Bernard O’Donoghue - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

PENGUIN BOOKS Bernard ODonoghue was born in Cullen, County Cork in 1945. Since 1965 he has lived in Oxford, where he teaches medieval English at Wadham College. He has published five volumes of poetry, as well as books on the language of modern poetry and on medieval literature. His anthology of medieval European love poetry, The Courtly Love Tradition, was published in 1982. It has often been said that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1385). 1385).

Yet the experience of the two poems in the history of English literature could hardly be more different. Ever since his own writing lifetime in the last third of the fourteenth century, Chaucer has been a major, documented presence in that history. Gawain survived by chance, when many anonymous poems of the same kind did not, and was hardly mentioned or read until the nineteenth century when it was first printed. Yet its appeal for a modern readership is unfailing. The poems voice, like the narrators voice in Miguel Cervantess Don Quixote (1605, 1615), is immediately recognizable to us: ironic, commonsensical and realistic. How can such terms apply to a marginal poem by an unknown poet in Middle English, written in a language which is a great deal less familiar to us than Chaucers? In many passages of the poem it is not an exaggeration to say that its language sounds wholly foreign to modern English speakers.

For this reason, a readable modern English translation (and there are several of them already) is essential if we are to encounter the ironic common sense of the original poem. This is a pity, it must be conceded at once, because the graphic and fluent alliterative language of the original is one of its greatest strengths. For that reason I have put in an appendix here one of the most admired passages in the poem, with an analysis of the form of the original language.

The poem survives in a single manuscript, now held in the British Library, which has been dated to around 1400, the year of Chaucers death. It is a small, unprepossessing manuscript book, written in a clear hand, in a language which is hard to place exactly, but which has usually been localized somewhere in the north-west English Midlands, on the borders of Staffordshire, Cheshire and Derbyshire. There are three other poems in the manuscript, in broadly the same language or dialect, and resembling Gawain in form to varying degrees.

They are all much more evangelically Christian than Gawain, which is to say religious to an extent typical of many medieval Arthurian romances (some of which of course are very religious indeed). Of the other three poems, the most celebrated is the poetic elegy Pearl, the story of a dream-encounter between a narrating jeweller and his lost pearl, which symbolizes a daughter who died at the age of two. The other two poems are Bible stories, also told in the brilliantly graphic language of the manuscript: Patience the story of Jonah, in the whale and elsewhere, and Cleanness (which used to be called Purity, for alliterative classification with the other two), which is made up of versions of three biblical narratives. The most successful attempts to find common thematic elements have suggested that the poems are all concerned, more or less, with acceptance of the will of God by a protagonist who is initially resistant to it. All four poems have usually been taken as the work of a single poet, the Pearl-poet or the Gawain-poet, but there is no evidence for authorship, despite a number of attempts to find an author over the past fifty years. The strongest case for single authorship rests on a common dialect and a shared formal brilliance of language, far beyond the reach of most surviving contemporary poems.

A fifth poem, not in the manuscript, is sometimes added to this putative corpus, St Erkenwald, written in the same dialect and about the miracles attending the exhumation of a Roman saint in London in the course of the building of St Pauls Cathedral.

It is always hard to say exactly where a poem like Gawain, from an outlying area of England and without a known date or author, comes from. In this case, there is clear evidence (in the way of textual corruption) that the dialect of the scribe is not exactly the same as the poets. On the other hand, remarkably plausible efforts have been made to identify precisely two of the three central locales in the poem, the Green Chapel and Bertilaks castle. In particular, the work by R. V. V.

Elliott in localizing the castle in the area around Leek in Staffordshire is enormously interesting.

Whatever claims can be made for the other poems in the manuscript and Pearl especially has always had enthusiastic advocates it is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that makes this group of poems a documentary survival of the first importance. So, while the likelihood that the unknown author of this brilliant romance was also the writer of a group of accomplished poetic narratives on biblical themes is highly significant, I will not discuss those other poems in detail. In Gawain the hero undergoes a set of experiences which, despite an incredibility acceptable in romance (he encounters a green man who can survive decapitation), have a remarkable psychological familiarity for us. The poems modernity has been repeatedly acknowledged and reproduced. The story has frequently been retold for children; there is one remarkably effective film version (and one not so effective); there is a related novel The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch; and there is a superb opera by Harrison Birtwhistle to a libretto by David Harsent.

The story is well known so it can be told briefly. One New Years Day, a day particularly devoted to festive celebration in late-medieval England, Arthur and the company of the Round Table are celebrating the season at Camelot when a huge, green knight youd think that he was some kind of half-giant (l. 140) rides into the hall on a green horse. He wants to make a deal: he will have his head cut off here and now with the axe he is carrying, on condition that his decapitator will come to his domicile, his Green Chapel, to have his head cut off in return in a years time. Gawain takes on his challenge, and the Green Knight rides off, gruesomely holding his speaking head. At the end of the year Gawain sets off to keep the agreement, with no very clear idea where he is going, travelling on a northerly route through some familiar real places set in the romance environment.

He spends the next Christmas period at a wonderful northern castle, where for three days the beautiful wife of the lord of the castle attempts to seduce him. Finally, he is directed to the Green Chapel, where he receives his fate at the hands of the Green Knight, and returns to Camelot to file his report, a sadder and wiser man. Why is it so appealing, this story of Gawain, Marys knight, who has taken a vow of chastity and who bears an image of the Blessed Virgin inside his shield, but makes an improbable pact of mutual decapitation mutually assured destruction, it would seem? The rationale offered at the end that the whole thing was conjured up by Arthurs malevolent half-sister Morgan Le Fay to scare his queen, Guinevere, her traditional enemy, to death is flimsy in the extreme and, like the moral of many medieval poems, does not seem to meet the case. In several ways, the beauty is in the detail. The Vivaldi-like sequence of the seasons at the start of the second of the poems four sections, before Gawain sets off to keep his bargain, is incomparably evoked, from the crabbed Lent to the warm showers that make the birds hasten to build for solace of the soft summer, to the hardening harvest whose: dryness makes the dust swirl around and fling up high off the face of the earth. 5234) On his winter northward journey Gawain sleeps in his iron armour, nearly slain by the sleet, where the birds pipe piteously for pain of the cold. 5234) On his winter northward journey Gawain sleeps in his iron armour, nearly slain by the sleet, where the birds pipe piteously for pain of the cold.