The Middle English masterpiece, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is a poem which begins and ends at the Christmas season. But each Christmas for the poem’s hero, Sir Gawain, could not be more different. This poem contains several Christmas messages, as the poet reveals in his magnificent story.
Christmas at Camelot in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
We join Gawain at King Arthur’s court at Camelot one Christmas time where there is boundless mirth, jousting, dancing and feasting (ll.37-84). This is a Christmas of frivolity and joy but, as we learn, King Arthur is bored and demands some story or adventure to enliven events (ll. 85-106).
It is at this point that a stranger arrives at court. A mysterious green ‘knight’ enters the hall astride a green horse; he bears in one hand a giant axe and in another a holly bough, “that is greatest in green when the greenwood is bare” (l.207).
In a season of cold, ice and leafless decay, this man is ‘as green as the grass, and greener it seemed’ (l. 235) – a magical, monstrous antithesis to the season. He wears no armour although everything about him is beautiful and finessed; he is so startling that when he asks the name of the court’s leader, none could speak:
“he was some phantom or faerie – or so those folk deemed -;
Therefore those stout fellows were afraid to answer [him]
And stone-still they sat, all stunned at his statement,
In shushed silence throughout that whole knightly sitting”
[ll. 240-43].
The knight challenges Arthur to a Christmas game, whereby the king can cut off his {the knight’s) head provided that the Green Knight can return the favour in a year’s time. Fearful for the king, but rash himself, Gawain takes on the challenge and cuts off the knight’s head. But…
“…neither faltered nor fell did that fellow, nor sink down,
But stoutly he starts forth upon his stiff shanks,
And, roaring, reached out there as all the ranks stood,
Laid hands on his lovely head and lifts it up sharply”
[ll. 430-33]
And then he tells Gawain, in haunting words,
"Look Gawain, now get ready to do as you pledged,
And, lord, look for me loyally until you shall find me,
As you have promised in this hall and hereunto these knights.
So I charge you to choose a road to the Green Chapel,
To fetch such a dent as you dealt and deserve,
To be yielded by contract on New Year's morn;
The Knight of the Green Chapel is how many know me;
And you'll not fail to find me if you ask of my name,
Therefore do come, or a coward be called; as you wish.'
[ll. 448-56]
When the knight rides off, head in his hand, Arthur and his court are in wonderment but it is clear that Gawain, as a knight, must hold to his word.
His earthly chivalry demands that he has a year in which to find his nemesis, and to die, surely, by the blow of that monstrous axe. He seeks distraction in frivolity but, as the poet reminds us darkly, a year which once shone brightly now ends with heavy woe,
“Gawain was glad to begin those games in the hall,
For the year’s end is now heavy, so have little wonder;
And while men’s minds are merry when they have been drinking,
A year winds in full term and rarely it yields
The form at its finish it was sent to unfold”.
[ll. 495-99]
Christmas at Hautdesert
And so a year passes beneath the shadow cast by the previous Christmas and Gawain must now journey on his way. Surely a doomed man, Gawain symbolically leaves Camelot on All Souls’ Day in search of the Green Chapel.
Despite those on his way being ignorant of such a church, Gawain eventually arrives at the mysterious castle of Hautdesert on Christmas Eve. He is told by its lord, Bertilak, that the Green Chapel is very close and so he can stay with him to celebrate Christmas. Delighted, Gawain agrees to stay.
But this is no ordinary Christmas. Despite attending his host's own chapel ‘for the heavenly evensong of that high season’ [l. 932], this most precious of services is disrupted by the arrival of the lady of the castle and an elderly woman. The younger lady, we are told,
‘likes to look on that knight’ [l. 941]
and is,
‘… the fairest in face, form and looks,
And highest of courtesy, colour and countenance,
And more bewitching than Guinevere, so Gawain thought.’
[ll. 943-45].
The older lady, in contrast, is highly respected by all but ‘if the younger was youthful, the other was yellowed [l. 951].
After describing the dress of the older woman, the narrator says,
‘Her body was short and thick
Her buttocks bulged and broad.
The prettier one to pick
Was the younger, by accord’
[ll. 966-69].
The skill of the poet here is in telling us in no uncertain terms that this most holy of masses is overshadowed by potential lust, albeit framed from a male perspective. In giving us his judgement of the older woman, he compels us to think of the younger; if she is more bewitching than Guinevere, we are seeing her through the eyes of Gawain. We see her as a sexual object through a man's eyes.
Gawain, in this romance the very apogee of the medieval art of ‘luf-talking’ (a type of seemingly-innocent flirtatious conversation), is seemingly going to be tested.
This is indeed the case. When Bertilak goes off hunting the next day (and on two subsequent days) a bargain is arranged whereby Gawain must exchange whatever he ‘wins’ in the castle with whatever Bertilak ‘wins’ in the chase.
During those three days when Bertilak returns with a deer, a boar and a fox; he wins from Gawain a kiss, two kisses and three kisses. However, it is the last of these rewards which turns the story.
Over the three days, the lady has apparently and unsuccessfully attempted to seduce Gawain but succeeds in giving him a kiss on each occasion – the ‘winnings’ he gives to Bertilak. But on the last day, as well as kissing him, she also gives him a green girdle to protect him from any danger - including, of course, the inevitable beheading at the Green Chapel.
Gawain does not confess this to Bertilak; although he lies to his host to protect suspicion falling on his host's wife, he also lies in order to protect himself. The girdle, however, being an item of intimate clothing and also symbolic of lust, also shows itself as more important to Gawain than honesty and truth.
A Christmas service at the the Green Chapel
At New Year, when Gawain eventually leaves Hautdesert and arrives at the Green Chapel, he must now receive the punishment he had agreed to a year before. The Green Knight comes down from a crag, pole-vaults across a freezing, bubbling stream on his axe, and prepares to deal out his punishment.
However, in a striking twist, after two missed blows, the Green Knight delivers a third whereby he only manages to nick Gawain on his neck and a few droplets of blood fall onto the pure, white snow. This is a symbolic shedding of innocence.
Gawain, thinking he has received his punishment, strikes out at the Green Knight only for his nemesis to burst out laughing. He explains that the first two missed blows represented the minor offences of Gawain kissing his wife while the third blow, drawing slight blood, was for the betrayal over the girdle. As he says,
‘For it is my weave that you wear, that woven girdle;
My own wife gave it to you as I would well know […]
And of my wife and her wooing, I wrought that myself!’
[ll. 2358-61]
The Green Knight, it seems, has been Gawain's own host in another form. Gawain is mortified and overwhelmed by shame and flings down the girdle,
‘Lo, there’s a false thing, foul luck befall it!
For fear of your axe, it taught me much cowardice,
And denounced me as covetous to forsake my character,
My largesse and my loyalty, which belong to all knights,
I am now faulty and false, I who was always fearful
Of treachery and untruth – may both be blighted with sorrow
And shame!’
[ll. 2738-84].
Hidden messages
It is the beauty and supreme excellence of this magnificent poem that it operates on so many levels to compel us, the reader, into deeper thoughts about who we are and how we behave. It is a masterpiece of inward reflection, a triumph of spiritual devotion over the transience and petty desires of Middle Earth.
In the northern England tradition of Arthurian romance, Arthur’s court is frequently shown as being led by the flawed king of a flawed court. Frequently in these stories, Gawain is revealed as the knight who will do Arthur’s bidding to protect him from his own folly and preserve his reputation.
And so it proves to be here. As he sets out on his journey, Gawain is watched by rueful courtiers lamenting the whole episode. They, like Arthur, seem bound by earthly vanity, preferring instead that Gawain be dubbed a duke for his deed rather than be dubbed instead by the Green Knight’s axe (ll. 674-810).
But what else could they expect from a king who puts his own earthly pleasure before spiritual duty at Christmas and who demands - out of boredom no less – that an adventure happen? Even one so deadly as that dealt out by the Green Knight?
Yet even at the end, when Gawain returns in rueful triumph to Camelot, Arthur himself learns nothing. Instead of being humbled by what has happened, Arthur instead tells all his knights to wear a green sash in remembrance of this adventure. The lesson learned is earthly and vain, the outcome a chivalrous badge of honour. As the poet says,
‘This was to declare the renown of the Round Table,
And all who wore it were honoured thereafter,
As the best books of romance all describe’
[ll. 2519-21]
Arthurian romance, on the surface, celebrates earthly prowess. But if Gawain has rescued Arthur, his court, and his reputation, he and his motives are also called into question by a deeper reading of the poem.
For Gawain, his rashness in accepting a clearly ludicrous challenge reveals him as placing vanity above commonsense. But he cannot control himself; in a battle between chivalry and spirituality, he seems driven more by earthly pleasures than spiritual joy.
Despite his love of God, Christ and Mary (ll. 753-62), he sees his badge as one of being the best ‘luf-talking’ knight as seemingly more important. As the lady taunts him during the second of her three attempted seductions,
‘[…] And you are acclaimed the most courteous known knight,
Whose word and whose worship walks far and wide,
And has sat by yourself with me two different times,
Yet I never heard your head herald these words
That ever spoke love at much length or a little!
For you, who are courteous and crafted in manners,
Ought to a young one be yearning to show
And teach some tokens of love’s true crafts!
Why! Are you low-witted, despite your renown,
Or else deem me to dim to behold of your dalliance?
For shame!’
[ll. 1520-30]
His reputation in this art is so widespread that even lady Bertilak knows of it. But she is a strange force herself, placed here deliberately by the poet. Revealed as seemingly the malleable tool of the lord of another green world (l. 2361), she is, by contrast, a powerful figure whose role is actually to reveal the vanity of men, their arrogance, and their innate contempt for women.
We learn too that Bertilak himself was transformed into the Green Knight by none other than Morgan le Fay (the old woman of the castle mentioned above); more, she sent him to Camelot to kill Guinevere (l. 2446).
In this house, Bertilak may be the figurehead but women hold the power. The poet may show Morgan as undesirable and menacing but in fact he employs her as a mirror to reveal how men think about themselves in relation to women. In seeking the death of Guinevere, Morgan appears to be saying that women must be seen as who they are, rather than fantasy figures for the rambling objectification of lustful male minds.
Gawain, on learning of the deception, enters into a rant about the dangers of women (ll. 2414-28), concluding vainly,
“[…] I deem it be better
To love them a lot and believe them but little, if man only could”.
Gawain, ranting about how feminine deceit stemmed back to the time of Adam, once more highlights the folly and arrogance of men. Men, it seems, were designed as incorruptible and pure; women their antithesis. But how wrong he is.
In Middle English romances such as Sir Degrevant, Bevis of Hampton, William and the Werewolf, and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, women are independent, highly intelligent and fundamental. They possess their own agency and authority and bring pragmatism and commonsense to the world. They are men’s equal —frequently shown as more so — and demand to be treated as such.
So when Gawain intemperately rages against women, he is going against the grain of fourteenth century romance. In refusing to accept female equality and instead see women as dangerous and inferior, he is revealed not only as contemptuous, arrogant and misogynistic, but also immature and a man significantly behind the times.
Christmas presence
In telling of a Christmas game demanded by a languid earth-bound Arthur, the poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight reveals a more strident Christmas message than the king could ever have imagined.
At surface level, the Christmas of the poem is an earthly Camelot Christmas threatened by dark forces, deceit and destruction. It tells of how a young knight nearly loses his life through folly and has his supremacy, religious belief and integrity tested to the limit by vanity and lust.
Yet for all its menace and mystery, the poem’s flipside Christmas at Hautdesert exists to serve another purpose: to shine a light through the darkness of its characters to make the world a better, purer and more equal place.
Despite their otherworldly menace and a seemingly malevolent desire to destroy Arthur’s marriage to Guinevere and cast him into misery, the lord, the lady and Morgan le Fay exist as tools of forgiveness and justice.
Yes, they test Gawain and the Round Table, but they are also seemingly reluctant to do so. With Morgan’s magic, the Green Knight could have killed Guinevere on his visit to Camelot. The Green Knight could have killed Gawain or the lady could have seduced him. Morgan’s power, her ability to make the Green Knight indestructible, could easily have brought Arthur down. But no.
Instead, the residents of Hautdesert hold a mirror to society, compelling us reflect more deeply on how we behave and consider the world we find before us. To be better people we must change our ways by seeing the forgiveness offered by the potential of sin; ‘lead us not into temptation’, as the Lord’s Prayer says.
The poem asks us to see the world through pure eyes and act to each other with respect as equals. In so doing, it shows that we must not judge those we see and meet by the terms of our own flawed and earthbound nurture. "Surquedry" - the overweening pride and arrogance of those who live at Camelot - is, implies the poet, the greatest sin of all.
So, of all the figures we encounter in the poem, it is the mysterious lady who holds the most power and whom we remember the most. But this is not on account of her seeming sexuality, her sassiness or her apparent sinfulness. Only in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can a 'seductress' in fact become the embodiment of that most exquisite of loves, the love that glows the brightest before its aim is won.
In bringing us to the apogee of playful joy, where all conceit is hidden away, the lady in fact crafts that deepest form of love: the intense, beautiful and forgiving love we all find at Christmas time. A love which overshadows selfishness to burn brightest in our hearts.
Prints and translation used in this article
The linocut prints used in this article are available to purchase in the Mythical Britain Online Shop.
Each print is signed and edition by Michael Smith and is hand-produced on 19th century Albion press using oil-based permanent inks printed on 250gsm Somerset Velvet.
The translation comes from Michael's book, published by Unbound in 2018 and available through Mythical Britain and all good bookshops worldwide.
About the Author, Michael Smith
Michael Smith is a translator and illustrator of medieval literature. His books, including a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, are available through all the usual outlets.
Signed copies
Signed and personally dedicated hardbound copies of the book, as well as limited copies of the book's original illustrations and other linocut prints are available directly from Mythical Britain.
An alternative look at the lady
The lady in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has been the subject of much scholarly debate. A fascinating examination of her character can be seen in Dr Debbie Cannon's wonderful one-woman play which shows an older lady Bertilak in later life reflecting on Gawain's visit years before. It is a mesmerising and intelligent production and is thoroughly recommended.
More about Debbie's work here.
Review of Debbie's play here
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