The Green Knight (Movie Tie-In) Page 2

  Another major critic of this poem, L. D. Benson,4 called it ‘a romance about romance’; that is to say, it is the very form, romance itself, that is being tested. It is being tested for its adequacy as a literary form: for its right to be taken seriously by a serious audience. The most miraculous achievement of the poem is that none of its elements is betrayed. Gawain may look foolish at the end, but the genre has survived. The qualities of romance, which Gawain possesses pre-eminently, are all shown to be worthwhile: courtesy, amorous language, religious fervour of course, generosity, love of fellow men, and – above all – fidelity to one’s given word. Burrow says that, if the poem had a single-word title to bring it in line with the other poems in the manuscript, it would be ‘truth’, in the sense of fidelity.5 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shows above all, in the words of Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, that ‘Truth is the highest thing that man can keep’.

  Between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, from Borges to Eco, from Montaillou to Heaney’s Beowulf, the Middle Ages have been much in vogue recently. Indeed, romance never lost its appeal after its revival in the nineteenth century. But the attractions of this poem are far beyond the popular, or beyond the romantic. Certainly it has noble and fearless knights, and beautiful, seductive ladies; it has magic and castles and threatening monsters (Ted Hughes’s ‘wodwos’), and marvels of all kinds. But its appeal has a sophistication and maturity well beyond such traditional romance trappings. The writer keeps us aware of this ambition to write something beyond the ordinary: at the beginning of the second of the poem’s four sections, before Gawain sets off to meet his fate, we are warned that the outcome may be more serious than he has (or we have) bargained for. ‘[A] year passes quickly and changes its moods; the end rarely matches the spirit it starts in’ (ll. 498–9). The poem presents us with classic romance travails and trials: seduction and physical threat. But – for the first time, it seems, in the annals of romance – it asks us to imagine what that is really like. You are tempted by your host’s wife, as in several earlier romances, and now in the most compromising and attractive and explicit terms. How do you really feel? And, more importantly, how do you behave? Gawain is worried about his courtesy, ‘lest crathayn he were’ (‘in case he’d seem boorish [towards the lady]’, l. 1773), but he is more anxious not to ‘betray that good lord whose castle it was’ (l. 1775), her husband and his generous host, just as the morally responsible hero of a serious nineteenth-century novel would be. He is expressing the same concerns as Macbeth’s duties of hospitality towards Duncan.

  There are other aspects to this narrative that have an obvious modern appeal too. The first is its nature as a ‘whodunnit’. It is as important reading Gawain not to know what is going to happen at the end as it is in a story by Poe or O. Henry or in a contemporary crime novel. The passage quoted in the previous paragraph makes this clear: it is indeed true of this poem that the state of things at the end is not the same as at the start. (As has also often been acknowledged, this makes it difficult to write an introduction without giving away some part of what the reader must not know until the end.) What is held back is not kept hidden only for suspense, however; it is integral to the serious meaning of this poem, which is finally serious to the point of life and death, despite its wonderful grace and lightness.

  Such scruples are new in the romance. For as long as Tristan and Iseult, or Lancelot and Guinevere, could persuade the ladies’ husbands that the evidence of adultery that they saw with their own eyes was false, neither they nor their stories were problematic. To be seen as guiltless was to be guiltless. But of course without those great adulterers, there would have been no supreme romances. The particular distinction of Gawain is to remain true to the spirit and narrative of such romance (it would be easy to dismiss that spirit as beneath serious or realistic consideration), while scrutinizing the form for its moral adequacy. If Gawain fails in the end, he fails in defence of the literary world he operates in.

  And it is that world that triumphs at the end. It is not presented with the irony – however affectionate – of Don Quixote, even if the narrative voice occasionally recalls Cervantes’s novel in its attitude to the hero. This is a seriously desirable and admirable world. The people in it are happy in the early Christmas scenes; it is a wonderful midwinter poem, celebrating the warmth of the indoors. The poem is of its age, but represents its age at its finest. And it succeeds by the finest poetic technique. The physical temptation of Gawain by the beautiful lady (the adjective is inadequate) is made real – we are returning to the minutiae after all – by the extraordinarily precise, tactile skills of the poetry. The mixture of erotic frisson and paralysed panic felt by Gawain when she suddenly sits on the edge of his bed is unsurpassed even in our age, which gives a lot of thought to such effects and fantasies. Sitting in her déshabillé, described in insinuating detail, she tells Gawain ‘Ye are welcum to my cors’ (l. 1237). Some rather bowdlerizing attempts have been made to interpret this as a defused metaphor, meaning ‘I welcome you’, and it has been noted that it occurs in the less narratively significant rhyming ‘wheel’ (the four-line brief quatrain that occurs at the end of each more substantial stanza). But the fact remains that what she says, sitting on the edge of his bed, literally means ‘You are welcome to my body’. Furthermore, this suggestive innuendo is totally in keeping with the lady’s attitude throughout her three visits to Gawain’s bedside, evoking states of mind with an exactness that seems astonishingly contemporary to us.

  It is important to emphasize that this psychological naturalness is entirely in keeping with much of the literature of the high Middle Ages, with the European courtly love writings by the Provençal troubadours and the German Minnesänger of the period around 1200. There has been some rather pointless critical argument about whether Chaucer or the writer of Gawain is more ‘English’. In some ways this poem is a particularly brilliant exercise in the principal genre of medieval literature, well beyond the compass of other writers of romance in England. But there seems something prophetic of the later English literary tradition in the pragmatic way that the poem refuses to leave unexamined the conventional donnée that a knight can be perfectly Christian and expert at love-talking at the same time. This practicality too is part of what the modern reader responds to in Gawain.

  ANALOGUES, SOURCES AND TRADITION

  The poem begins and ends with the idea of the ‘Brut’: that Britain, like Rome, was founded by Felix Brutus, a descendant of the Trojans after the fall of Troy. But this elegant framing has little to do with the substance of the story. Gawain is a new and complex romance that is made up of several familiar elements, such as the three stories I have mentioned already: the decapitation bargain, the exchange of winnings and the feminine temptation. Several parallels have been found for the decapitation contract, particularly the Irish Cuchulainn story Fled Bricrend,6 and the originally Welsh story of Caradoc, perhaps known to this poet (who is clearly well read, on various evidence) as the Livre de Caradoc, a section of what is called the First Continuation of Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, in which the attention shifts from Perceval to introduce a whole new Gawain romance.7 Parallels for the temptation scenes are also very strong, especially the French romance Le chevalier à l’epée (‘The Knight of the Sword’, before 1210),8 whose correspondences are stronger than has often been claimed. But in general it is not wise to tie down Gawain to particular influences, or to see it as a departure from a particular source, as has sometimes been done in relation to the Fled Bricrend. None of the story elements is very unexpected in the romance world; it is their intricate joining together by this poet which is so remarkable (the kind of literary conjoining that medieval commentators called ‘antancion’ or ‘conjunctura’). Like Chaucer and Shakespeare, this medieval romance writer did not make up stories or adapt existing single narratives in any simple way.

  Apart from the poem’s clear relations in the world of romance, one other set of cultural relations has been suggested for Gawa
in, in a series of interpretations that were collectively dismissed by C. S. Lewis and others as ‘the anthropological approach’. An extreme version of this was proposed by John Spiers,9 who saw the poem’s more profound meaning to lie in its links with the natural world’s yearly cycle, connected with such seasonal things as mummers’ plays, in which allegorical figures acted out the events associated with the changing seasons. Interpretations along these lines were founded in such canonical works as Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which suggested that the deeper meanings of literary works with links to a folk tradition, as romances have, are to be sought at a subliminal, sub-textual level. The Green Knight as a midwinter vegetation figure, it is suggested, somehow links with Gawain as a sun god (Gawain did have some such associations with an earlier avatar, the Welsh semi-divinity Gwalchmei),10 and the story in the poem connects with the killing of the old year and the revival of the new. Some of the most appealing things in the poem link to the seasons and the life principle: in the great passage describing the stages of the year when Gawain is setting off on his quest, the autumn warns the grain to harden before the trials of winter; at the end, Gawain’s attachment to his life wins him the Green Knight’s approval. But such links, suggestive though they are, have little to do with the concerns or appeal of the poem as it stands, even if such vestiges feed an important vein of life in the poem. Gawain is as independent of those distant sources as of its more proximate ones. Although operating with paralleled story elements, and keeping faithful to the spirit of the romance world, it stands outside its traditions as a work of imaginative originality that speaks to all ages.

  NOTES

  1. R. W. V. Elliott, The ‘Gawain’ Country (Leeds, 1984), and especially ‘Landscape and Geography’ in the most valuable collection of essays on this poem and the others in the manuscript A Companion to the ‘Gawain’-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 103–17.

  2. For a good summary of modern versions, see Barry Windeatt and David J. Williams in Brewer and Gibson, Companion.

  3. J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry (London, 1971).

  4. L. D. Benson, Art and Tradition in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (New Brunswick, 1965).

  5. J. A. Burrow, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London, 1965), p. 25.

  6. G. Henderson (ed. and trans.), Fled Bricrend: Bricriu’s Feast (London, 1899).

  7. For an excellent detailed account and translated texts of some important sources and analogues of Gawain, see L. E. Brewer, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’: Sources and Analogues, Arthurian Studies 27, 2nd edn (Woodbridge, 1992), and the same writer’s chapter ‘The Sources of Sir Gawain’ in Brewer and Gibson, Companion, pp. 243–55. The First Continuation of Perceval was edited by W. Roach (Philadelphia, 1949); see p. xiii for parallels with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

  8. L. E. Brewer, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’: Sources and Analogues, pp. 109ff.

  9. John Spiers, Medieval English Poetry, The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (London, 1952), pp. 215ff.

  10. Described by R. S. Loomis in Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (New York, 1949), pp. 146–8.

  Further Reading

  The four poems in the manuscript (British Library MS. Cotton Nero A.x) were reproduced in facsimile for the Early English Text Society with an introduction by I. Gollancz (Oxford, 1923). To read the poem in the original without full-scale study of its rich and eccentric Middle English poetic language, there are two possible short cuts. First, there are a number of parallel-text versions, of which the most useful is W. R. J. Barron’s prose translation, facing a text based on the EETS facsimile of the manuscript (Manchester, 1974). A second relatively painless way of reading the original is in the Everyman edition, first edited by A. C. Cawley (1962), and revised by J. J. Anderson, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience (London, 1996), which glosses obscure words to the side of the text and translates difficult lines at the foot of the page. The standard scholarly edition is Norman Davis’s 1967 second edition of J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon’s 1925 Oxford edition. Davis’s good glossary and notes can be supplemented by those in Theodore Silverstein’s edition (Chicago, 1984). The best overall critical study of the poem remains J. A. Burrow’s A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London, 1965). The most valuable handbook for all contextual matters is Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (eds.), A Companion to the ‘Gawain’-Poet (Cambridge, 1997). A useful compendium of analogical material and sources is L. E. Brewer (ed.), ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’: Sources and Analogues, 2nd edn (Woodbridge, 1992). Readers who are interested in the general development of any Arthurian text from Celtic origins onwards should turn to R. S. Loomis’s magisterial Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (Oxford, 1959). A detailed and exhaustive study of the poem’s poetic language is Marie Borroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study (New Haven, 1962). Among previous translations, Tolkien’s and Borroff’s both attempt to reflect the stylistic structure of the original in their renderings.

  A Note on the Translation

  All great poetry is untranslatable, and this is perhaps particularly true of writing like the ‘Gawain’-poet’s, which is formally so highly wrought. As illustrated by the passage of the original included as the Appendix here, the long lines of the original are principally characterized by a ringing consonantal alliteration. As most previous translators have agreed, it is not possible to sustain this alliterative pattern – with three or more alliterating consonants in every line – without losing the precise meaning in modern English and without sacrificing any claim to idiomatic naturalness. A highly ‘poetic’ translation can opt to do this: the most famously successful instance is Ezra Pound’s version of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer. But in my translation I am aiming at plain style modern verse, comparable, say, to Thomas Kinsella’s style in representing the medieval Irish of The Táin (from a literary tradition with which Gawain has things in common).

  To explain why this seems to me the best strategy, we may recall the poetic tradition that Gawain belongs to. It is one of the principal texts of the ‘Alliterative Revival’, a movement in late Middle English which either revived, or adopted as a stylistic antiquarianism, the formal practices of Old English verse, rather than the European system of rhyming syllabic lines favoured by Chaucer and his successors. This was based on rhythmic patterns rather than the foot- and syllable-counting of iambic pentameter. It is sometimes claimed that it is a more natural form in English than the iambic pattern which has dominated English verse since Shakespeare.

  The rhythmic alliterative line was divided into two halves, each containing two (or in the first half-line occasionally three) main stresses. In Old English the alliteration followed an invariable pattern across the line, which can be written aa/ax. That is to say, the significant alliteration occurs on the initial syllables in the first three stresses of the line and never in the fourth. To put it another way: the third stress (that is, the first stress of the second half-line) always alliterates with one or both of the stresses in the first half-line, but never with the fourth stress. Lines 3 and 4 of Gawain follow this pattern:

  Þe tulk þat pe trammes of tresoun þer wro3t

  wat3 tried for his tricherie, Þe trewest on erthe

  (In a literal prose translation: ‘The man who performed the machinations of treason there / Was tried for (or ‘known for’) his treachery, the most certain in the world’.) Many modern translations have attempted to reproduce some parts of this system – in some cases (such as Borroff’s version in 1967) with impressive success. But it is impossible to reproduce these formalities in anything like normal modern English, without introducing anachronisms of vocabulary or word order. Borroff’s version of the two lines I have quoted is:

  The knight that had knotted the nets of deceit

  Was impeached for his perfid
y, proven most true,

  correctly alliterating on the first three main stresses and not the fourth. In my version I have abandoned alliteration altogether, while keeping firmly to what seems to me to be the original stress-pattern as it survives into modern English:

  the man who’d betrayed it was brought to trial,

  most certainly guilty of terrible crimes.

  My aim has been to keep strictly to the rhythm of the original, while replacing the phonetic formalities (alliteration most importantly) with the normal formalities of modern English. In practice this has meant that I have often (as here) moved towards the ten- or eleven-syllable line of post-Shakespearean blank verse, even if this has not been a conscious intention.

  There is a further major formal matter to be addressed by the translator of Gawain. A glance at the pages of even a translated version like this will show how the long-lined stanzas of unequal length in the poem end with a device which has been called the ‘bob and wheel’, a short phrase of two words containing one stress, the bob, followed by a four-line rhyming quatrain made up of three-stressed lines (rhyming iambic trimeters). Most previous translators have chosen, for good reasons, to accentuate the extreme formal departure from the main stanzas in these sections by keeping at least the half-rhyme in the second and fourth lines of these ‘wheel’ quatrains. I have chosen not to: it seems to me no less essential to maintain the modern plain style in these shorter sections as in the main stanzas. The crucial change of pace they effect to break up the narrative is evident from a glance at their shape on the page, making it unnecessary to treat their lexical or prosodic make-up differently from the rest.