Back to the Green Chapel, Part 5

'Tis the Season to be Jolly

When the young Prince Agrippa I, invested by Caligula with the Kingship of Judea, passed through Alexandria, the natives of that town resolved to insult him by a piece of buffoonery.  They were not fond of the Jews... [1}

There are two long Christmas seasons in Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green Chapel.  Each season is a place, a time, a set of resident persons and temporary guests gathered for the festival, a space in which transformative actions and games are played out appropriate to the defining celebration. 

The first, in Camelot with King Arthur, his queen-wife Gwenor, and the Knights of the Round Table, is clearly a festive occasion: it is marked by a specific time and place, a gathering of many guests, celebratory words and actions, grand banquets and entertainments, not least of which is the unexpected but unsurprising arrival of the Green Man on a Green Horse.  He and the challenge he proffers are seen in the poem as Christmas gomens, games of masquerade and metamorphosis. 

The second, after a few months of profane time, is Gawain’s sudden arrival at the unexpected courtly festivities of Betilak de Hautdesert, his queen-wife Lady Betilak, the gnarled old woman later identified as Morgan le Fé, and Host’s entourage of guest, retainers, guests and servants: the celebratory events include the three morning hunts between the departure of the main party of guests after Christmas Day and the coming of New Year, and the exchange of gifts in the banqueting hall between Bertilak and Gawain.  What forms a background to these festivities at the Castle Hautdesert are the secretive visits by the Lady of the Castle to Gawain bedroom, their conversations and the granting of the green girdle which is then not made part of the stipulated exchange with the Host. 

Each of these Christmas events has a sequel: outside of but close to Betilak’s castle, Gawain meets the Green Knight for the agree-upon second part of the beheading game, in a place called the Green Chapel—but as we have indicated it is neither green nor a chapel except in very coded and complex extensions of both terms.  This third venue, which is actually the second, since it was the one Gawain set out to discover on his travels through the wilderness of Wyral and Wales, has a strange relationship also to the Castle he did find and which seems a bizarre mirroring of Camelot (qa milot: like a word) .

The coordination of Green Chapel to Hautdesert seems at first a quirk, a mere play on words.  The deserted chapel that Gawain descends into, seen as a part of the natural wasteland, then as an old tumulus, and lastly apparently as the devil’s oratory stands on a scale that mirrors, darkly and ambiguously, as the primeval fortress that rises up out of the winter mists made of twisted boughs and heavy stumps, then as a late medieval castle full of towers and crenulations, and finally as a delicate and artificial decoration presented during an interlude between courses of a large ceremonial banquet.  But there are other aspects to these many-layered images of things experienced in the trance-like state of a festival: first, the old cave with a stream pouring out of it, encumbered with a gnarled ancient tree, has aspects and words that point towards something sexual and reproductive, as well as archaic in the formation of consciousness, the frightful infant’s memories of emerging through the birth canal, squeezed, pushed, deprived of oxygen, covered in slime and knotted hair; then the reminiscences triggered by fragments of experience in sound, smell and taste of the heavy breathing and frenetic shivers of coitus, the release of primal energies, and the threat of the huge battle-ax and the nick on the neck (cervix) and the tell-tale drop of blood, and thus also of the whole ritual of brit ha-ot, pulling back of the foreskin, cutting off of the encumbering hood, using a flint knife, and the blood to be sucked away, revealing the naked eye of the male organ so that it looks and bleeds like a female’s body.  What is cut away from the natural organ is now marked with the sign of divine relationship, the covenant of the Law, the signs or words written on two tablets of stone, luach ha brit (read: brt-i-lak)—“Rock of ages cleft for me.”

The other sequel to the successful or unsuccessful outcome of the Christmas game undertaken by Gawain on behalf of his king and his fellow knights is his return to Camelot: superficially, it is, of course, the same place and it is experienced a year later by all as the continuation and completion of the first. Looked at closely and its constituent words, gestures and resonances examined as particles of a different kind of celebration altogether, the household and literary reputation of the occupants of seats around the Round Table has changed dramatically.  Whilst they all take Gawain’s return intact, his head still attached to his body, as proof positive of his success, and hence of their guarantee of trawth as honor and fame as noble upholders of feudal, chivalric and refined love values—to the point of sporting their own versions of the green girdle as emblems of this victory—Gawain sadly knows within himself that the success is a shame: he was not beheaded and therefore restored to one piece, either in fact as an act of real magic or in illusion as part of a prestidigitation trick that is acceptable in season mumming performances.  He knows that he and all the other knights and ladies of Camelot will henceforward live a lie, whether they realize it or not, and that insofar as their present existence is an idealized backformation of the literary texts that sing of their adventures in the various languages of western Europe, all is a sham, a hoax.  At best, they are self-deluded, at worst, like Gawain, tragic players in a charade of honesty and trawth in all its manifold senses.  Despite the reassurances of the Green Knight and his alter ego Bertilak de Hautdesert that Gawain did as well as could be expected as a fallible, sin-born human being, this kind of “good enough” status does not fit with what they believe about themselves and which is chanted in their songs of fame.  There is something that makes any possible fit between the annual celebrations of Christmas and New Year as courtly festivals of self-praise, the faith they have in Arthur’s or Gawain’s or their own abilities and ideals that the games imitate, celebrate and perfect, and the lengthy tradition of romances, lyrics and prose tales based on the legends, myths and dreams of poets and audiences. 

The impossibility of a clear and meaningful fit between the illusions, delusions and allusions inherent in Arthurian tradition would hardly be able to undermine the entertainment value of these romantic characters and actions, as only a childish fool or an idiot would take them seriously—and most great poets always have their tongues in their cheeks and many in the Renaissance grant to their favored characters a degree of self-mockery or scepticism as to keep these archaic stories going for a few more hundred years, as the world turns more cynical, secular and materialistic.  In the fourteenth century, as the currents of realism and reform, begin to run through England, France, Italy and other lands of the West, it is still mostly felt that the Arthurian past can stand as a metaphor through which the present can be clarified, seen more accurately and measured for its own social, political and psychological successes.  Yet neither Chaucer or Malory, for instance, attain to the degree of inwardness manifest in the alliterative poem we have been examining, and this poem in itself—as opposed to various scenes or characters which appear elsewhere in literature—has no subsequent resonance: it is not seen for what it is, even in a slight way, until modern editions begin to appear at the end of the nineteenth century. 

The entire manuscript in which it comes down to us is unique in many ways: it is not a presentation copy, it is very small, the script and illuminations are mediocre, and the language is awkward and archaic.  The inwardness of its characters, especially Gawain, are not matched in the other romances, tales or homiletic material contained in the whole of Cotton Nero A.x.  Moreover, it lacks a Christian perspective, although there are, to be sure, some references to persons and events in the New testament.  Its main themes is not so much about a quest that fails or almost fails to achieve what the great men and women in the narrative think it does; than about the ambiguities of personal achievement, identification, and will to carry on in an imperfect world and with fallible ideals.  

[1] Philo, cited by  M.J. Lagrange, Notes on the 'Orpheus' of M. Salomon Reinach, trans. C .C. Martindale (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell and London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co,m 1910) p. 29.