This article was first published in the excellent Hwaet magazine.
Reading about The Green Knight online can be quite frustrating. Most outlets seem to understand the importance of the movie as a retelling of a classic text (perhaps one of the top three most important texts of the English language, alongside The Canterbury Tales and whichever Shakespeare one deems the most influential), Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. However, the point of said text seems to elude them, with their focus lying on the obvious elements of the story: magic, honour, and bravery. Articles across the web say strange things like heralding the ending of the poem as an “unambiguously happy ending” or claiming that the point of the poem is about Gawain’s cowardice or lack thereof. Interestingly enough, many of these articles also seem to miss out on the subtleties of The Green Knight movie adaptation, preferring to focus on its psychedelic aesthetic or on the twists and turns of its ending.
These posts and articles don’t really interest me in and of themselves, but rather as a gateway to examining the contemporary perception of Gawain’s story as it manifests in our popular culture. This perception is, of course, also the one that created (and is, in turn, being bolstered by) The Green Knight movie itself. There are many things which the movie quite faithfully adapts from the poem and, also, something that it crucially interprets differently or which it knowingly chooses to discard: the point, for the original author, of Gawain’s struggle and its resolution. This difference creates an interesting artistic work in its own right, conveying (as the original work) its creator’s anxieties, perspectives, and thoughts.
Delaying on this difference and somehow claiming the original poem is superior to the movie because of it, or the other way around, is not my purpose here. I don’t find that to be an interesting question. Rather, the more interesting question is to interrogate the differences in interpretation of the two works and, through them, try to sense the differences between our contemporary, (post)modern world and the times in which the original was recorded. Expanding on the value of such a type of comparison is not something I have the space for here but I hope, to readers of this zine, that it is self-evident. Suffice it to say that seeing ourselves reflected unclearly in the past is a very good way to learn about our mercurial present.
Before we expand on the major difference between the movie and the poem itself, let us consider the factors that could have led to, or created, the differences in perception and culture which might have led to this difference. First, there is the distorted mirror of the 19th and early 20th century conceptualization of chivalric romance and the body of literature associated with it. From there we get the images, tropes, and enshrined stories of the chivalric knight that are most often associated with him: shining swords, impeccable honor, monster-slaying, the Holy Grail, unrequited love, and the such. That is, we do not have “direct” access to the “original” texts of chivalric romance; our perception of them, and how they reflect through it, is inherently tinted by the period in which they were resurrected in print and popularity, the very beginnings of the late modern era in which we find ourselves.
This reflection, like any reflection, is not entirely erroneous; bravery in combat, “clean”, aloof and Christian love, quests for sacred items, these are all actual story points which appear in the source material of what is often called The Matter of Britain (and of France). However, when we read the original works (translated, of course, except for those of us who have chosen to wrestle with Middle English and French) we find much more complicated and ambiguous records of these deeds. In the La Chanson de Roland from the 11th century for example, we encounter the question of whether fighting a doomed battle to the death (a classic example of knightly courage) really is a matter of worthwhile military might and courage or instead that of out-dated and fatally stupid traits. This message doesn’t really fit into the Romantic perception of a knight and (among other reasons) that part of the text is less well known.
Many more such examples exist. After all, the original tales of romantic chivalry were written both by a diverse type of person (some were knights themselves, some were men of intellect, and yet others members of the Church with their unique agenda of Pax Catholica as it were). These people had complex and differing views of the chivalric knight, as it was a living figure, with all the subtleties and contradictions of real life, rather than a static, historical object like the knight is for us. Indeed, at the basis of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight lies one of those contradictions and complexities: when the chivalric code (Gawain’s honour distilled through his obligation to the rules of the tryst with the Green Knight and his duty as a guest to his noble host) clashes with the virtues of Christianity (fidelity, truth-telling, and chastity) and, indeed, with a knight’s very survival, what is a knight to do? The answer given in the text, like the question itself, is also complex and multi-faceted. Gawain’s answer is a bold cry against his perceived cowardice and an exaltation of the chivalric code. But the Green Knight and the court of Arthur have different answers, ones which involve making fun of Gawain’s innocent and bull-headed virtue and naivete.
In our modern times, seen through the Romantic aspirations and literary revival of the late 19th century, the image of the knight is a much more individualist one. The knight is a figure which exemplifies personal courage and sacrifice. They are a paragon, a shining beacon and example of goodness and bravery whose stories are used to moralise and educate the young. This is also the second major factor which influenced or brought about the differences between the movie and the poem: an emphasis on individualism. In the original poem, while Gawain’s emotions and thoughts are well described (a rarity in works from the time) the point of the story is still not one man’s conflicts but the clashes between religion and the norms of a certain class. In the movie, this is not the case; except for a few scenes (like the fight with the highwaymen), The Green Knight is pretty much devoid of questions unique to the knightly class or with class power in general. Indeed, its main conflict deals with a different type of class altogether and the most individualistic one: the king. At the base of the movie lies the question of power and its price. Gawain’s basic question, the one he asks when crouched before the Green Knight is: is it good to live through cowardice and, through that same cowardice, come to dominate other men? Or is it better to die a just man and wash your hands of personal ambition, staying pure, unblemished by power’s grasp?
The movie, keeping with the poem here, provides an ambiguous answer. On one hand, the vision that Gawain has below the Green Knight’s axe shows all of his desires falling to ash, the lineage he has the chance to build crumbling in his hands, and all his desires for power, glory, and fame falling to nothing. On the other, does the Green Knight really kill Gawain once he removes his (literally) seminal sash? We don’t know. In the poem, the knight does indeed provide Gawain with a stroke but it is not lethal; since we don’t see the stroke here, we cannot know (post-credit scene and speculations thereof aside). But the question remains the same: as opposed to the poem, wherein the sash is merely a synecdoche for all that the guest owes a host, here the sash represents Gawain’s ambitions, his desire for grandeur, his deliberations with power and his willingness to sacrifice everything in order to survive and prevail over all. After all, the sash has power itself: first, it is imbued with Gawain’s semen and what more blatant metaphor for masculine strength and dominance is there? But secondly it has the power to grant him immunity from any weapon, a power rooted in cowardice, a power which, while it definitely appears in the poem, receives a much broader emphasis in the movie.
And so, we see that the divergence between the movie and the poem is a subtle but important one. Both works are interested in the question of courage and an adherence to a certain code or virtue. But for the poem the question is different since, of course, it is directed to a different audience: an audience of a well educated, affluent, and culturally powerful class. The question puts into perspective, and offers a certain solution to, the inherent contradictions of the conflicting ethos at the core of their way of life, an ambiguous resolution to a question being asked in churches, halls, and palaces across Europe. The movie, however, is directed at a modern audience, an audience born and crafted by an individualist society. The question then becomes: what is more important to you? Honesty or power? Does the end truly justify the means? Who will you cheat, lie to, and coerce in your quest for personal aggrandisement and achievement? The movie attempts to articulate a question that definitely has a public component but is more about the voices inside of us, the temptations for control and domination that we struggle with in our lives. Are they really that bad? Or do they lead us towards victory and fulfilment?
Recall that, in Gawain’s vision, his sins continue after his lie to the Green Knight; like he cast aside his honesty in their challenge, so too he casts aside his first love, their child, his own happiness, the respect of his people, in his quest for dominance. On this, both works agree: a desire for excellence that stems merely from the ego, from the self’s wish to be writ large upon the world, is a hollow and brittle thing. However, the conclusions they reach in solving this answer are completely at odds: in the movie, this hollowness is what tempts Gawain to cheat and survive, a temptation he seems to set aside in favour of an unknown, but surely terrifying, fate. The movie wholeheartedly endorses and celebrates Gawain’s choice; it is surely the correct one, the hollowness described above tempered in the resolute, and individualistic, overcoming of fear. It is, of course and as we said above, trying to teach us a lesson about our own conflicts and internal questions regarding the nature of power. How far can we, or must we, go in service of our desires and self-interested goals?
In the poem, a more complicated answer is provided. Gawain is the butt of a joke which makes the point that, when faced with an impossible choice, even the purest of knights must show some flexibility in deference to either ideology, especially when their life is on the line, by setting aside their unyielding and “pure” code. Dying just to say that you never lied or cheated is no victory at all but a complete defeat which leaves the contender unable to do anything else that is worthwhile in life (because they are, of course, dead). Dying simply in order to fulfil some imaginary set of rules dreamt up by a class of individuals (rather than the eternal and just code of Christianity, of course) is just as hollow as a life of supposed cowardice and has little value in the real world, outside of fairy-tales.
It is, interestingly enough, an exact distillation of the differences which history has created in our perception of the chivalric knight: contemporaries wanted to show us the figure in all of its complexities and, indeed, make fun of its unrealistic, irrelevant rigour of honour and code. In writing down their tales of worthwhile, yet bumbling, buffoons, in making light of as much as blindingly adoring their own images in literature, many (if not all) of the authors of mediaeval chivalric romances tried to capture the complexities of what they felt towards their own class. In that regard, The Green Knight attempts to do the same, trying to channel our own anxieties about our responsibilities, personal choices, and desires through the lens of the mediaeval knight. In so doing, it joins a chorus of current voices which turn the knight into a simpler, more static object than it might originally have been. Is that a mistake? The question, I think, is pointless; historical objects are important artefacts of how we come to understand and rationalise the world. However, remembering and thinking on the more dynamic, complicated, and unclear “originals” from which such objects are derived is just as important, to remind us the world is more complicated, varied, and, at the end of the day, beautiful than some of our more individualistic morality tales might let on.
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