Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, beginnings, men made of earth, bobbing and wheeling

the first two hundred lines and all the strange things they set us up for

Thank you so much to my paid subscribers who make everything I do here possible, particularly my big translation projects like this one. If you are interested in reading more of my work or supporting me, you can read an extra essay per week as a paid subscriber for £4 per month. If you would like to support me but aren’t able to become a regular subscriber, I also have a Ko-Fi tip jar here.

When I asked substack if anyone would like me to start work on a part by part translation and commentary of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it got more ‘yes’ and more ‘omg yes’ and more ‘I have Dev Patel’s face on a t shirt’ than any other translation I’ve asked about on here. That might tell us something about the algorithm but I also think it tells us something about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Knight himself, Gawain himself, and the hold it has on people. I’ve spoken to a lot of avowed non-medievalists who say they hate the whole era of literature apart from this text. I’ve met people with completely opposite takes on what the poem means who love it equally. It’s a poem that grabs people and doesn’t let go, and it’s a poem that reaches far outside medieval studies to find and take you.

I met Gawain during my undergraduate degree then again, and more properly, during my masters. My MA dissertation was called ‘Playing games with the earth: Space, time and horror in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Green Knight (2021). My aim was to use a medievalist-ecocritical methodology to understand how soil, specifically just soil, works to create a horrific sense of space and time in the medieval text and the A24 film.

I don’t intend to rehash my whole dissertation here - maybe four people would enjoy that - but I think that focus on soil will come through intensely and squelchily in my translation. I can’t imagine a way to tell this story that isn’t a story about soil. That’s all I see when I read it anymore, and I see more and more of it each time.

People ask me a lot why I chose soil. If you’ve been reading any of my PhD preparation diaries series (and I hope you have, there’ll be a test later), you’ll know my PhD is going to be on medievalist soil and horror in a larger pile of texts. I intend to ask such urgent and fundable questions as, ‘What do The Wicker Man and Piers Plowman have to say to each other on the topic of otherworldly famine?’. I got to soil partly through loving nature, loving ecological close reading and ecocriticism, but always being frustrated when people treated nature as one single thing. People analyse ‘nature’ a lot but they don’t get into what exactly nature is, how its different parts work differently and eat each other. I don’t see how any book less than a thousand pages long could talk about nature in Gawain. You can do trees, the air, the wind, foxes, birds, shrubs - sure. But I don’t have it in me to do all of nature at this time. So I’m doing soil.

Starting this translation, I suppose I should say what I think this poem is about. I’m aware people will disagree with me here, but also, no one’s ever agreed with anyone else on what this poem is about so I really can’t please everyone. I see Gawain as a series of dreamy and horrific games - well, half-horrific. They’re horrifying if you think everything you see is real. It might be a death game or a hilarious Christmas masque. I think the gamemaster is the soil, the place from which everything powerful in this story emanates.

The Green Knight himself is in some ways powerful and in some ways a puppet controlled by others. Different versions of retellings of this story have had him be controlled by Morgan le Fay or by Gawain’s mother, or a handful of other people. I see him as a mouthpiece for the soil itself, the place everything green grows from, the place everything returns to when it rots. I see the soil as a place that holds, changes, births, respools and restarts time. It’s a temporal game played in between two Christmases and new years. The year during which the plot takes place is an odd, outside time, set apart, lost year.

An academic book chapter I’ve been really influenced by is Christopher Flavin’s Fear of the World in The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, which argues that both Gawain and Sir Orfeo are, themselves, medieval examples of folk horror. If both texts gesture backwards at an even-earlier medieval period or a pre-medieval period, can they not also be folk horror? It’s fascinating to me that Gawain is an alliterative revival poem - a Middle English poem written with the shape and sound of an Old English poem. It makes the whole thing into an odd cultural layer cake, because this fourteenth-century poem is obsessed with the earlier past, the existing heritage of Arthurian stories and earlier medieval English poetic forms. I think finding the past in the earth is what we’re doing here.

My plan for this translation project is to post roughly 200 lines of text at a time, which will mean we end up with about ten (if I go a bit longer on some) installments for this 2,530 line poem. I’ll be translating in my trademark gonzo, liberal free verse style, and I will absolutely be led by what I think sounds good over what’s accurate. I’m working quickly around a full time job and a lot of other research commitments so, like, don’t quote me. I’ll be using Casey Finch’s text and translation from the University of California Press and I’ll also be checking in with J.R.R. Tolkien and Simon Armitage from time to time. If you’d like to correct me, rewrite parts or tell me where I’ve done a silly goof, please do, but try not to make me cry.

I’m keeping the bob and wheel structure, because that’s easy to do, and I’m not doing the alliteration, because that’s hard to do. There’s definitely something lost when you don’t bother with the alliteration, and my translation is clearly, definitely, substantially worse than all the ones I’ve listed above. I’d love to do a proper alliterative one one day but that would take a hundred times as many hours as this, and I’m already open-mouthed at how long this is goign to take. So if you’d like to read an alliterative translation, please either read Tolkien or give me a generous book deal.

So with all that being said, let’s get muddy.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

After the siege on Troy ended,
flames reduced the city to brand and ash,
and those that wrought the treason
were tried for their trickery, truest on the earth.
So noble Aeneas and his high nobles
went to distant lands and conquered them,
and became lords in the western isles.
Rich Romulus went to Rome,
proudly watched the city built from nothing,
gave the new place his name, as it is known now.
Ticius build homes in Tuscany,
Langabard in Lombardy,
and far away over the French sea,
Brutus found the many banks of Britain and built his realm,
so beloved,
where strangeness, war and mourning
all live in the land.
There has been happiness and sadness
tossed in the wind and rain here.

I think a lot of readers are surprised by the fact this Middle English arthurian poem chooses to start with Troy and the ‘creation myth’ of Brutus founding Britain. I think it causes a lot of students to worry they bought the wrong book. What I love about this opening, random as it may seem, is how immediately we are situated in land being created, destroyed and transformed. This whole stanza is about the changes that are wrought on land over large timescales and the very first image of the poem is city land becoming ash, buildings reduced to dust like bodies rotting.

And when Britain had been so richly put together,
it birthed brave men, bold in battle,
and many times they have had to fight.
And more strange wonders have been seen here
than on any other land I know, not since the old days.
But out of all Britain’s many kings,
the greatest was Arthur, in the stories I know.
So I will tell a story of this land in those times,
and everyone who hears it agrees it is strange,
one of the wildest wonders Arthur ever saw.
Listen just a little to this story,
and I’ll tell the version I heard in town
to you,
just as it was made,
bold and strong,
bound up in letters,
told before on this land.

Arthur stayed in Camelot at Christmastime,
with his many lords, nobles, the best of the best
and they sat around the Round Table.
They celebrated richly, with humour.
Many knights came there to play
at jousting, the many gentle knights.
They came there to sing carols,
and the feast held sway fifteen full days,
as joyful as anyone could imagine.
It was glorious to hear them so happy,
music every day and dancing every night.
So happiness was there in all the halls and chambers,
with the lords and ladies and those they loved,
experiencing all the joys of this world,
the knights the most courteous of that age,
and the greatest ladies that ever enjoyed life,
and the most renowned king who ever had a court,
all the folk fair in their youth
in this age,
noble under Heaven,
the king blessed,
You cannot find now
a court so famous.

When the new year had just barely arrived,
they sat down to a feast twice as large.
When the king and all his knights came to the hall
the chapel in the choir stopped their singing,
and the clerics and the laymen cried out.
They called “Noel!”, they called it again and again,
and the nobles gave out presents for the new year,
calling ‘gifts!’ as they were passed around.
There was competition for the best gifts
and the ladies laughed when they lost the game,
and the winners were not woeful either.
They laughed and laughed till the meat was served.
They washed and went clean to their seats,
the highest lords were seated first, as is always done.
Guinevere was laughing in the centre of the crowd
at the high table on the dais, decorated so beautifully,
and up in the rafters above her were draped
tapestries from Tolouse and Tharsia,
they were bound up with the finest gems
that could be found on earth for any price,
anywhere.
And the most beautiful of them
was a rare grey-eyed jewel,
You could not find a fairer one
that I have ever heard.

I am so fascinated by this line, ‘ladies laȝed ful loude þoȝ þay lost haden’. The idea of laughing even when you lose seems like something of a guide to how to read the entire poem. Even when you lose, and even if you lose something valuable, you must remember it’s a game and let it resolve into laughter. The constant repeated references to Christmas and New Year and the ways in which they carve out their own kind of time take us into something of a liminal place here, and we start the story off with the court already in a topsy turvy world.

I also love the idea of the busy, warm, crowded, candlelit hall bound up in dark tapestries and precious stones. I specifically love it being specified that the precious stones are hung up on the ceiling. I had a conversation with a friend (see I’m citing you) where she said the precious stones were the stars, not jewels in the tapestries. I don’t think I agree, but even if they are then we’re still using this jewel imagery to make the warm, dark, echoing space feel subterranean. It makes me feel like we’re in some kind of gaudy ant colony under the ground. In the final section of the stanza (the ‘bob’ in this ‘bob and wheel’ verse, if we’re being technical) it is unclear whether we are talking about Guinevere or one of the jewels, so already we are unsure what is a person and what is a part of the ground.

But Arthur would not eat until all were served.
He was joyful and wild, boyish perhaps,
and he loved his vibrant life. He cared less
for sitting or lounging about too long.
His blood was too young and he was wild-brained.
So the king kept to a rule he had set,
where on a high holiday he would not eat a bite
until he had heard a story, something new and well told,
something strange, wondrous, something he’d believe.
He wanted to hear of nobility, taking up arms, adventures,
a true knight in danger, jousting, jeopardy,
betting a life for a life, the knight and the challenger
allowing fate to decide who would live.
This was what King Arthur asked his court for
when he had his fair company together
in his hall.
So he stood full and proud,
strong and tall,
young in a new year,
enjoying everyone.

Here King Arthur asks for a Christmas story of lives bet against each other and fate deciding which of a knight or a challenger should win the day. He asks, pretty much, for what is about to happen to Gawain in front of him. So we might wonder how far any of the rest of the story ‘happens’ - is the rest of it just the story Arthur hears at Christmas? Does the world bend its rules to create the Christmas story he requested? Is the Green Knight listening from outside?

So the king stood strong in the centre of the hall,
speaking before the high table, jokes and trifles.
Gawain was sat at Guinevere’s side
and Agravaine a la Dure Main on the other side,
two noble knights, the king’s two nephews.
Bishop Baldwin had an excellent seat,
and Urien’s son Ywain, eating beside him.
They dined together on the high table.
The first course was served with trumpets sounding,
with bright banners hanging from them.
There were drums and pipes played well,
singing wild and sweet, and everyone
who heard them felt their hearts rise.
Then the feast was brought, in the finest way,
so many dishes of fresh meats
that it was hard to find a place to lay them.
So every guest was served the finest things
at the tables.
There was enough
for everyone,
twelve dishes for two people,
good beer and bright wine.

I will say nothing else about the dinner,
because you know now just how good it was.
But then a new noise was heard, suddenly near,
just as the king was starting to eat.
The music ended. It was silent a few moments,
as the first course was served to the rest of the guests,
when a new man entered the hall.
He was the tallest man ever seen on the earth,
wondrously muscled from his neck to his waist,
every part of him tall and strong.
You might think he was a half-giant, striding over earth,
but probably not, probably he was a man,
the largest that could sit assured on horseback,
wide across the shoulders but small at the waist,
all formed well, handsome, pure
and clean.
But there was something strange,
in his appearance,
fairy-like and fair,
and entirely, entirely green.

When I was writing my masters dissertation I had a long section in the first draft about how it’s uncanny and ecologically odd that the Green Knight is so damn hot. It’s impossible to translate this stanza without it sounding just very very thirsty. The Tolkien translation gives one line as, ‘and his loins and his limbs so long and so huge’. I do think there’s a serious point in there as well, though. The Green Knight arrives and pulls your eye to him so completely in every possible way. He’s clearly, obviously attractive, but he’s also a strange earth-plant thing. Many people interpret him as being either literally or figuratively a tree. He’s also green. So what does it do to our understanding of the order of things that the frightening green earth-tree man is so hot? The poet really buries the lead on his greenness, with a long stanza on his proportions and hotness only resolving into green at the end after we’ve covered his nipped in little waist and broad shoulders.

His clothes and everything that covered him were green,
his long coat cut close to his figure,
and his heavy robe above it, edged in fur
the finest that could be found on earth,
and his hood too, that covered his hair and shoulders,
his trousers as well, all the same green,
clinging to his calves. His golden spurs
sat brightly and richly on the silk.
But he rode quite shoeless.
Everything glowed and shimmered in green,
the bars on his belt and the shining stones,
arrayed across his clothes, gleaming bright.
On his saddle, on the worked silk,
were intricate designs, too many to describe,
of birds and butterflies, all bright in green and gold.
The pendants of his horse’s armour, worn proudly,
the boss and all the bridle, was enamelled in bright metal,
and the stirrups on which he stood were the same,
and his saddlebows, every part,
shimmered and gleamed with green stone.
The tall proud horse was like the rest,
I say so.
A green horse, great and wild,
you would not stand against him,
but obedient to his master,
proud warriors both.

I am obsessed with the way this verse makes the Green Knight seem not just like a green and growing thing, a tree or a plant in some interpretations, but how clearly he seems to be in continual conversation with the earth. I love how deliberately his shoelessness is pointed out. I had to argue with a professor that he really is shoeless here, because there are a couple of possible translations here, but Tolkien agrees with me so there. I’m fascinated by it being so important to the poet that we imagine the Green Knight walking shoeless on the earth, touching the ground. When I scribbled all over this verse during the first of my grad school rereads, I wrote ‘He is a landscape’ in bright pink pen. I think we see the landscapy-ness of the Green Knight very clearly here - he was a man (a hot man) in the last stanza, but now he’s a thing made of materials, gems, bright metal and different textures. He’s turned into a (hot) landscape painting.

So the strange man was all, all over, green.
His hair fell to his shoulders the same colour,
his beard a wild hedge, down to his chest,
and they faded together, a strange tangle,
down to his elbows so his upper arms were hidden
like a king’s cloak conceals his neck.
The horse’s hair, too, was curled and combed
and entwined with curious knots,
gold thread on the handsome green,
tail and top-lock twisted in bright thread,
and bound with a band of brilliant green,
studded with stones, wondrous in the light,
knotted tight to the harness with leather,
hung with burnished gold bells, ringing out.
Such a form upon the earth, such a horse as this,
such a strange sight had not been seen in that hall.
in that time.
His look was like lightning,
and everyone who saw him said
no one could be strong enough
to stand against him.

This is probably a reach, and I have not written this anywhere academic, but I am so fascinated by the description here of the Green Knight as a body that is hidden by foliage. It’s hard not to think of him as a soily landscape form when he’s the strong, broad surface from which plants grow, hidden under the foliage. I know I have readers who know this text very well and raise their eyebrows when I say it’s all about soil but surely, surely, surely, this is the Green Knight being readable as a land-form.