The first page of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Cotton Nero A.x, via Wikipedia.
Hiya, Readers!
I went underground ‘for a week’ to grade my way out of a massive pile that accumulated rather suddenly. (As I understand it, can relate; maybe others of you can as well and I’d love a DM if that’s you—let’s stay sane together, educators!) I was amazed I could find and even make some time to write. Also, once upon a time I wrote an M.A. thesis on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, so I knew what I was getting into… or so I thought.
Along the way I discovered that, because this poem is so old, it’s like an alien artifact and there’s a lot that had better be explained before saying anything about it. And then, when I added all of that into a post on Fitt I of the poem, it threatened to turn into a book. So here’s a prolegomenon, a collection of words offering an introduction, that answers the question, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—what is this thing, anyway?”
Special shoutout to those of you following along with Tolkien’s and Gordon’s translation of the poem!
Fondest,
Aaron
Since last post I’ve been preparing to write on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a medieval romance that, if you’ve never had the pleasure, has plenty to offer. (If, when I said “romance” just now, you thought of a pink-spined airport paperback featuring a buxom woman swooning into the arms of a Fabio-looking dude, you’ll want to read this before continuing the current post.) In many regards it’s a funny text. Its beauty is multifaceted: it is sonorous poetry; its descriptions are rich, helping readers’ imaginations paint vivid pictures of the characters and places; and its plot is ingenious, even beguiling in places. This is one of my favorite texts in British literature because it bears straightforward, first-glance reading, but its linguistic and structural complexities offer new discoveries each time I read it.
I first read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or, as the medievalists affectionately refer to it, “SGGK,” in a course called Middle English Beyond Chaucer. (And here it’s worth noting that if you missed
’s series on Chaucer this past winter, you’re missing a real treat!) “Beyond Chaucer” is a good description for SGGK. For one, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales often dominate courses on Middle English literature, so reading SGGK takes us somewhat afield of the mainstream of Middle English.For another, Chaucer’s status as, alternately, “the father of English literature” and “the father of English poetry,” and his distinction of having been the first to be buried at Westminster Abbey in what’s now known as “Poet’s Corner,” cemented his reputation as the most famous author of Middle English literature.
Chaucer is central to the English literary canon not least because he was writing in London, which is and has been central to British culture for more than a millennium. So to read SGGK is to depart Britain’s cultural center for a moment and see what was said at its cultural margin.
Finally, if you’ve read Chaucer, you know there are a great many dirty jokes, some of them extremely gross. Compared with Chaucer’s bawd, the Gawain-poet—we don’t know his name—is prim, invested in cleanness. In fact, Cotton Nero A.x, the manuscript in which we find the original version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, features another poem by the same poet called Cleanness. We might say that morally, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is “beyond” Chaucer’s fratty-ness. Or at least, the poem is, if not all of its characters are. You’ll see what I mean.
Before we get started, let me pull together a few concepts from recent posts. First, as I mentioned in “A Brief Note Before a Jump in Time,” the animalization of machines, which is my current focus on Salvage—is bound up with attempts to generate wonder, to play on emotions, and to populate imaginary worlds that commodify things, usually with the goal of selling something. Second, as I pointed out in “Wonders at the Edge,” wonders and wonder are defining features of the romance, as we shall see in SGGK; but over time, what constitutes a “wonder” changes because what inspires wonder changes. Finally—and this one’s implied, not spelled out so much—the romance and its sensibility, romanticism, including their relationship with wonder/wonders, are both still alive and well. In fact, the romance appears a great deal in daily life, and when we encounter it it’s often benign. But not always. Romanticism can inspire awe and make wonders wonderful; but it can also tear our sentiments out of alignment, can make us feel wonder toward what should terrify us. And that, as we shall see next post, is Arthur’s problem, and the problem with Camelot’s culture. First, though, some comments on the text.
SGGK is divided into four chapters, or “fitts,” divided into stanzas. Your copy may have numbered stanzas or even numbered lines. Also, it matters whose translation you’re working with. Simon Armitage’s is one of the more recent and well-hyped, but I think that, way too often, it plays way too fast and loose with the original Middle English. If you read Armitage’s alongside the Middle English version from Cotton Nero A.x and the old reliable translations—J.R.R. Tolkien’s and E.V. Gordon’s, Marie Borroff’s, or James Winny’s—you see the slippage in Armitage’s language pretty quickly through a line-by-line comparison. (And don’t get me started on the blasted Green Knight film that came out a few years back.)
SGGK is a linguistically hybrid text. An admixture of Anglo-Saxon (a.k.a. “Old English”) and French, Middle English was a result of the Norman Conquest. In 1066, at the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror uh… conquered England and installed French or Francophile nobles. The result was a Frenchification of English as the ruling class—who also did the reading, writing, and conversing about public matters—mixed the two languages. The resulting hybrid of Old English and French is now known as “Middle English,” and it’s called that because it’s a form of English that arose after Old English and before Modern English. (Also, it’s worth nothing that for some modern English authors there’s a humiliation in this Frenchification because it has forever affected English literature.1)
The term “Modern English” generally designates what happened to the language as mechanical type allowed for standardized printing, and Shakespeare is commonly treated by lit scholars as the first writer in Modern English. (Of course, these things play out more gradually than the arbitrary choice of a single author as “the first” would seem to indicate.) SGGK is a Middle English text in the sense that it still has about it an Old English poesy, but its wording—definitely its spelling, and often its author’s word choice—show a French influence.
SGGK begins with a prologue, a very high-level recount of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, which then segues into British history by arguing, albeit poetically, that Felix Brutus founded Britain. The prologue’s job was to situate SGGK in, or perhaps as a new riff on, the epic tradition. And the history of literature reveals that the epic gives way to romance. Here, W. P. Ker’s (really old) book Epic and Romance (1896) is worth returning to:
The passage from the earlier “heroic” civilisation to the age of chivalry was not made without some contemporary record of the “form and pressure” of the times in the changing fashions of literature, and in successive experiments of the imagination.
Whatever Epic may mean, it implies some weight and solidity; Romance means nothing, if it does not convey some notion of mystery and fantasy… Beowulf might stand for the one side, Lancelot or Gawain for the other.2
Later on in the text Ker notes that “No kind of adventure is so common or better told in the earlier heroic manner”—that is, the epic—“than the defence of a narrow place against odds.”3 By contrast,
The favourite adventure of medieval romance is something different,—a knight riding alone through a forest; another knight; a shock of lances; a fight on foot with swords, “racing, tracing, and foining like two wild boars”; then, perhaps, recognition—the two knights belong to the same household and are engaged in the same quest.4
I draw this contrast here for two reasons. First, inasmuch as it’s actually helpful to delineate between the epic and the romance (historically, the shift was likely more gradual than a “line” indicates), Ker draws the distinction between, for example, Beowulf on the one hand and SGGK on the other. I’ve already pointed out the shift from Old English to Middle English, but Ker underscores the fact that the shift wasn’t only linguistic, it was also generic: a new, Frenchified English and the historic actions it took to bring it about issued in an advance on the epic genre, the romance.
Or, second, we might say the romance is a genre born of conquest. For what it’s worth, I think Homer’s Iliad is an epic, whereas his Odyssey is a romance. Here the theory that the romance is born of conquest finds another supporting case. And we might also argue that the Marvel film franchise of the early twenty-first century—which, you’ll note, arose in the wake of the epic defensive posture of 9/11—segued from the epic defensiveness of Iron Man to the romantic adventuring of Thor and Captain America. After Home is secured, the warrior ventures forth into the unknown to test his or her own mettle and to encounter what wonders and terrors lie beyond the bounds of Home’s knowledge.
The prologue of SGGK substantiates this theory by offering us a history of the contagion of empire. Note that the prologue’s history takes up after the fall of Troy—so there’s Homer’s Iliad—sketches out the story of Aeneas—so there’s Virgil’s Aeneid, which recounts the founding of Rome—and then claims that Britain was founded by Brutus, based on the similarity between the names. The argument basically goes, “Just as Romulus founded Rome, Tirius founded Tuscany, and Langaberde founded Lombardy, so Brutus founded Britain.” This purported heritage is a claim to imperial legitimacy: Arthurian Britain is a great nation because it is descended of great nations. But the nations from which it has purportedly descended are imperial nations, nations that took what they had from their neighbors.
So the romance is a shift in the epic’s perspective. The epic recounts how “we” defended what is “ours” from “them,” the invaders. The romance recounts how “we” went out into the Unknown and encountered “them”—and lived to return and tell the tale, proving it with whatever we were able to bring back with us, usually wonders or horrors.
In the posts that follow, I’ll summarize a bit here but not too much because I assume you’re familiar with the poem. Finally, because it’s widely available, I’m going to work from Tolkien’s and Gordon’s translation, which you can acquire here.
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 Twitter (yeah, yeah, on X) or LinkedIn, and his website is here.
Tolkien’s Riders of Rohan were born out of his theory that, had the British also had horses at Hastings, they would not have lost to the French and much more of Old English would have survived for him and his colleagues to study.
W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (London, England: MacMillan and Co., Ltd., 1896), 4-5. An e-book version is available via Google Books.
Ker, 5.