The Layers of Sir Gawain

SGGK, Fitt III

Remember, 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.

In my last post, “Opening Knight,” I noted that “Somewhere in fitt II Gawain crosses a limit, departing the space known at Camelot and entering the weird. Because this limit lies in the middle of fitt II, by the time we reach fitt III it’s easy to forget that Gawain has crossed it. So we have to read fitt III with the latter half of fitt II in mind.” When we do that, we see that Gawain has been opened, as it were, and fitt III is a study in what lies beneath his reputation, his armor, even his courtly manners. Beneath it all lies someone struggling with a choice between his morals and his survival; and he eventually compromises his morals by accepting a wonder that ensures his survival. After appealing to God’s providence and seeing his prayers answered, Gawain succumbs to the siren song of a technology—a human-made device—and its promise to ensure his safety. And he makes himself vulnerable in this way by flippantly committing to a game he doesn’t fully understand.

The Rash Boon

How many times have you consented to something without fully understanding the responsibilities you’re taking on? Every time I scroll quickly past an end-user licensing agreement (EULA) looking for the “I Agree” button, I idly wonder to myself whether I shouldn’t have read things more carefully. I’ve heard they bury offers for free things in that legalese! The last time I rented a car, as I drove away I shuddered at how fast I’d signed the paperwork. The fact is, our world and its labyrinths of legalese, presented to us in Kafka-esque situations wherein we must sign even though we’ve hardly the time and space we need to actually read it all, isn’t all that different from Sir Gawain’s agreement with Lord Bertilak at the end of fitt II.

At this point in the poem Sir Gawain has explained the errand he is on: he’s looking for the Green Chapel, and he’s only at Chez Bertilak to shelter from the weather during the celebration of the Christ Mass. When he learns the Green Chapel is nearby, he agrees to remain at the chateau for a few extra days:

“Now I thank you a thousand times for this beyond all!
Now my quest is accomplished, as you crave it, I will
dwell a few days here, and else do what you order.”¹

Bertilak is delighted by this: “For the love of him that lord was as loud in his mirth
as one near out of his mind who scarce knew what he meant.”² (Sound like anyone you know?)

Then he called to the knight, crying out loudly:
“You have promised to do whatever deed I propose.
Will you hold this behest here, at this moment?”
“Yes, certainly, sir,” then said the true knight.
“While I remain in your mansion, your command I’ll obey.”³

Bertilak’s order, then, is that while he goes hunting Gawain will remain in the chateau, rest well, and enjoy the company of Lady Bertilak and her maidservant. And then he adds one more condition:

…“we’ll make an agreement:
whatever I win in the wood at once shall be yours,
and whatever gain you may get you shall give in exchange”…
“By God,” quoth good Gawain, “I agree to it all,
and whatever play you propose seems pleasant to me.”⁴

So, three times Gawain assents to a bargain he doesn’t fully understand. So far as he knows, he’s got a warm resort for Christmas and a good location from which to strike out for the Green Chapel on New Year’s day.

Collectively, these three instances of Gawain’s assent constitute an example of what’s called “the rash boon” or “the rash promise,” a recurring trope in the medieval romance. In The Road to Middle Earth, Tom Shippey describes “the motif of the Rash Promise” as an instance in which a character “has to stand by an undertaking carelessly worded.”⁵ As Shippey’s comments indicate, since he’s writing about Tolkien’s stories, we see the rash boon later works influenced by medieval romances, for example in fantasy literature. In Tolkien’s The Hobbit, in response to Thorin’s rash promise of payment, Bilbo takes Thrain’s Arkenstone to give to the Sylvan Elves. We might also recall Frodo Baggins, in The Fellowship of the Ring, yelling to be heard above the clamor into which the Council of Elrond devolved: “I will take the Ring to Mordor… though I do not know the way.” And in an innovative twist, Frodo’s conversation with Galadriel, in which he offers her the Ring, is an example of her refusal of a rash boon.

These variations in Tolkien’s use of the rash boon actually show us new contours of Bertilak’s acceptance of Gawain’s hasty promise. Bilbo accepts Thorin’s rash boon, takes something Thorin lusts after, and gives it away, relinquishing his own (Bilbo’s) share of the profits from the Lonely Mountain in a bid for peace and the restoration of Elf-Dwarf amity.⁶ Frodo humbly offers the rash boon of undertaking the journey to dispose of the One Ring, not realizing it will cause him pain so unbearable he will decide to depart from the Grey Havens, costing him a good (perhaps unnatural) long life celebrated with milestone birthday parties under the Great Tree near Bag End—but eucatastrophically saving the world, if not for himself.⁷ And Galadriel proves she possesses a wisdom rooted in moral judgment when she rejects Frodo’s rash boon of the One Ring.⁸ By contrast, Bertilak’s acceptance of Gawain’s rash boon is not aimed at peace and amity, not offered humbly, and has mischief as its ulterior motive. Gawain, who is renowned not only for his martial prowess but for “the fine points of manners, and the perfect expressions of polished converse,”⁹ is about to have his manners and powers of speech tested by having them turned against his martial instincts.

Forza and Froda

In this pitting of might against wit we encounter one of the central tensions between characters in the romance tradition, the tension between what Northrop Frye calls “forza,” on the one hand—“violence”— and “froda” on the other—“fraud.”

When violence and fraud enter literature, they help to create the forms of tragedy and comedy respectively. The tragic hero is normally a person capable of being an aged and not merely a victim of violence, but tragedy is mainly a form in which an actual or potential agent of violence becomes a victim of it. As forza is open violence, tragedy seldom conceals anything essential from audience or reader… And when we ask what it is that brings the tragic hero to grief, we find that it is often a deficiency in dealing with fraud.[…]
The corresponding pattern in romance is the story of the hero who goes through a series of adventures and combats in which he always wins[, which] appears to have been uniformly successful up to the moment of his death. But even death is a defeat of sorts, hence there is an inner dialectic in the eulogy of power which tends to make all heroes of action ultimately tragic heroes. Often a hero seems to be trying to achieve some kind of liberation for himself through his physical strength… But sooner or later some chink in the armor opens up and the hero is destroyed.¹⁰

Thus, when the romance is focused on forza, part of the ritual it performs is to immortalize the individual hero by merging the account of his deeds into his culture’s literary tradition, which in return informs the romance’s theory of heroism: in return for dying, the hero becomes a legend.

By contrast, froda triumphs in “the story of guile and craft.” Moreover, “Its themes often feature disguise and concealment of identity, both from other characters and from the audience, and its plot normally moves toward an end acceptable to the audience but unlikely under the condition of the action, so that some surprising or unexpected event is needed to resolve the conclusion.”¹¹ With this description in mind, Tolkien’s deployment of eucatastrophe—of “good catastrophe” aimed at a happy ending—and his staunch belief that eucatastrophe is part of reality, makes a great deal of sense. Over-against the forza of Sauron, the froda of Frodo (the visual rhyme is no accident) prevails.

Finally, Frye genders froda as often a characteristic of a heroine, as opposed to a hero, and then links this heroine-ism with the romance, which has been figured as feminine in comparison with the epic, which is marked by forza. As he explains, “A romance is normally comic, in the sense that usually the heroine’s wiles or whatever are successful and the story ends with marriage or some kind of deliverance.”¹²

I spent so much space expositing the forza-froda tension because in Fitt III, that tension is at play in several ways. First, Gawain is asked to remain in the chateau, a role that feminizes him in the domestic sphere while Bertilak and his rout ride out into the hunting grounds surrounding the chateau. Gawain is to linger with the women while Bertilak brings home the kill. Second, Gawain, exhausted, lies abed on the morning of the first hunt, but Lady Bertilak enters his chamber and engages him in seductive conversation. She is the sexual aggressor and he is the target struggling to avert a liaison that would constitute a huge moral infraction and undermine cordial relations with his host—whose people also possess Gawain’s armor, weapons, and horse. In this vulnerable state, Gawain’s weapons, and thus his martial skill, are not only beyond his reach, they are of no use in the face of the aggression brought against him. Gawain’s wit and his words—in short, his froda—are all he has. If he is to survive, he will have to summon a craftiness great enough to undo the rash boon thrice extended that got him into this compromising situation.

Entrelacement, the Weaving of Plots

The poetic structure of the test of Sir Gawain in fitt III is undergirded by a literary device, common in medieval romances, known in French as entrelacement—“interlacement” (pronounced “on-tway-lass-eh-MOHN”). As Shippey notes, entrelacement proves

the author has the story under control, and [the interlaced details that mark the trope] are significant to any reader who has grasped the entire plot. However, that is not how they appear to the characters, or to the reader whose attention has lapsed (as whose does not?). In this contrast between half- and full perception lies the point of interlacings. For to the characters the story appears… as a ‘bewilderment.’ They are lost in the woods… They also do not know what is going on or what to do next.¹³

But this bewilderment should not lead us to despair. In a conflict-ridden world where the life-stories of characters who are questing amid struggle are linked by coincidences and parallax, giving up the quest “does the other side’s work for them, and ruins all your own possible futures and other people’s as well… While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give ‘luck’ a chance to operate, through unknown allies or unknown weaknesses in the opposition.”¹⁴ Or again:

Events in the world, [entrelacements] say, appear chaotic and unplanned, appear so all but unmistakably. But however strong that impression is, it is a subjective one founded on the inevitably limited view of any individual. If individuals could see more widely… they would realise that events have a cause-and-effect logic, though there are so many causes that perhaps no one but God can ever see them all at once.¹⁵

This specifically providential framework is perhaps more overt in Tolkien’s work than in any other in the history of romance (much of which is framed in theistic terms, nevertheless). In SGGK, the entrelacement is much more invested in a poesy that sets up parallels between Gawain and three sylvan creatures who are also caught in Bertilak’s clutches. And Gawain doesn’t give up hope—he does persevere—but like Frodo, during the test his rash boon has gotten him into, he discovers his own faults.

By placing Lady Bertilak’s three seductions of Gawain in poetic parallel with Lord Bertilak’s three hunts, this entrelacement animalizes Gawain. While outside the house Bertilak kills, in order, a deer, a boar, and a fox, inside the house Lady Bertilak repeatedly corners Sir Gawain, showing him affection which puts him at grave risk. After all, Gawain has promised to convey to Lord Bertilak “whatever gain [he] get[s]” resting in the chateau while Bertilak is on the hunt. Gawain must convey Lady Bertilak’s kisses to Lord Bertilak; and kisses are bound to pique the lord’s curiosity, if not to arouse his suspicion. But Gawain isn’t the hunter, Lady Bertilak is the huntress. This establishes the parallel between Gawain and the animals that Lord Bertilak kills.

The Politics of Animalization

Animalization has to it a kind of politics; and the contours of this politics has been clearly and concisely exposited by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin in Postcolonial Ecocrticism, where they offer four examples of the way animalization does political work.¹⁶ But interestingly enough, none of the instances of animalization that they treat are at issue in SGGK, fitt III. Gawain is animalized, certainly; but the animalizations aren’t barbarizing Gawain so much as underscoring his powers. I’ve outlined Huggan’s and Tiffin’s four examples of the political uses of animals in note 16 below; but to them I would add the following:

• when a species inspires fear in two cultures, one culture’s subjection of members of that species becomes an intercultural display of the subjecting culture’s prowess, as if to say, “We have mastered what you still fear”;

• having killed a fearsome specimen, some humans or human cultures have aesthetically or culturally appropriated animal traits to posture as animal, which is part of an intimidation tactic that bespeaks their potential to dominate other humans;

• reducing a dead animal to its usefulness—this is approximately what Nicole Shukin means by her use of the term “rendering,” which I discussed in “How Ford has Rendered the Animal Body”—humans not only make as much of the animal’s body as useful as possible, they also bring the animal’s form into a representational economy that uses the animal to make meaning between individual humans and human cultures.

For example, the first two instances of animalization I’ve offered here are essential to the way William Golding scares us in Lord of the Flies—Jack and his hunters become scarier the more they kill wild pigs. But these uses of animals are also much older than Golding’s book, as seen in Homer’s Iliad, where Achilles famously tells Hector, “There are no binding oaths between men and lions”¹⁷; “lions” here is Achilles’s reference to himself.

The Layers of Sir Gawain (and Lady Bertilak)

Everything I’ve noted thus far is a long (sorry, comes with my last name) preamble to a relatively short exposition of fitt III, wherein we see Lady Bertilak’s increasingly aggressive seductions of Sir Gawain interlaced with Lord Bertilak’s three hunts, in which he kills a deer, a boar, and a fox, in that order. The entrelacement of Lord and Lady Bertilak’s respective conquests suggests a parallel between their quarries as well; and so across the three hunts, this parallelism links Sir Gawain to, in order, a herd of deer, a wild boar, and a sly fox. The parallel passages of the entrelacement therefore animalize Sir Gawain, inviting us to read him as deer-like, boar-like, and fox-like. But what does each of these associations mean?

It’s worth noting that Gawain’s deer-likeness is specifically described in terms of the doe, not a hart or a stag, since “the lord of the castle had decreed in the close season that no man should molest the male of the deer.”¹⁸ This implies Gawain’s grace, but distinguishes it from his strength or his wisdom, which the Gawain-poet addressed later in the forms of the boar and the fox.

While Lord Bertilak and his men are loudly and raucously (perhaps even drunkenly?) hunting the does, Gawain finds himself suddenly cornered, both physically and socially:

As in slumber he strayed, he heard stealthily come
a soft sound at his door as it secretly opened;
and from under the clothes he craned then his head,
a corner of the curtain he caught up a little,
and looked that way warily to learn what it was.
It was the lady herself, most lovely to see,
that cautiously closed the door quietly behind her,
and drew near to his bed. Then abashed was the knight,
and lay down swiftly to look as if he slept;
and she stepped silently and stole to his bed,
cast back the curtain, and crept then within,
and sat her down softly on the side of the bed,
and there lingered very long to look for his waking.¹⁹

The dilemma she’s arranging for him is this: either he scorns her advances (and I’ll assume most of us are aware of William Congreve’s note of Hell’s paucity of any fury comparable to that of a woman scorned), offending his hostess and by extension his host, or he accepts her advances, offending his host. Vaunted, then, for his forza in battle and contests of knightly skill and strength, which he has already demonstrated in decapitating the Green Knight back at Camelot, Gawain’s froda is now being tested. And given that froda has long been feminized (and forza masculinized), it’s noteworthy that Gawain’s assayer is a woman. According to the cultural assumptions of medieval Britain, Gawain cannot hope to outwit one who is innately wily, so it would have been believed, by merit of her gender. Like the deer being hunted (note that since they are does, they too are feminized), he can only verbally feint, dodge, and flee.

In case anyone doubts that Lady Bertilak is verbally hunting Gawain, consider her description of how she’s approaching him: “here [in bed] fast shall I enfold you,” she says, evoking at once the fold of Lord Bertilak’s hunting ground and the quilt of Gawain’s bed.

“To my body you will welcome be
of delight to take your fill;
for need constraineth me
to serve you, and I will.”²⁰

She is overtly, even surreptitiously, trapping and seducing Gawain.

The two subsequent cycles of entrelacement follow a similar pattern. Each time he settles for a gift from Lady Bertilak that, under normal social circumstances, would raise questions about what he’s been doing in the chateau all day. During the first to cycles Gawain assents to receiving a kiss, such that swapping gifts with Lord Bertilak after the first two hunts is comedically awkward.

But during the third cycle, while Bertilak is hunting a fox, Lady Bertilak offers Gawain much more valuable gifts. First,

A rich ring she offered him of red gold fashioned,
with a stone like a star standing up clear
that bore brilliant beams as bright as the sun:
I warrant you it was worth wealth beyond measure.²¹

Here we see the archetype of Tolkien’s Arkenstone, from The Hobbit, also of the rings of the Elves from The Silmarillion, and undoubtedly of the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings. And its great worth might also remind us of Bilbo’s mithril mail. But we also see a token that, in our own history, has come to signify a pledge of troth between two married people, reforged as one unbroken circle, a sign of their mutual embrace. At the most superficial level, this is a beautiful, valuable gift; but at a deeper level, it’s a compromising article for Gawain to accept from Lady Bertilak, especially since he must turn it over to her husband at close of day. So, like Frodo—and here the similarity should evoke for us the word froda—Gawain refuses the ring: it is too valuable and would put him too deeply in Lady Bertilak’s debt.²²

“If to my ring you say nay, since too rich it appears,
and you would not so deeply be indebted to me,
I shall give you my girdle, less gain will that be.”
She unbound a belt swiftly that embracing her sides
was clasped above her kirtle under her comely mantle.
Fashioned it was of green silk, and with gold finished,
though only braided round about, embroidered by hand;
and this she would give to Gawain, and gladly besought him,
of no worth though it were, to be willing to take it.²³

Based on the description—this article is “clasped above her kirtle,” Lady Bertilak’s tunic, her “slip,” we might say in modern parlance—this is just a “belt,” not the article we’d now call a “girdle.” But it comes from “under her comely mantle”—from beneath her skirts—and so carries a cultural resonance similar to what underwear might carry today: later on, Tolkien and Gordon translate it as “love lace,”²⁴ connoting something one might now purchase from Victoria’s Secret. (And the British cultural resonance of that name is no accident.) Such a personal gift from close to the Lady’s body, and more to the point, from close to her loins, is risqué. While her husband is out hunting a fox, she has out-foxed Gawain. He has refused her ring and asked for something less valuable, so she has foisted upon him her enchanted underwear (in the sense that she wears the belt beneath her dress). And now he must accept it as he said he would; and then he must determine how to convey such a personal gift to Lord Bertilak upon his return from the hunt. (By the way, Men In Tights fans, this is undoubtedly one of the medieval roots of the image of the chastity belt. You’re welcome.)

Gawain assents, though unwillingly, especially because the Lady promises the belt will protect him:

But one who knew of the nature that is knit therewithin
would appraise it probably at a price far higher.
For whoever goes girdled with this green riband,
wile he keeps it well clasped closely about him,
there is none so hardy under heaven that to hew him were able.²⁵

And in his acceptance we see his fault: he doesn’t intend to give this protector away in keeping with his and Lord Bertilak’s agreement. While both the girdle and the ring are wonders in the sense I’ve written about before, the ring is a wonder for its beauty and monetary value; but the girdle is a wonder for its enchantment, for what it can do. Given the opportunity, Gawain the hunted decides to become invincible.

To cover his tracks, which is to say, to ensure that Gawain can easily break his vow to Lord Bertilak, Lady Bertilak also gives the knight a kiss. Now he has two gifts: one to pass on per his agreement, and one to keep for himself in subversion of the agreement. She has optimized the conditions for Gawain to decide to compromise his honor.

Coda

The third is easily the most complex fitt of SGGK. The entrelacement sets up a juxtaposition of Lord Bertilak’s forza and Gawain’s froda, but also a juxtaposition of Lord Bertilak’s forza and Lady Bertilak’s froda. The Bertilaks are hunters; Gawain is the hunted. As such, Gawain is animalized and this animalization resonates in all kinds of strange ways. Out of his animal nature he’s struggling for survival, which compromises his civitas, his courtly manners, for example in keeping his promise to Lord Bertilak.

Gawain-as-animal is also weaker than the Bertilaks, which means he must resort to froda—to fraud—in order to survive, and this inverts our modern cultural logic, which values ingenuity and downplays the importance of “brute force.” (Note the barbarity of the phrase and its implication that froda is somehow less brutish. Culture has shifted in eight hundred years.)

But there’s one other angle to consider here: the gift. If you look back to my post on fitt I, the Green Knight himself is a wonder; and so, by extension, is the axe he gave to Gawain, the very axe with which Gawain hewed the Green Knight’s head from his shoulders in a single stroke, the ultimate act of forza. It’s no coincidence that here in fitt III Gawain must receive and retain a gift of froda, a work of ingenuity that will by magic protect him from force. The two gifts round out his powers—one offensive, one defensive—and he comes into each by acts that are characteristically similar (i.e., he gets the axe by a show of courage and keeps it by an act of forza, and he is given the girdle for his wit and keeps it by an act of shrewdness, of froda).

But existentially, 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. Years ago I argued that Gawain is Nature’s champion (that’s a post for another time); but he’s still a man, and that means he’s still riven with self-contradiction in the sense that St. Paul exposits in Romans 7.15-20. 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.

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.

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), 64.

2. Tolkien and Gordon, 65.

3. Tolkien and Gordon, 65.

4. Tolkien and Gordon, 65-66.

5. Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a Mythology (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), 259. Cf. pg. 315, where Shippey cites this motif in a discussion of the tale of Beren and Luthien in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion.

6. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937), 233.

7. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, Being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1955), 309.

8. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Being the First Part of the Lord of the Rings (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1954), 381. This instance of the rash boon, along with the two cited in notes 6 and 7 above, demonstrate SGGK’s influence on Tolkien’s imagination and underscore his efforts to innovate on the trope in his own fiction.

9. Tolkien and Gordon, 58.

10. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 66-67.

11. Frye, 68.

12. Frye, 92.

13. Shippey, 163.

14. Shippey, 164.

15. Shippey, 165.

16. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London, England: Routledge, 2010), 134-140. Huggan’s and Tiffin’s four examples of politicized uses of animals include (1) animalizing others to justify enslavement or other mistreatment of them as sub-human; (2) putting human people groups and animal populations in competition with each other for scarce resources; (3) posturing one’s own and one’s people’s perspective on a given species as “more humane” than some other people group’s perspective, thereby insinuating the others’ barbarity; and (4) objecting to concerns about animals on the grounds that such concerns divert attention from specifically human problems.

17. Homer, The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles, with introduction and notes by Bernard Knox (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1990), 550.

18. Tolkien and Gordon, 67.

19. Tolkien and Gordon, 69.

20. Tolkien and Gordon, 70.

21. Tolkien and Gordon, 93.

22. Tolkien and Gordon, 94.

23. Tolkien and Gordon, 94.

24. Tolkien and Gordon, 95.

25. Tolkien and Gordon, 94-95.