Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: trees and roots, tension and release, promises, laughter

translation and commentary on the game getting started

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This is part 3 of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translation and commentary series. The first two parts contain disclaimers and rationale for my translation style (and all its many failings) and links to the texts I’ve used while writing this. I won’t repeat it all here because I doubt anyone wants to read the same blurb slightly reworded this many times, but please do check out the first two parts.

• Part one

• Part two

This part of the poem is the first time we get to experience real horror. I believe, deep down to my bones, that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a horror movie exactly as much as it’s a whimsical Christmas game. I think its horrific nature makes it a better Christmas game and its Christmas game status makes it a better horror movie. This third section is where the long-drawn-out, playful, somewhat kinky negotiations about the rules of the game have been decided, repeated and repeated again, and we start to play. It’s the first time we see real violence happen ‘on screen’. Game pieces are starting to move on the board.

This is a fantastic section of the poem to think about in terms of ecology and sensuality. It’s probably obvious, from the previous two parts, from the title of the poem, and from anything you might know about it, that Gawain lends himself well to ‘green reading’. It’s a profoundly ecological poem on every possible level. My focus in all my work on it and in my PhD more broadly, is soil. There’s a lot of nature here, but what do we get if we focus in on the earthiest, deepest, darkest, parts of it? Soil and the body are really bound up together here. The soil is the part of the nature world that is keenest to get on you. People touch soil, dig in it with their hands, let it cover their skin.

In more ways than one, there’s something dirty about soil.

I might be accused of this being a very modern, queer-woman-on-the-internet reading, but then I am a modern queer woman on the internet. Every time the Green Knight appears he is always tied up with desire. The poem looks at him with a longing gaze. He’s horrific. He’s wondrous. He has broad shoulders and powerful thighs (as we saw when we translated a full stanza on his powerful muscles and shapely form). It’s a very visual poem and, here, a lot of that visual obsession is Gawain and the Green Knight looking at each other with tension and longing. There’s some fantastic material on this in Sarah Stanbury’s excellent book Seeing the Gawain Poet: Description and the Act of Perception, which you can find on archive.org and JSTOR.

Whether you want to read it sexually or not, what I am most concerned with here is how the Green Knight acts as a representative and emmissary of a green, natural world, and he’ll drag you down with him. I don’t know how else to read him extracting Gawain’s promise that he’ll follow him into the forest than as the earth putting its hands on you and pulling you out of the civilised world towards a hole in the ground. He’ll draw you into his game, bind you up with rules, and when you finally manage to look away, you’ll find yourself somewhere very strange.

So the game is afoot here and it’s a game of tension building and releasing. That tension can take the form of dread, suspicion, or wonder. We end up in a very different place at the end of this section than we might think at the start. Dread gathers and transforms in odd directions.

This section will be a bit shorter than the previous two, because we reach a natural split in the story at the end of Book 1 and it seems a good place to leave it. I’ll work real hard at having the next section done soon, so you aren’t kept in too much suspense. I would hate for you to shiver with antici

“God,” said the Green Knight, “Gawain, yes. I’m pleased
that your hand will give me what I’ve looked for.
You have consented and repeated the rules
of the covenant I have formed with the king.
I only ask for one more thing - please, promise me,
that you’ll look for me, find me wherever I am,
near or far on the earth, to fetch the wage
you earn when you strike me in front of the court today.
“Where should I look for you?” asked Gawain, “Where is the place?
I can’t imagine, in the name of God that made me,
and I don’t know your name, sir, or the name of your court.
Tell me the way, sir, tell me truly, and tell me your name,
and I will use all my wit to get to you.
This I promise solemnly and for sure.”
“That’s enough for now, at Christmas. I need no more promises now,”
said the Green Knight to the man close at his hand,
“I will tell you truly when I’ve taken the blow,
if you give it with honour then I will declare
the name of my hous eand homeland, and my own name.
Then you can find me there and keep your promise.
I won’t waste my words, so you can strike better.
I fear you’ll linger at home and not look for me —
but stay —
tale up your weapon
and I’ll see you strike.
“Sir,” said Gawain, “I will,”
He tested his blade.

There’s something very breathless in this stanza. I fear it gets lost in my scrappy free verse translation, but there’s a lot of stopping and starting here, short phrases and interjections in Gawain’s speech. I’ve included a couple of extra ‘sir’s to put a little of that halting, going back on yourself, way of speaking. I think we can hear fear here but also wonder. We have to imagine him looking up at the Green Knight, who is much taller than him. Gawain is aware of all the court’s eyes on him, including Arthur’s, and the uncanny eyes of the Green Knight. I think it’s only fitting in line with the long descriptions we’ve already read to read wonder and desire here alongside nerves.

So, with grace, the Green Knight knelt down on the ground,
leant his head just a little, to bare his neck.
He lifted his long, lovely hair, and let it fall over his crown,
showing his neck, naked, green, as needed.
Gawain lifted the great ax and readied himself to hit,
with his left foot was before him on the ground.
He let the axe fall. It fell easily, down on the neck,
and in one bold stroke it shattered the bone,
sank clean through the gristle, split it in two,
and the blade’s keen edge bit the ground.
The handsome head fell and hit the earth,
where it rolled to and fro between the guests’ feet.
Blood burst from the wound and shone bright on the green,
but the strange knight’s body did not falter or fall.
He stood on his strong legs, walked forwards,
and went into the crowd where the guests were,
he found his handsome head and held it up.
He strode to his horse, took the bridle,
stepped up onto the stirrups and mounted.
He held his head in his hand all this time
and settled into his seat on the saddle,
as if nothing untoward had happened,
headless.
He twisted his trunk around.
His body, bleeding, ugly now,
and everyone was afraid
when they heard him speak.

Guys, it literally does say ‘lovely’ and it really does say ‘naked’ in the original, I promise.

But enough horny content — what I really want to talk about here is the deep earthiness of the stanza. We are watching Gawain behead the Green Knight but our eyes are drawn down to the ground over and over again. We look at the ground when the Green Knight kneels down to give himself up to the axe, and we watch the ground again when Gawain positions his feet on it and when the axe meets the floor at the end of its swing. We never forget the presence of the earth under our feet, even while we are apparently watching something else. The sound of the severed head hitting the earth (specifically, in the original text, earth) echoes through the rest of the poem.

The Green Knight is quite clearly figured as a tree here. We watch him root himself in the earth, and be cleaved with an axe, and the word ‘crown’ appears in the original text — describing both the top of a person’s head and the top of a tree’s canopy. Beheading the Green Knight is more than just killing (or maybe killing) a man, it’s disrupting (or maybe disrupting) a whole ecosystem.

With his hand he held up his head,
held it out towards the dais where the nobles sat.
The eyes of the face opened and looked around.
The mouth opened and said these words.
“Remember, Gawain, to keep your promise to me,
to follow me and look, faithfully, til you find me.
All the knights in this hall heard you swear.
I summon you to the Green Chapel,
to be struck as you have struck me here.
You’ll accept it on New Year morning.
I am known as the Knight of the Green Chapel.
You’ll find me if you look, carefully, devotedly.
So come, or we will all know you were not brave enough.”
His horse turned and, with roaring and rushing,
he left the hall with his head in his hand.
Sparks flew where his horse’s feet hit the floor.
No one knew what country he rode to,
just as they did not know where he had come from.
What then?
The king and Sir Gawain
found themselves laughing,
and deep down,
they were wonderstruck.

The fact this stanza ends with laughter is one of my favourite things in the entire poem. In a lot of different ways, Gawain is a poem about tension building and releasing. You’re always a bit surprised by the release when it comes. The deeper you go into horror, the more sudden it seems when you find you were just playing a game. Similarly, the deeper you go into being playful, the more horrified you become. The Green Knight challenges Gawain to come to his death following a very gory stanza — we have seen blood spurt and a head roll along the floor — and it seems very clear at this stage that Gawain has less than a year to live. But the wonder of what we have seen can tip into either horror or absurdity, and here the culmination of gore is laughter.

Although Arthur found it strange indeed,
you couldn’t see it on his face. He spoke loudly,
speaking gently to the queen in these words,
“My lady, do not be dismayed by this.
This kind of craft is fitting for Christmas —
like an interlude, some laughter and singing,
these kinds of carols sung by knights and ladies.
These things are suitable for our feast today.
What we have seen is a wonder. We cannot deny it.
His gaze moved to Gawain, and he said,
“Hang up that great axe now — it has hewn enough today.”
They hung the axe on the tapestry over the table.
Everyone who saw it agreed it was a marvel,
and it promised a story of a strange adventure.
So they returned to the table to feast,
the king and the good knight, to be served
double of all the sweet luxurious things being served,
good meat, and pleasant music while they dined.
They spent the day in delight, until darkness came again
to the land.
Think carefully, Gawain.
Don’t be afraid
to set off on the adventure
you have taken in hand.

‘This kind of craft is fitting for Christmas’ is the thesis statement for every deep, dark, folk horror Christmas I’ve ever had and ever will have. The uncanny topsy turvy nature of Christmas in this court for these people in this time is something it can be easy to forget. The coca-cola red Santa Claus wasn’t invited to these feasts. The deep midwinter time of games reversed status and turned you upside down in the dark, alongside ghosts and spirits. Everything we have just seen, including all the horror and the blood that spurted from the wound, came after Arthur asked for wonders and games. Reminding us of the Christmas game-playing context invites us to consider the violence we have just seen as a crafted puzzle-box illusion — even though it frightened us and it, explicitly, frightened all the assembled lords.

So the axe becomes a (somewhat literal) ghost at the feast. Its continued presence in Camelot over the next year reminds us of the physicality of the wonder we have seen, the fact we are still in game-time, bound by game-rules and game-covenants. You might remember from the first installment of the poem that the tapestries about which the axe gets hung are full of glimmering jewels, like a night sky or gemstones shining in the earht. Even when Christmas ends and we’re no longer in the dark midwinter game-and-ghost time, the axe reminds us what we have seen is real.