SGGK: A Retrospect

Salvaging a startlingly modern medieval poem

Before turning at last from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—or “SGGK,” as the medievalists so fondly call it—I thought it might be worth synopsizing the six posts I’ve published on it since last summer. SGGK is an old text, and if any of you are following the zeitgeist then you know old things have nothing to teach us and should be summarized by cleverly coded chatbots in language that’s as vanilla—no: as mayonnaise—as possible so as not to draw interest to anything but ‘facts’ about them. (Which has me wondering then: why are you reading Salvage?)

The King of the Dead from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. No hero returns unchanged. Image hosted at Wikia.

In “SGGK: Prolegomena” I offered an all-too-cursory overview of the poem’s original historical context and structure. Honestly, having earned two graduate degrees in literature, both from departments that emphasize genre, I’m much more invested in SGGK as a romance than I am in any other aspects of it. Genre tells us something about the author, his audience, and the politics of literary expectation in which the story was written. (To you other Substack literati: we could quibble about this and you might even have better arguments; but I’m sticking with this genre-oriented perspective because it’s helped me see a great deal for far too long for me to let it go just yet.) One line from that post sticks out: “the romance is a genre born of conquest,” which is to say it was descended of the epic poems from an earlier “heroic” era. (And if you’re looking for a journey to that era,

Matthew Long

’s recently begun a series on Homer’s Iliad that’s worth your time. See for yourself. Although I like him better because he has a cool last name, we are not related. From what I can tell, more’s the pity.)

In “How Wonder-ing Leads to Wandering” I noted that the driving force behind Gawain’s errand was Arthur’s love of wonders—his refusal to celebrate Christmas without one, and his inability to resist engaging one that rode through his door. Arthur, who was both Gawain’s king and his uncle, thought little enough of his nephew-subject’s life when he allowed Gawain to take his place. And this thoughtlessness is exacerbated by, perhaps is also a symptom of, Arthur’s already-egregious wealth. As I said then, “Arthur’s court, Camelot, is encrusted in wonders of art; and Arthur’s thirst for wonders, or perhaps just his soul-dead habit of collecting them, gets Gawain into trouble. We might say that Arthur’s wonder-ing eventually necessitates Gawain’s wandering.” As my father once told me in a wise moment I’ll carry to my grave: “The hardest part [of having nice things] is knowing when enough is enough.” Surely, when it leads us to sacrifice those we love and for whom we’re responsible, enough is, at that point, quite enough. But Arthur couldn’t see it. There are no heroes in Arthur’s court, only wonder-chasing man-boys and their forever-scarred kith.

In “The British Medieval Biomorphic Sublime”—the post you all liked least of the SGGK series, if analytics are any indicator—I argued that

humankind has been trying to re-engineer the natural for a long, long time; and part of what’s inspired us to try it is nature’s sublimity. We’re so awed by it, we want to make something that sublime. Seeing the romance, as a literary genre, as an artifact of empire; or seeing Gawain’s armor as weaponry rather than art; we miss the beauty in humankind’s ambitious imitation of the creation around us. Our souls are larger than their current low estate; and that’s a shame.

I’d like to add to that. It’s a shame because, in their current state, our souls grow restless until they unleash themselves on their neighbors, or until, to borrow St. Augustine’s famous phrase, “they find their rest in [God].” There are no heroes here; only sinners and saints.

If I’m being totally honest, “Opening Knight” was way too much fun to write. It was a rollicking romp through contemporary film, a piece too fast and loose ever to see the light of an academic journal, but too well-grounded in identifiable evidence to be mere opinion. (I hope to do it again at some point.) The post frames Gawain’s arrival at Chez Bertilak, out in the weird beyond Camelot’s knowledge, as an alien encounter: “from Chez Bertilak’s perspective, Gawain is the alien. He has ridden out of the forest, out of the weird, and sought hospitality at their hearth. To reject his request would be to treat him like an undesirable, perhaps an enemy; and all too often such treatment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” But as we also saw, even ‘hospitality’ may not be all that it appears. And for Gawain, whatever it was instead occasioned quite a bit of self-discovery.

I’ve read, reread, and re-reread SGGK for years. I wrote my M.A. thesis on it. I’ve taught it twice in my courses. It’s an old friend. But while writing “The Layers of Sir Gawain” I had a breakthrough—the actual act of writing brought it on. I was disappointed in Gawain’s heroism:

Gawain is, for me a tragic hero. He certainly desires to live honorably; but he is wracked with the same faults that plague all really human heroes. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to live; but breaking one’s word and stealing what rightfully belongs to another in order to possess an object that promises survival (and really, the logical connection between wearing borrowed underwear and being invincible in battle is extremely difficult to see) is an egotistical act that betrays Gawain’s reputation.

I think it’s because I know my own would have fared no better in a similar situation. And if I’m being totally frank, my readers, I don’t expect much better from any of you, either. Heroism’s an aspiration but only that, a pipe-dream because our souls are in their current low estate. Our options, again, as I’ve said above, are sinning and taking what we want, or a saintliness wherein we ultimately entrust even our very lives to God.

And this brings us at last to “A Maladjusted Return,” in which I pointed out that the romantic hero always returns changed. Usually the hero is scarred, though sometimes strangely enhanced by a wound, wounded by an enhancement, or wounded in exchange for it. The hero always—always—returns changed. And only in the thinnest, low-stakes kiddie-lit is this change ever a wholly good one. If it is, we get suspicious that it worked out so well because we know that’s not the world we inhabit. In our world, “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.”

Our age is too full of politics and culture war, so I won’t apply any of this to any particular situation. But what I hope is evident is just how relevant this old poem remains. If you haven’t already, read it and see.

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.