Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

Was never withinne walle.

As if to show the range and the difference of style in English romance, there is another story written like Sir Libeaus in the reign of Edward III, taken from the same Arthurian legend and beginning in the same way, which has scarcely anything in common with it except the general resemblance in the plot. This is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most original works in medieval romance. It is written in alliterative blank verse, divided into irregular periods which have rhyming tailpieces at the end of them—

As hit is stad and stoken

In story stif and stronge

With leal letters loken

In land so has been longe.

While the story of Sir Libeaus is found in different languages—French, Italian, German—there is no other extant older version of Gawain and the Green Knight. But the separate incidents are found elsewhere, and the scene to begin with is the usual one: Arthur at his court, Arthur keeping high festival and waiting for ‘some main marvel’. The adventure comes when it is wanted; the Green Knight on his green horse rides into the king’s hall—half-ogre, by the look of him, to challenge the Round Table. What he offers is a ‘jeopardy’, a hazard, a wager. ‘Will any gentleman cut off my head’, says he, ‘on condition that I may have a fair blow at him, and no favour, in a twelvemonth’s time? Or if you would rather have it so, let me have the first stroke, and I promise to offer my neck in turn, when a year has gone’. This is the beheading game which is spoken of in other stories (one of them an old Irish comic romance) but which seems to have been new at that time to the knights of King Arthur. It is rightly considered dangerous; and so it proved when Sir Gawain had accepted the jeopardy. For after Gawain had cut off the stranger’s head, the Green Knight picked it up by the hair, and held it up, and it spoke and summoned Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year’s space, and bide the return blow.

This is more surprising than anything in Sir Bevis or Sir Guy. Not much is done by the writer to explain it; at the same time nothing is left vague. The author might almost have been a modern novelist with a contempt for romance, trying, by way of experiment, to work out a ‘supernatural’ plot with the full strength of his reason; merely accepting the fabulous story, and trying how it will go with accessories from real life, and with modern manners and conversation. There is none of the minstrel’s cant in this work, none of the cheap sensations, the hackneyed wonders such as are ridiculed in Sir Thopas. Only, the incident on which the whole story turns, the device of the beheading game, is a piece of traditional romance. It is not found in every language, but it is fairly well known. It is not as common as the lady turned into a serpent, or the man into a werewolf, but still it is not invented, it is borrowed by the English poet, and borrowed for a work which always, even in the beheading scenes, is founded on reality.

It is probable that the author of Sir Gawain is also the author of three other poems (not romances) which are found along with it in the same manuscript—the Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. He is a writer with a gift for teaching, of a peculiar sort. He is not an original philosopher, and his reading appears to have been the usual sort of thing among fairly educated men. He does not try to get away from the regular authorities, and he is not afraid of commonplaces. But he has great force of will, and a strong sense of the difficulties of life; also high spirits and great keenness. His memory is well supplied from all that he has gone through. The three sporting episodes in Sir Gawain, the deer-hunt (in Christmas week, killing the hinds), the boar-hunt and the fox-hunt, are not only beyond question as to their scientific truth; the details are remembered without study because the author has lived in them, and thus, minute as they are, they are not wearisome. They do not come from a careful notebook; they are not like the descriptions of rooms and furniture in painstaking novels. The landscapes and the weather of Sir Gawain are put in with the same freedom. The author has a talent especially for winter scenes. ‘Grim Nature’s visage hoar’ had plainly impressed his mind, and not in a repulsive way. The winter ‘mist hackles’ (copes of mist) on the hills, the icicles on the stones, the swollen streams, all come into his work—a relief from the too ready illustrations of spring and summer which are scattered about in medieval stories.

The meaning of the story is in the character of Gawain. Like some other romances, this is a chivalrous Pilgrim’s Progress. Gawain, so much vilified by authors who should have known better, is for this poet, as he is for Chaucer, the perfection of courtesy. He is also the servant of Our Lady, and bears her picture on his shield, along with the pentangle which is the emblem of her Five Joys, as well as the Five Wounds of Christ. The poem is the ordeal of Gawain; Gawain is tried in courage and loyalty by his compact with the Green Knight; he is tried in loyalty and temperance when he is wooed by the wanton conversation of the lady in the castle. The author’s choice of a plot is justified, because what he wants is an ordeal of courage, and that is afforded by the Green Knight’s ‘jeopardy’.