A Maladjusted Return

SGGK, Fitt IV

If you’re just joining us, in Salvage here I’m focused on the ways very old literature has influenced our technological vision; and I originally turned to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—or, as the medievalists fondly refer to it, “SGGK”—to show the form of the romance, a literary genre that’s had a marked effect on the modern technological imagination. Also, recall that the romance, as a genre, is not so much concerned with buxom beauties swooning in the arms of Fabio-looking dudes as with adventure beyond the limits of the protagonist’s society’s knowledge. The hero/ine of the romance enters the weird, the space beyond the edge of the map, encounters monsters and wonders there, and returns, changed, to tell the tale, hopefully bearing some proof that the story is true. The romance thus functions as a new installment on a previously-less-complete map. With proof, the hero/ine’s story is taken to be true, then it’s added to what’s known at court about the outside world.

Thus far we’ve seen that the Gawain-poet imagined Britain as a place of marvels, and the occasion for the adventure that SGGK recounts is Arthur’s desire to see/hold/experience a wonder. In the romance, wonder and wonders mark the occasion for the knight to venture forth. We’ve also seen that the assemblage of knight-armor-horse constitutes a wonder, and the wondrousness of Gawain’s equipage bespeaks the sheer age of biomorphism, a human tendency to replicate nature when we make things. Moreover, we’ve seen that beneath this nature aesthetic, the knight is a multi-layered character and this multi-layered-ness proliferated in lots of forms long after the romance’s heyday had waned. This is another way of saying that although we may not call our contemporary stories in twentieth- and twenty-first-century forms “romances,” they follow the old romance form, deploy the old romance’s tropes and figures, and do much of the same cultural work. Furthermore, we’ve delved into some of the layers of Sir Gawain, who’s encrusted not only in metal armor and woven finery, but in reputation and, poetically, in animalizations that inflect his character. (And here I mean “character” in the sense one might use it in an RPG like Dungeons & Dragons, and in a moral sense as well.)

The Contradiction in Sir Gawain

In my previous post I expressed a certain disappointment with Gawain’s tragic heroism:

At first he seems worth emulating. But then, beneath the layers of martial prowess, loyalty to his liege, love for his comrades, devotion to Christ and to Mary, affinity to nature and the land, and courtly manners, he turns out to be a member of the same faulted species to which I belong. Alas.

For me, this makes the transition from Fitt III to Fitt IV literarily awkward because I can’t help but wonder how the interactions upon his departure from Chez Bertilak could be anything other than awkward. (If you read this transition differently, I’d love to hear from you. Comments are always welcome, or you could write your own post here on Substack and tag me in a note with a link to it. As one of my daughters’ kiddie audiobooks says after the story is over, “Let’s keep talking about this wonder-book!”)

The night before his leave-taking Gawain asks Lord Bertilak for a squire to guide him to the Green Chapel, the object of his quest, which Bertilak has told him is nearby. The squire granted, Gawain thanks Bertilak and then we read this morally and emotionally confusing passage:

Said Gawain, “My thanks receive,
such a favour you will do!”
The knight then took his leave
of those noble ladies two.

Sadly he kissed them and said his farewells,
and pressed oft upon them in plenty his thanks,
and they promptly the same again repaid him;
to god’s keeping they gave him, grievously sighing.
Then from the people of the castle he with courtesy parted;
all the men that he met he remembered with thanks
for their care for his comfort and their kind service,
and the trouble each had taken in attendance upon him;
and every one was as woeful to wish him adieu
as had they lived all their lives with his lordship in honour. ¹

Huh? Why in the world is he sad? Lady Bertilak just spent three days manipulating him, putting him in compromising social, sexual, moral, and ethical situations, testing his manners and his self-control. Sure, Gawain’s got good manners; but the emotional dissonance here is awkward, a kind of low-grade Stockholm Syndrome.

Behaving with social decorum before the court makes a certain social sense; but Gawain carries on even when the Bertilaks aren’t looking, lavishing on the household further praise and even a blessing, long after he’s observed basic decorum. The following morning he speaks briefly to the grooms who have prepared his horse, Gringolet:

“Now solemnly I swear on my troth
there is a company in this castle that is careful of honor!
Their lord that them leads, may his lot be joyful!
Their beloved lady in life may delight befall her!
If they out of charity thus cherish a guest,
upholding their house in honour, may He them reward
that upholds heaven on high, and all of you too!
And if life a little longer I might lead upon earth,
I would give you some guerdon gladly, were I able.”²

(A “guerdon” is an old-timey word for “reward” or “recompense.”)

And then Gawain departs with one last word: “‘Christ keep this castle!’ he cried and wished it fortune fair.”³ What?

Here’s my real issue: how does a guy—a story’s hero, no less—break a promise to his host, entertain the host’s wife’s advances inside the curtains of a canopy bed (even though nothing but conversation happens), accept the host’s wife’s personal effects in secret so that now there’s this thing between them, and then behave at his leavetaking as though the host and his wife are such dear people?? He’s betrayed the host; and although he thinks what the hostess was tempting him to do is wrong, he still has a fondness for her. What kind of ‘heroism’ is this?

The sheer level of cognitive dissonance this creates for me, as an empathetic onlooker reading the poem, is so jarring I find Gawain either woefully disingenuous here—which I read as a flaw in his moral character—or else unbelievable as a literary character. His behavior can’t really be explained as Christian forgiveness because we don’t have any sense that Lord or Lady Bertilak is somehow at fault. We might read it as Gawain trying to die without regrets; but he’s overdoing it and it’s jarringly maudlin. It looks like he’s doing major image-management,⁴ a sort of medieval “I’m okay, you’re okay,” in an attempt to assuage his own guilt.

The Scars of a Trial

In any case, this jarring note to Gawain’s departure from Chez Bertilak doesn’t set the right mood for the great trial he’s known all poem long that he’d eventually face. Gawain himself is off-balance, and that’s a bad place to be on the morning of a life-or-death trial by hatchet.

As they draw near to the Green Chapel, the squire tells Gawain,

“The place you pass to, men perilous hold it,
the worst wight in the world in that waste dwelleth;
for he is stout and stern, and to strike he delights,
and he mightier than any man upon middle-earth is,
and his body is bigger than the four best men
that are in Arthur’s house, either Hestor or others.
All goes as he chooses at the Green Chapel;
no one passes by that place so proud in his arms
that he hews not to death by dint of his hand.
For he is a man monstrous, and mercy he knows not;
for be it a churl or a chaplain that by the Chapel rideth,
a monk or a mass-priest or any man besides,
he would as soon have him slain as himself go alive.
And so I say to you, as sure as you sit in your saddle,
if you come there, you’ll be killed, if the carl has his way.
Trust me, that is true, though you had twenty lives to yield.

He here has dwelt now long
and stirred much strife on field;
against his strokes so strong
yourself you cannot shield.”⁵

Spooky! The squire goes on to say, in effect, “Go on, run! I won’t tell anyone.” But Gawain declines. He wouldn’t be a knight if he turned tail now.⁶

The terror of death continues to mount, and the following five stanzas add to the mood. Stanzas 85-90 deploy the romance’s dark aesthetic twin, the gothic, in their description of the Green Knight as a bloodthirsty monster, the Green Chapel as a ruin, and the scene as a lonely meeting in the weird, the part of the world beyond Arthur’s knowledge. The scene is set. Things are looking dark and no backup is coming.

But then, for the careful reader, the spell breaks like a dream troubled by hunger or the need for a midnight bathroom break, breaks on the familiarity of the circumstances when the Green Knight draws attention to them: “we are in this valley now verily on our own, there are no people to part us—we can play as we like.”⁷ Does the Green Knight know Lady Bertilak? Enclosing them, the ruins work like the drapery of the canopy bed in which Gawain has had to muster all of his wits to avoid the worst (short of death).

Gawain, true to his word, kneels to accept a blow from the Green Knight’s giant halberd. As the Green Knight winds up the first two times, Gawain flinches as the blade falls and the Green Knight, stopping his stroke both times, instead mocks him for cowardice. Finally, the third time, Gawain stands “still as a stone or the stump of a tree that with a hundred ravelled roots in rocks is embedded.”⁸ And at that point, the Green Knight strikes. Gawain’s neck is just barely cut; his head is not severed. And he leaps up and declares he’ll accept no more blows, for the agreement they had was blow-for-blow.

At this point the connection between Chez Bertilak and the Green Knight starts to materialize. Says the Green Knight:

“First I menaced thee in play with no more than a trial,
and clove thee with no cleft: I had a claim to the feint,
for the fast pact wee affirmed on the first evening,
and thou fairly and unfailing didst faith with me keep,
all thy gains thou me gavest, as good man ought.
The other trial for the morning, man, I thee tendered
when thou kissedst my comely wife, and the kisses didst render [unto me].
For the two here I offered only two harmless feints to make.

The true shall truly repay,
for no peril then need he quake.
Thou didst fail on the third day,
and so that tap now take!

For it is my weed that thou wearest, that very woven girdle:
my own wife it awarded thee, I [know] well indeed.
Now I am aware of thy kisses, and thy courteous ways,
and of thy wooing by my wife: I worked that myself!
I sent her to test thee, and thou seem'‘st to me truly
the fair knight most faultless that e’er foot set on earth!
As a pearl than white pease is prized more highly,
so is Gawain, in good faith, than other gallant knights.
But in this you lacked, sir, a little, and loyalty came short.
But that was for no artful wickedness, not for wooing either,
but because you loved your own life: the less do I blame you.”⁹

So the link becomes clear: the weirdness at Chez Bertilak and the weirdness at the Green Chapel are linked; and Gawain survives his trial at the Green Chapel because he was only smooching with Lady Bertilak and not letting it go farther.¹⁰

The hilarious staff from the Plaza Hotel in New York City, from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. If you’re unsure why this is here, see note 10 below. Always—always—read the footnotes! Writers bury their funniest (and meanest) stuff there.

So Gawain doesn’t die; but he is now scarred. He tries to return the girdle, to turn it over to Lord Bertilak alias the Green Knight the way he should have during their deal at the chateau:

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!…
Now I am faulty and false, who afraid have been ever
of treachery and troth-breach: the two now my curse may bear!”¹¹

But the Green Knight bids him keep it as a reminder of the goings on at the Green Chapel; and Gawain assents:

“but as a token of my trespass I shall turn to it often
when I ride in renown, ruefully recalling
the failure and the frailty of the flesh so perverse,
so tender, so ready to take taints of defilement.”¹²

There follow some additional revelations that explain why the Green Knight even rode into Arthur’s court last Christmas anyway, and then Gawain heads out, bearing his scars and brooding on his faults.

He is forever changed; and he wears the girdle as a reminder.

Gawain’s Tragic Maladjustedness

If Gawain’s departure from Chez Bertilak was awkward, his return to Camelot is doubly so because it ends the tale with his shame unresolved. His forever-changed-ness is, in the company that once warmed him, now a queerness, a forever-maladjusted-ness.

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,

—which is what Arthur wanted from the beginning—

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.¹³

Gawain tells them he must wear the green girdle for the rest of his days, for it’s bound to him by the fault with which he acquired it.

Arthur laughs this off.

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 baldrick should have,
a band of bright green obliquely about him,
and this for love of that knight as a livery should wear.¹⁴

At this point, we have to make a hermeneutical choice. Following Arthur, do we read Gawain as being a bit too hard on himself? Or do we take his moral unction seriously? Put differently, do we trust his moral judgment about himself, or do we assert that we know better?

If we think Gawain’s being a bit too hard on himself, we have to appreciate the Arthur’s good-natured rejoinder. “Nah, bro,” Arthur says, “you’re good. And to make you feel better, green baldrics all around!” And this romance has a comedic ending.

But if we trust Gawain’s self-judgment, we have to admit Arthur’s glibness at this point. “Green baldrics all around!” commodifies the girdle wonder, reproduces it, and mass-distributes it—“scales” it, as the entrepreneurs like to say. In other words, it only solves the issue of Gawain’s guilt-feelings for Camelot.¹⁵ But Gawain—and it’s worth dwelling on this—knows what he experienced and what it means to him; and since he’s the only knight from Camelot that was there, the rest of the court can’t easily appreciate his perspective. That’s why they commodify it, trivialize it, consume it. But by doing so, they’re talking out of turn about something they only know through Gawain’s tale; and the weight of social consensus, the solidarity gesture of dressing like Gawain, and the resulting trivialization of a token whose cost he feels so acutely must therefore be alienating the poor knight. Read this way, the poem, for Gawain anyway, ends tragically, with the commodification of a symbol of his pain and fault.

Romance and Tragedy

The entire purpose of reading SGGK this year was to demonstrate the extent to which the old medieval romances undergird the modern narratives that entertain us now. The adventure serves the regent personally and regency as an institution. And the return isn’t always neat, doesn’t always straightforwardly present a regent with new information about the weird. Instead, a hero’s return may challenge a great deal of what the regent thinks he knows. And since regents prefer not to be challenged, especially at so fundamental a level, a hero’s return risks alienating him from his king and his fellows at court because he, the adventurer, has had an experience that they have not, and what he takes it to mean may be markedly different from what they want it to mean.

Stop and think about stories you’ve read about someone’s return and you’ll notice that returns are just as often troubling as they are joyful. Odysseus commits mass-murder upon returning home in Homer’s Odyssey. Frodo Baggins and his three hobbit friends are never quite understood by their kin in the Shire, even though (for the first time in Tolkien’s Hobbit lore) everyone in the Shire actually understands what was at stake in their journey. Tony Stark leaves home to sell some weapons in a third-world country, only to return with shrapnel and a mini-reactor in his chest and a schizophrenic relationship with fame and public duty. The blessing or toast, “Many happy returns” means something because, as we shall see, as the romance matures, not all returns are happy. In fact, it’s worth asking whether they ever were, and if not, where we came by the assumption that they should be.

Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. You can find him on LinkedIn and his website is here.

1. J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, translators, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1975), 99-100.

2. Tolkien and Gordon, 102-103.

3. Tolkien and Gordon, 103.

4. I find this morally, socially, and ethically reprehensible, a symptom of human fallenness wherein we cover our tracks to prevent others from seeing how morally sordid our interior lives truly are. I think I quail at it in Sir Gawain because I abhor it in myself.

5. Tolkien and Gordon, 104-105.

6. Tolkien and Gordon, 105.

7. Tolkien and Gordon, 110.

8. Tolkien and Gordon, 112.

9. Tolkien and Gordon, 114-115.

10. And yes, in this sentence, when I used the word “smooching,” I was definitely thinking of this famous scene from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. If she’s smooching with Gawain, who’s to say that Lady Bertilak isn’t “smooching with everybody”? With “Snuffy, Al, Leo, Little Mo with the gimpy leg, Cheeks, Bony Bob, Cliff”—but not my brother, on account of the fact that I don’t have a brother. That, as Cliff has said in this clip, “is a lie.” Or, alternatively, if he’s smooching with Lady Bertilak (and then, per their deal to turn over whatever gifts he’s received, with Lord Bertilak too), who’s to say Gawain isn’t smooching with everybody? Queer things happen in the weird.

11. Tolkien and Gordon, 115.

12. Tolkien and Gordon, 115-116.

13. Tolkien and Gordon, 120.

14. Tolkien and Gordon, 121.

15. And if we read the girdle as the medieval equivalent of the modern thong, Camelot has another issue, with all its knights and ladies riding around with underwear strapped over their outer garments. It certainly undermines the originality of Captain Underpants, as a character concept.