not unnaturally at first in an emotional state of mind, greatly disturbed, after having not only his whole ‘code’ pulled to pieces, but receiving sore wounds to his pride. His first outcry against himself is hardly more likely to be just than his bitter generalization against women.22 But it is none the less very interesting to consider what he has to say; because he is a very roundly drawn character, and not a mere vehicle of opinions and analyses. This poet had skill in character drawing. Though the lady, when she has a reported speaking part, has only a simple role, and only one line to follow (directed by an unexplained ‘enmity’), all that she says has an unmistakable tone of her own. Better still is Sir Bertilak, and greater the skill with which he is made to behave and speak credibly both as Green Knight and as Host, so that, if these two had not in fact been one, either would have been adequately drawn as an individual, yet at the end we are well able to believe that we have listened to the same character throughout: it is this as much as anything that makes a reader accept as unquestioningly as Gawain their identity without (in this poem) any disenchantment or change of shape after the revelation. But both these actors are secondary, and their main function is to provide the situation for Gawain’s trial. Gawain has full literary reality.
His ‘perfection’ is made more human and credible, and therefore more appreciable as genuine nobility, by the small flaw.23 But, to my mind, nothing makes him ‘come alive’ as a real man so much as the depiction of his ‘reactions’ to the revelation: here that grossly abused word ‘reaction’ can with some justice be used, for his words and behaviour are largely a matter of instinct and emotion. We may well consider the contrast between the stanzas in which these are exhibited and the lines in which his perilous journeys are described, lines at once picturesque and perfunctory. But this poet was not really interested in fairy-tale or in romance for their own sakes. It is also, I think, a final stroke of art in a poem that is so concentrated on virtue and problems of conduct that it should end with a glimpse of the ‘reactions’ of a man truly ‘gentle’, but not deeply reflective, to a fault in a part of his personal code that is not to a cool outside judge essential. That it should indeed end with a glimpse of that twofold scale with which all reasonably charitable people measure: the stricter for oneself, the more lenient for others.24 Þe kyng comfortez þe knyt, and alle þe court als laʓen loude þerat.
What does Gawain feel and say? He accuses himself of couardise and couetyse. He ‘stood in a study’ a long while.
in such grief and disgust he had a grue in his heart;
all the blood from his breast in his blush mingled,
and he shrank into himself with shame at that speech.
The first words on that field that he found then to say
were: ‘Cursed be ye, Coveting, and Cowardice also!
In you is vileness, and vice that virtue destroyeth.’
He took then the treacherous thing, and untying the knot
fiercely flung he the belt at the feet of the knight:
‘See there the falsifier, and foul be its fate!
Through care for thy blow Cowardice brought me
to consent to Coveting, my true kind25 to forsake,
which is free-hand and faithful word that are fitting to
knights.
Now I am faulty and false, who afraid have been ever
of treachery and troth-breach: the two now my curse
may bear!
(95.2370–84)
Later, on return to the Court, he recounts his adventures in this order:26 his hardships; the way things went at the tryst, and the bearing of the Green Knight; the love-making of the lady; and (last of all) the matter of the Girdle. He then showed the scar in his neck which he got as a rebuke for his vnleuté:
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.
‘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.’
(100–1.2501–10)
Two lines follow, of which the first is unclear, but which together (however interpreted or emended) undoubtedly express Gawain’s feeling that nothing can ever delete this blot. That is in keeping with his ‘excess’ when moved; but it is true to the emotions ofmany others. For one may believe in the forgiveness of sins (as he did), even forgive oneself one’s own and certainly forget them, but the sting of shame on morally less important or insignificant levels will bite still after long years as sharp as new!
Sir Gawain’s emotion is thus one of burning shame; and the burden of his self-accusation is cowardice and covetousness. Cowardice is the chief, for through it he fell into covetousness. This must mean that as a knight of the Round Table Gawain makes no claim against the Green Knight for the unfairness of the beheading-pact (though he has glanced at it in lines 2282–3), abides by his own words quat-so bifallez after (382), and elects to stand trial on the simple ground that this was a test of the absolute courage of a knight of his Order: having given his word he was obliged to keep it even with death as the consequence, and to meet that with straight unflinching human courage. He was by circumstance the representative of the Round Table and should have stood his ground just so, without aids.
On that simple, but very high level, he is ashamed, and as a result emotionally disturbed. He thus calls ‘cowardice’ his reluctance to throw away his life without striking a blow, or to surrender a talisman that might possibly have saved him. He calls ‘covetice’ his acceptance of a gift from a lady which he could not immediately repay, though it was pressed on him after two refusals, and in spite of the fact that he did not value it for its costliness. It was indeed only ‘covetice’ within the terms of the game with the lord of the castle: keeping back any part of the waith because he wanted it for himself (for any reason). He calls ‘treachery’27 a breach of the rules of a mere pastime, which he could only have regarded as jocular or whimsical (whatever lay hidden in the proposer of the game), since there could obviously be no real exchange between the gains of a hunter and those of a man idling at home!
And so we end. Beyond that our author does not take us. We have seen a gentle courtly knight learn by bitter experience the perils of Courtesy, and the unreality in the last resort of protestations of complete ‘service’ to a lady as a ‘sovereign’ whose will is law;28 and in that last resort we have seen him prefer a higher law. But though by that higher law he proved ‘faultless’, the exposure of ‘courtesy’ of this kind went further, and he has had to suffer the final mortification of discovering that the will of the lady was in fact his own disgrace, and that all her flattering protestations of love were false. In a moment of bitterness he has rejected all his ‘cortaysye’ and cried against women as deceivers:
a gain ’twould be vast
to love them well and believe them not, if it lay in man’s
power!
(97.2420–1)
But that has not been all his suffering as a knight: he has been tricked into ‘not playing the game’ and breaking his word in a sport; and we have seen him pass through an agony of emotional shame at this failure on a lower plane only really fitting to failure on the higher. This all seems to me vividly true and credible, and I am not making fun of it, if I say that as a final spectacle we see Gawain tearing off the School Tie (as unworthy to wear it), and riding home with a white feather stuck in his cap, only to have that adopted as the colours of the First Eleven, while the matter ends with the laughter of the Court of Honour.
But finally, how true it is to the depicted character of Gawain, this excess of shame, this going beyond all that is required in adopting a badge of disgrace for all to see always, in tokenyng he watz tane in tech of a faute (100.2488)! And how true also to the whole tone and air of this poem, so concerned with ‘confession’ and penance.
Grace innogh þe mon may haue
Þat synnez þenne new, ʓif him repente,
Bot wyth sorʓ and syt he mot it craue,
And byde þe payne þerto is bent
says the poet in his Pearl (661–4).29 After the shame the repentance, and then the unreserved confession with sorrow and penance, and at last not only forgiveness, but the redemption, so that the ‘harm’ that is not concealed, and the reproach that is voluntarily borne, becomes a glory, euermore after. And with that the whole scene, for a time so vivid, so present, even topical, begins to fade back into the Past. Gawayn with his olde curteisye goes back into Fairye30
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.
(101.2521–30)
Postscript: lines 1885–92.1
In the above discussion it was said (page 130) that Gawain’s light heart was sufficient evidence that he had made a ‘good confession’. By that I meant that gaiety proceeding from a ‘lightness of heart’ may be and often is a result of the fitting reception of a sacrament by one of the faithful, and that quite independently of other pains or cares: such as, in Gawain’s case, fear of the blow, fear of death. But this may be, and has been, queried. It has been asked: Is not his gaiety due rather to having the belt, and so being no longer afraid of the tryst? Or it has been suggested that Gawain’s mood is due rather to despair: let me eat and be merry, for tomorrow I die!
We are not dealing with a simple-minded author, nor with a simple-minded period, and it is not necessary to assume that only one explanation of Gawain’s mood is possible (i.e. was in the poet’s mind). Gawain is being drawn with understanding, and he is made to feel, speak, and behave as such a man would in his situation as a whole: consolation of religion, magic belt (or at least a belief that such a thing was possible), and approaching mortal peril, and all. But I think, nonetheless, that the placing of the lines describing his mood immediately after the absolution (And sypen 1885), and the use of the words ioye and blys, are sufficient to show that the author intended the confession to be the chief reason of Gawain’s increased mirth; and was not thinking at all of a wild gaiety of despair.
But the belt requires more attention. I think it is significant that Gawain nowhere ever shows confidence in the girdle’s efficacy, certainly not even hope in it sufficient to cause care-free joy! In fact his hope in it seems to have continually decreased from the time of his confession. It is true that, at the time of acceptance and before his visit to the priest, he thanked the lady abundantly and heartily for it (one so courteous could hardly do less!), but even at the moment when the idea of help in escaping from death first wakes in his mind (lines 1855 ff.) and is strongest, before he has had time to reflect, all that the poet strictly reports him as thinking is: ‘It would be a marvellous thing to have in the desperate business allotted to me. If I could somehow escape being slain, it would be a splendid trick.’ It does not sound confident enough, as an explanation of his being merrier that day than ever before. In any case that night he sleeps very badly, and hears every cock crow, dreading the hour of the tryst. In lines 83.2075–6 we read of þat tene place þer þe ruful race he schulde resayue (‘that grievous place where he is due to endure the dolorous blow’), which is plainly meant to be Gawain’s reflexion as he and his guide set out. In lines 85.2138–9 he openly declares to his guide that his trust is in God, whose servant he is.31 Similarly in lines 86.2158–9, with reference certainly to his confession and preparedness for death, he says: to Goddez wylle I am ful bayn, and to hym I haf me tone. Again in lines 88.2208–11 he overcomes fear not by any thought or mention of the ‘jewel for the jeopardy’ but by submission to God’s will. In lines 90.2255 ff. he is in great fear of imminent death, and is at pains to conceal it, but does not quite succeed. In lines 91.2265–7 he expected the stroke to kill him. And finally in lines 92.2307–8 we read: no meruayle þaʓ hym myslyke þat hoped of no rescowe.
Now all this fear, and this summoning up of courage to meet death, is perfectly consonant with the consolation of religion and with a mood of joy after being assoiled, but it does not accord at all with possession of a talisman that is believed in as a protection against bodily harm, according to the words of the temptress:
For whoever goes girdled with this green riband,
while he keeps it well clasped closely about him,
there is none so hardy under heaven that to hew him were
able;
for he could not be killed by any cunning of hand.
(74.1851–4)
We may fairly say, then, that from the moment of its acceptance, certainly from the moment of his absolution, the Girdle seems to have been of no comfort to Gawain.32 If it were not for lines 81.2030–40, where Gawain puts on the Girdle for gode of hymseluen, we might well have supposed that he had, after confession, resolved not to use it, though he could not now in courtesy hand it back or break his promise of secrecy. From Gawain’s setting out to his shame at the revelation the poet has at any rate ignored the Girdle, or has represented Gawain as doing so. Such comfort and strength as he has beyond his own natural courage is derived only from religion. It is no doubt possible to dislike this moral and religious outlook, but the poet has it; and if one does not (with or without dislike) recognize this, the purport and point of the poem will be missed, the point at any rate that the author intended.
Nonetheless it may be objected that I am here pressing the author too hard. If Gawain had shown no fear, but had been cheerfully confident in his magic belt (no more mate ne dismayd for hys mayn dintez than the Green Knight confident in the magic of Morgan le Fay), then the last scene, the tryst, would have lost all savour. Also granted magic, and even a general belief in the possibility of enchanted belts and the like, it would have needed a very lively faith in this particular belt to take a man to such a tryst without even a shudder of the shoulders! Well, let us concede that. In fact it only goes to strengthen the point that I put forward. Gawain is not depicted as having a very lively faith in the Girdle, even if that is only, or partly, for mere reasons of narrative. Therefore his ‘joy’ on NewYear’s Eve is not derived from it. Therefore that must be derived from the absolution, to which it is appended, and Gawain is shown as a man with a ‘good conscience’ and the confession was not ‘sacrilegious’.
But quite apart from narrative technique, the poet evidently intended to emphasize the moral and (if you will) higher sides of Gawain’s character. For that is simply what he has consistently done throughout, whether with complete appropriateness to his inherited story-material or not. And so, while Gawain does not accept the Girdle solely out of courtesy, and is tempted by the hope of magic aid, and when arming does not forget it, but puts it on for gode of hymseluen and to sauen hymself, this motive is minimized, and Gawain is not represented as relying on it at all when coming to the desperate point – for it, no less than the horrible Green Knight, and his faierie, and all faierie, is ultimately under God. A reflexion which makes the magic Girdle seem rather feeble, as no doubt the poet intended that it should.
