Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

the axe descends Gawain shrinks, and the Knight checks the blow and pauses to reprove him. The second stroke is a feint, but at the third he lets the axe come down fair. Gawain, however, suffers no hurt except a little cut on his neck; having kept his bargain he is preparing to defend himself when the Green Knight changes his note and speaks to him friendly words. The first two strokes (he tells him) were intended only as feints because Gawain had kept troth in the matter of his winnings on the first two days; at the third stroke he had wounded him because on the third day he had a little failed in lealty by keeping back the girdle. Gawain, who now sees that the Green Knight and his host are one, is overwhelmed with shame. The Knight, however, comforts him and tells him that the wooing at the castle was a temptation wrought by himself to test him, and that it has proved him the most faultless knight on earth. He gives him the girdle as a present and tells him, further, that the whole adventure from beginning to end was the wicked work of the enchantress, Morgan la Fay, who hates Guinevere and the Round Table. So Gawain rides again to Camelot and is welcomed by Arthur and his knights. (Fit IV.)

It is an excellent story, quite outside the regular Arthurian cycle, and the reader will naturally ask where it has come from. The two incidents of which it is composed, the Beheading and the Wooing, are nowhere else found in combination, but there are extant in various languages romances in which one or the other is described separately; romances of which Gawain is the hero. The temptation theme, indeed, is a fairly common one and need not be further discussed. The beheading theme, with differences, is found in at least two Gawain romances, one French, “La Mule sans Frein,” the other German, Diu Krone. The oldest example of it, however, is in the Irish romance “Fled Bricrend” (“Bricriu’s Feast”), belonging to the Cuchulinn cycle. In this, three heroes at Conchobar’s court dispute about the chief place at the feast; Conchobar, refusing to decide the issue himself, sends them to submit their claims to a giant, Gath. After exacting from them a promise to undergo any form of trial which he may appoint, Uath prescribes a beheading test which consists of a blow by each of them at himself and a blow by him at each in return. Cuchulinn alone keeps to his agreement; after beheading the giant and submitting to nothing more than three feints in return, he is awarded the hero’s portion. Here there are obvious affinities with the story of the Green Knight: in both the proposer of the test is a giant, in both there are three blows at the hero, and in both the beheading is a test of courage. In folklore, and even in some of the romances, beheading is merely a means of disenchantment, not a test of courage. We must not, however, press such correspondences as have been mentioned too far. We are not dealing with folklore. Folklore is rigidly conservative, and in it incidents have a fixed, unalterable shape. When story has once emerged out of the stage of folklore into that of romance the conditions are different; the romancers select, combine, and transfer quite freely. In Diu Krone the challenger is a shape-shifter, as in Sir Gawain; but it does not follow that one borrowed from the other, for in medieval romance almost any stranger may prove to be a shape-shifter. The author of Sir Gawain would assuredly not be dependent on a particular romance for a knowledge of shape-shifters, or green men (green being the fairy colour), or enchantresses, or magic laces, or faery chapels. It is, indeed, quite likely that the poet found one, or both, of the two main incidents in French romances and borrowed them in the same way that Shakespeare borrowed many of his plots. But the quality of the poem itself is good evidence that he had sufficient genius to use his materials with a poet’s imagination.1

It is very rarely that we find such artistic unity in a medieval romance as in Sir Gawain, and only consummate art could have achieved it. The two incidents, the Beheading and the Wooing, are no longer disconnected themes; they are vitally linked together. The test of Gawain’s courage and the test of his chastity are revealed as one and the same; the same man “wrought them both,” under the spell of the same malicious enchantress. In medieval theory only virtue can defeat enchantment; and had not Gawain been proof against the lady’s wiles which tempted his chastity, the beheading which was to test his courage must (so it appears in the event) have been fatal to him.

The writer was a true poet. Out of the raw material of folklore and the elements of crude magic he has conceived a human story with human motives, without sacrificing anything of the real magic which is the atmosphere in which his story lives. Only sympathy and imagination and a true humanity could have portrayed characters so attractive in their different ways as Gawain, the Green Knight (in both his guises), and the squire. His descriptive power is equal to his conception; he writes with his eye on the object; his phrases are alive and apt, and there is hardly any dead wood. Consequently all his pictures, whether of action or man’s works or wild nature, are as clear and sharp as the miniatures of the period. It is not without reason that the poem has been described by a great scholar and a great lover of letters2 as “the jewel of medieval English literature.”

The name of the author is unknown. He evidently knew the forest of