Are you hot-tempered? Do you flare up at the slightest offense and do everything in your power to maintain your honor, or someone else’s? If so, you are not alone. You have a lot of company in that particular Venn diagram. Among the people in that category would be King Arthur’s nephew Gawain. We met him reading Geoffrey of Monmouth and got a little sense of his hot-headedness there. If you remember, he was sent on the journey to meet envoys from Rome near the end of the book. He allowed himself to be provoked by the Romans and ended up cutting off the head of a Roman officer (an action he seems to repeat from time-to-time). His zeal for the honor of Arthur and Camelot led to the sacking of Rome by Arthur.
Geoffrey of Monmouth is not the only place we can hear stories of Gawain. In a lot of the medieval Arthur stories, Gawain is pictured quite often, and typically as a model of knighthood. This may strike us as odd; especially when we see the mess he gets himself into in the book we are about to read, but the medievals liked Gawain a lot and sung about him often. The stories that we are likely most familiar with about Arthur, those of Sir Thomas Malory and Alfred Lord Tennyson, do not picture Gawain as the model of the knight. Rather they tend to picture him as a scoundrel and a traitor. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight lets us see a little of the alternate tradition that pictured Gawain as a true hero.
We know that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written in the fourteenth century but we do not know who wrote it. This may be because the author did not want to be known (out of a sense of humility) or because the name was accidentally lost. Oftentimes, tales told in the medieval world were more about preserving the deeds of the hero than the fame of the author. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was also a poem. It was written in a style known as alliterative poetry. We typically think of poetry as rhyming lines. Some poetry does rhyme, but by far most poetry in the world does not work like this. This can make poetry a little inaccessible to some people unless they read a lot of it. We are going to be reading a prose rendition of the poem. It preserves the story, but some details are necessarily lost. A very good verse translation exists by J.R.R. Tolkien (of Lord of the Rings fame).
Some of the features of the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are worth examining a little by way of preview. Gawain is a knight and is bound by a code of chivalry. Chivalry essentially meant honorable conduct. It originally meant honorable conduct between warriors, but as Europe turned into what some scholars call Christendom (a concept we’ll deal with in a minute) this code of chivalrous behavior began to reflect the values of Christianity and the ethics it demanded of believers. This gives us a picture of Gawain in which honor, virtue, and truth are very important. Courtly romances, like Sir Gawain, often played up the situations that this code could bring into existence if all the aspects were not kept in their proper place.
A well-balanced worldview is like a clean room. Everything has a place and stays in its place. If it is left out of its place, the room is no longer clean and distortions are bound to occur (like leaving a school picture someone gave you out when everyone else’s is put neatly away, thus creating the distortion that you have feelings for this person when you do not). Courtly romances tended to capitalize on the distortions that could take place when honor or truth take a higher place than they deserved and at the expense of other components of the worldview. Sir Gawain shows us what can happen when honor is taken too far and at the expense of virtue or truthfulness.
Europe began as an influx of pagan Germanic tribes into Christian Roman territory. As time went on, many of these tribes converted to Christianity and began to establish legitimate kingdoms based, in part, on Christian teachings of morality and justice. By the time of Charlemagne (800 ad) most of Europe could have been called Christian. The invasions of the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries disrupted this general tendency, but even they were eventually won over by the power of the Gospel. Scholars often call this general saturation of European culture and society with Christianity, Christendom. Christendom means that the structure of society in Europe was Christian. The kings swore allegiance to the pope in many cases, and were often crowned by priests or had coronation ceremonies in churches. Sir Gawain gives us an accurate picture of the effect of Christendom on literature and folklore in Europe. The Church is always in the background of everything that is done. Masses are said every day, more than that in the castle Gawain stays at over Christmas. Lords often have their own private priests and chapels to have mass said in. Gawain visits the chapel often, as do most other characters in the story. Holy days and portions of the ecclesiastical calendar, like Michaelmas and All Hallows Day, are an essential part of how the passing of time is told in the story. We may object that masses are said but we must remember that Roman Catholicism was the only version of Christianity open to England, France and most of Western Europe at that time. The influence of Christianity in creating a Christian state, or Christendom, is monumental and this story exhibits it front and center in a very unapologetic way.
Finally we will notice that Sir Gawain takes a particular view of masculinity and femininity. The lord and his band go out hunting all day while the ladies remain at home and do feminine tasks. This may strike us as sexist or chauvinistic in our modern culture. Before we write Sir Gawain off, we should consider whether our notions are wrong. Medieval civilization attached some very definite roles to men and women that we have discarded for some poor reasons. Nonetheless, we do not have to accept the roles attached to the sexes in this story simply because they are medieval. As always, our standard should be Scripture and its teaching on the subject. We will find, for instance, that the picture of women as constantly trying to woo or be wooed by a knight, even if they are married, is a very unbiblical role.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a work of lasting beauty and creativity. It is short and fun to read. Enjoy!
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