New Year's and The Green Knight

Hello!

Happy holidays. Below is Hannah's write-up for this Tuesday's event that nicely aligns with the season. See you there!

It is a truth commonly acknowledged that this time of year can be kind of tough. It can be hard to match expectations, yours or someone else’s, for happiness and peace when the wider modern world doesn’t actually stop for either grief or celebration. I think it is especially true to us who are born to and keep choosing this modern Western culture of constant light and sound pollution, separated physically and spiritually from the quiet dark of winter. For me, the story that best captures this unsettling feeling of separation, of endless cycling change and the cold dark before a return is Sir Gawain & the Green Knight.

This is a New Year’s story; a chivalric romance that is set during the season of Yule. The origins of Yule are foggy and differ largely by region, and is usually understood to be a pagan precursor syncretised into Norman Christianity. That said, by the time the Gawain poet was recording the story of the Green Knight in the 14th century, widespread pagan religious practice had largely been wiped out of England by separatist Christian kings and was left mostly in small pockets of colonial resistance in Wales and of course, in the stories people told each other.

You can make a long list of binary themes to be found in the poem:
Nature/Civilization, Paganism/Christianity, Honor/Sin, Passion/Chivalry, Hunter/Hunted, Masculinity/Femininity, Childhood/Maturity. The plot itself is about test after test being put before Gawain, known in this Irish/Welsh context of Arthurian legend as the very best of Arthur’s knights, and his various triumphs and failures within the context of a set of games. He is not, in this story, infallible and honorable in all his acts. He chooses survival over honor, self-interest over chivalry. Through a deeply Christian lens, this is usually interpreted as a reminder of the sin that exists in all of humanity.

If we take into consideration more of the context of the creation of the poem, the interpretation becomes more expansive. The author, known as the Gawain Poet, is unidentified and hard to separate from a potential transcriptionist, if there is even a separation to be had. The dialect of the original manuscript however, does place the author/transcriptionist near the border of England and Wales. Meaning that this was written in a colonized region, in the age of the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt. Meaning that the original audience for the tale would have been one absolutely hammered by traumatic cultural change. Looking back at that list of themes, if you move past the repeating dualities and symbiotic relationships, what you see is change - the cycling of existence. It’s good for a New Year’s tale.

Some other things about it I think are cool about this ancient poem:

Structure/numerology:
This poem is the first recorded use of the word ‘pentangle’ (Lines 640 - 665). The pentangle is Gawain shield and the most extensively described symbol in the whole poem because it is meant to be a direct representation of Gawain’s faith in Christianity. The pentangle is called the Endless Knot and connects the five Joys of Mary and the Five Wounds of Christ to Gawain’s faith via his five senses, five strong fingers, and the five virtues he most embodies. The number five is so significant in medieval numerology that the Gawain Poet wrapped it into the structure of the poem itself, which is 110 stanzas, two sets of 55. In Christian numerology 11 is often associated with transgression, making each set of five elevens (55 stanzas) representative of the tension between transgression and incorruptability, suggesting that Gawain is faultless in his faults.

There are other reprises and patterns of repeating numbers throughout Gawain’s adventures, but particularly when he arrives at the castle in the final days before the new year and the confrontation with the Green Knight. The patterns of three hunts, three gifts, three kisses, three swings of the axe stand in contrast to the patterns of two: two beheadings, two castles, two women.

The Green Knight
A singular character in the zeitgeist, syncretised out of Green Man myths and the ideal Arthurian knight. The Green Knight is intended to be terrifying in action and function, but is so deeply chivalrous, kind, and welcoming to Gawain, even in his moment(s) of failure and cowardice that he makes for a very confusing symbolic character. The Green Knight is assurance that the cycle will keep moving and one will have more chances to redeem oneself, even through death and into life again.

The Beheading Game
Beheading was a literary trope of the day about symbolic maturation, rooted in Irish mythology like much of the Gawain character during the era of chivalric romance. Gawain technically loses the game he accepted the challenge for. The terms were: Any man who steps forward and delivers the Green Knight a blow, will stand and receive that same blow one year from today in the Green Chapel. Gawain, youngest of the knights, but most pure of heart, paragon of virtue and famous as a defender of maiden, is the one who steps forward and asks Arthur for the honor. When the blow finally comes a year and a day later, Gawain cheats to survive using an advantage gained from cheating at the game he agrees to at the castle.

Gawain’s maturation from that point, travels a road through the loss of his honor and an emergence on the other side that doesn’t undo him, but instead binds him closer to Arthur and the other knights of the round table. Forgiven and even memorialized by the addition of green sashes to their tunics to remind them all to be honest. This self-improvement is in turn, like most virtue in Arthurian legend, is passed along to all of Camelot, reflecting back on king and kingdom.

How ancient it actually is
The story was discovered on manuscript Cotton Nero A X/2 called the Pearl Manuscript, which is estimated to have been written in the late 14th or early 15th century. It is one of the most famous illuminated middle-english romance manuscripts. Of the 12 illustrations in the manuscript, two are dedicated to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. One is a depiction of the Knight and the other is of Lady Bertilak attempting to seduce Gawain, which are the two interlinked games that shape Gawain’s failure.

Outside links, because I process things interdisciplinarily:

Playlist:
https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/49213681

Film adaptations -
The first two are, kinda tragically, by the same director.
[https://tubitv.com/movies/100002778/sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed (1973)](https://tubitv.com/movies/100002778/sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed (1973))

[https://tubitv.com/movies/100002778/sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed (1984)](https://tubitv.com/movies/100002778/sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed (1984))

https://tubitv.com/movies/100002689/the-green-knight?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed (2021)