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English Studies

ISSN: 0013-838X (Print) 1744-4217 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/nest20

Sir Gawain and the Great Goddess Rubén Valdés Miyares To cite this article: Rubén Valdés Miyares (2002) Sir Gawain and the Great Goddess, English Studies, 83:3, 185-206 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1076/enst.83.3.185.8690

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SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREAT GODDESS

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To Professor Patricia Shaw In memoriam I used to be glad when I seen her coming up the burn, and would run out and catch her by the hand and the cloak, and call my mother, ‘Here’s the Wee Woman!’ No man-body ever seen her. My father used to be wanting to, and was angry with my mother and me, thinking we were telling lies and talking foolish-like.1 Bot hit is no ferly pa a fole madde And pru wyles of wymmen be wonen to sorwe. (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 2414-5)

It is well known that medieval romance, particularly the matter of Britain, contains a substantial layer of archaic, ‘Celtic’, images. Among these the representation of female deities is the most elusive, like that ‘fair, fierce’ Queen Maeve of Yeats’s peasant tales. Sir Gawain’s conflicting encounters with the feminine, whether as an immature seducer or as the bridegroom of a supernatural hag, bespeak the significance of a certain great goddess of sovereignty in the narrative.2 But at the same time they signal an uncertainty at the heart of the patriarchal culture Sir Gawain champions.3 A reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (henceforward SGGK) will lead us, through some other Gawain romances and the theme of the loathly lady, to Thomas of Erceldoune, at last a conciliatory rendition of the meeting between a male poet and the image of female sovereignty. In this process of revision we hope to suggest an approach to reading chivalric romance wherein the patriarchal co-exists in dialogic dynamics with the matriarchal. I. The meanings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight The variety of readings of SGGK is virtually inexhaustible. From the appearance of the Green Knight at the Round Table the Gawain-poet seems to be try1 2

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W.B. Yeats, Mythologies (London, 1959), p. 121. This has been most fully argued by John Matthews, Gawain: Knight of the Goddess (Wellingborough, 1990), where Gawain is presented in the various roles of the archetypal Champion, Child, and Consort of the Goddess, who is correspondingly triple-aspected. Matthews, p. 100. While acknowledging the significance of the archetypes Matthews describes (see previous note), the importance of Gawain as Arthur’s (not Morgan the Goddess’s) champion in most medieval romances should also be stressed. The fact that the hero is most often the defender of the patriarchal order, and quite a misogynist, cannot be simply dismissed as a corruption of his original character by monkish scribes wishing to deprive him of pagan traits. Gawain’s interest, in our view, lies in the contradiction between his archetypal role as champion of women and the actual character of a women’s slayer.

English Studies, 2002, 3, pp. 185-206 0013-838X/02/03-185/$15.00 © 2002, Swets & Zeitlinger

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RUBÉN VALDÉS MIYARES

ing to puzzle us: for the challenger is just ‘half etayn’ (140) (how tall is ‘half a giant’?), a huge hairy green man yet the most proportioned and handsome knight, boorish as well as courteous. Certainly his contradictions could match those of the medieval warrior set against his own chivalric image, but they are only a minor part of his mysterious identity, symbolised by his greenness. Such mysteries build up suspense as they spellbind the audience/reader. As in a detective story, the answers come at the end. SGGK, however, defers more questions than it can answer (why, for example, Arthur, though still a young man, takes the axe first but fails to behead the Green Knight?), or makes the interrogations too large to be accounted for by the Green Knight’s own explanation at the Green Chapel, when he turns into Gawain’s confessor. It was all devised by ‘Morgne the goddess’ (2452): ‘Ho wayned me pis wonder your wyttes to reve, / For to haf greved Gaynour and gart hir to dyye / Wip glopnyng of pat ilke gome pat goslych speked / Wip his hede in honde before the hye table’ (2459-62). Men were puppets in the hands of Morgan le Fay to grieve another powerful woman, Guinevere. Even before being told this, Gawain had excused his own weakness by blaming women for it, citing Biblical precedents (2414-5). Readers may find these revelations hopelessly poor compared to the narrative preceding them. Far from providing final answers, the feminine conspiracy both Sir Gawain and the Green Knight suggest just begs further questions. Interrogation is the method Anne Wilson adopts in order to deal with SGGK in the final chapter of a study of the use of magic in Arthurian romance.4 She postulates up to thirteen problems with the general assumption that SGGK is a story about the testing of a hero.5 The problems elicit questions such as: why is Gawain’s remarkable devotion to the Virgin Mary forgotten at the end and are no thanks given for her protection?6 Why does the boundary between the natural (or Christian) and the marvellous (or magic) remain undefined in the poem? Why is the relationship between Bertilak and Morgan also uncertain?: in Wilson’s words, ‘if Morgan is evil, must not Bertilak, her instrument, be evil?’7 Wilson’s answers turn on ‘a magic plot’ that remits everything to the hero’s psyche, so that even the beheading challenge is Gawain’s game, not the Green Knight’s.8 In her conclusion, however, she is faced with the basic crux once again: ‘Now that the magical scheme is revealed as organised by the hero, what is the status of the explanation that it is organised by Morgan le Fay?’ To which her answer is that Morgan’s presence ‘expresses an essential feeling in the plot, that woman, a witch, is responsible for it all, rather than the hero himself’.9 But then again, we are prompted to ask, what is the reason for that ‘essential feel4 5

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Anne Wilson, The Magical Quest (Manchester, 1988), pp. 192-200. In particular, she quotes the views of G.V. Smithers, ‘What Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is about’, Medium Aevum, XXXII, No. 3 (1963), p. 187, and J.A. Barrow, A Reading of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (London, 1965), p. 165. It is Mary who protects him in his most perilous encounter with the lady: ‘Great perile bitwene hem stod, / Nif Maré of hir knyght con mynne’, 1768-69. Wilson, op.cit., p. 194. Ibid. p. 205. Ibid. p. 212.

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ing’? Wilson’s book ends on this page, though not before dropping a final hint inviting further inquiry:


The beautiful seductress in the hero’s vision appears as two characters, both deeply disguised, the all-powerful mother figure, and the young woman, firmly separated off from the sinister power of the woman who is felt responsible for it all.

It is this last remark that really triggers off many more questions about Gawain’s attitude to the feminine: for example, why does Wilson ‘firmly separate off’ Morgan from the old lady in the castle, whereas readers usually interpret them to be one and the same person?10 Or, to return to the Blessed Virgin, are Mary and Morgan also somehow associated in Gawain’s mind when he neglects praying to the Virgin in his moments of greatest danger at the Green Chapel?11 Wilson’s approach cannot possibly tackle these enigmas. If we have followed Wilson’s reasoning in considerable detail it has been to set an example of the inconsistencies derived from the common practice of focusing on the mysteries of the poem from the hero’s viewpoint.12 A more fruitful analysis is perhaps Geraldine Heng’s, which distinguishes ‘a feminine text in Sir Gawain in those regions where the logic of the poem as the stage of the masculine actors founders and fails’, ultimately leading her into ‘something very like an allegory of language or a narrative of the sign’, particularly exemplified by the slippery meaning of the girdle.13 We believe SGGK is rather more than a mere textual game or allegory of language, but Heng’s study is of great help in unravelling the manifold ways in which the text signifies, as well as in stressing the importance of feminine desire in a story which, as we shall see in what follows, is too often interpreted as based on masculine mythologies.14

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This common assumption is based particularly on line 2446, where Bertilak says that ‘Morgne la Faye ... in my haus lenges’, therefore, if she is not the young lady, who is Bertilak’s wife, then Morgan should be the old one whom Gawain sees by her. It was to Mary that he complained during his journey to Hautdesert: ‘To Mary made his mone, / pat ho hym red to ryde’ (lines 737-38), but on the way to the Green Chapel he just swears ‘Bi Godde’. Certainly the poem often invites its reader to adopt Gawain’s viewpoint by presenting descriptions as he would have seen them, particularly in the scenes of his arrival to Hautdesert and the first appearance of the Lady. But on other occasions things he could not have seen are described in great detail, for example the hunting scenes. Geraldine Heng, ‘Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, PMLA, CVI (1991), 501 and 508-509. This is not to say that SGGK is not a patriarchal text. Its agenda is not just masculine, but maybe purposefully anti-feminist. As it has been argued, ‘If women could be placed on the periphery, as Morgan is in this poem, then the Round Table might not have fallen. To deny the female would be to save the kingdom, and, in its revisionary agenda, that is precisely what Sir Gawain and the Green Knight attempts to do.’ Sheila Fisher, ‘Leaving Morgan Aside: Women, History, and Revisionism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Thelma S. Fenster, ed., Arthurian Women. A Casebook (New York and London, 1996), p. 78.

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II. The underlying myths Our understanding of a story depends on the mythological codes we apply to interpret its imagery. But that of SGGK implies apparent contradictions, despite the powerful cogency of the narrative. Supposedly a Christian knight in a Christian poem, Sir Gawain arrives at the Green Chapel ‘decked out like a savage with talismans of every description’.15 As a result of this visible pagan substratum, research into the ritual element of SGGK seems to offer rewarding answers to its mysteries.16 Claude Luttrell tries to explain its plot through a type of folktale, in which the hero, while staying at the castle of an evil being, manages to fulfil the tasks imposed on him thanks to the help of the evil being’s daughter, who then elopes with the hero.17 Luttrell’s case rests upon considering the Green Knight a Satanic tempter. While admitting that ‘the medieval poet does not leave such a suggestion contradicted’, Luttrell concludes that ‘The mystery is given a solution in which the Green Knight displays a complete change of attitude and lays off the responsibility for his fiendishness on a malicious fay’.18 Such a reading nullifies Morgan’s role, reducing it to a lame excuse of the Devil. A different kind of attempt to unravel the ‘underlying myth’ of SGGK is represented by Christopher Wrigley.19 ‘The central mystery of the story’ is, in his opinion, why the Green Knight should forgive Gawain at the end of the story, since, after going through the ordeal of the Beheading Game, ‘if any forgiving is to be done it should be Gawain who does it’.20 Aided by evidence from Old Irish, Middle English (The Carl of Carlile) and African analogues, he interprets Gawain’s ordeals as an initiation rite of circumcision (symbolised by the beheading game) ‘to help the boy to overcome his Oedipal emotions, to part from his mother and to come to terms with his father, and so with life’.21 Thus Wrigley develops in full the Freudian reading proposed by Derek Brewer, according to which ‘the Green Knight is a father figure and his lady the seductive aspect, and Morgan the malevolent aspect of the mother figure’.22 While such 15 16

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J.A. Burrow, op.cit., pp. 178-79. J.L. Caramés Lage, ‘El Ritual Simbólico y Mítico de Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ in Estudios Literarios Ingleses: Edad Media, ed. J.F. Galván Reula (Madrid, 1985), pp. 139-63, has even developed a ‘ritual method’ by applying it to SGGK. Claude Luttrell, ‘The Folk-Tale Element in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Studies in Philology, LXXVII (1980), 105-27, reprinted in Derek Brewer, ed., Studies in Medieval English Romance (Woodbridge, Cambridge), 1988, pp. 92-112. The story is Type 313 in Aarne and Thompson’s classification of folktales. Ibid. p. 112. Christopher Wrigley, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Underlying Myth’, ed. by Brewer (1988), op.cit., pp. 113-28. Ibid. p. 113. Ibid. p. 127. Derek Brewer, English Gothic Literature (London, 1983), p. 165. Elsewhere Brewer had made very clear his view that the poem must be interpreted from a masculine perspective: ‘Morgan and Guinevere are marginal, whatever their significance to Gawain ... [T]he protagonist is central, and all must be interpreted in relation to his interests.’ D. Brewer, ‘The Interpretation of Dream, Folk Tale and Romance with Special Reference to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Neophilologische Mitteilungen, LXXVII (1976), pp. 570 and 574.

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phallocentric arguments ought not to be dismissed altogether, since SGGK is mostly told from Gawain’s male viewpoint, there is no reason to accept them as privileged. It would be scarcely less plausible to regard Gawain’s neck as a symbol of his penis than to suggest that the cut he receives is a sublimated vagina: an imprint of the Lady’s body, since the hero gets that cut for accepting her girdle as a talisman. In fact both interpretations may be compatible. Older mythological interpretations also focused on male principles. Jessie Weston considered Gawain as the first preserved version of the Grail hero, on whose Quest depends the fertility of the land, and recalls his early reputation as a magic healer.23 R.S. Loomis followed a similar trail, only placing a greater emphasis on solar myth than on vegetation rites, and agrees with Weston in relating the Grail legend to the cult of Cybele and Attis, and so to that of the Great Earth-Mother.24 The ritual connotations of the Green Chapel, actually described as an underground cave, recalling an ancient burial mound, and the drop of Gawain’s blood on the snow, as it were fertilising winter with sacrifice, readily bring to mind archaic myths. In his extremely influential The Golden Bough, F.J. Frazer regarded most primitive myths as versions of a rite of transmission of priesthood in which the succeeding young priest kills (or acts as if he were killing) the old. Loomis’s interpretation is Frazerian: the Beheading Game represents a primitive Irish story in which the old sun-god Curoi is faced by the young sun-god Cuchulainn, though in SGGK the story is modified so that Curoi becomes the youth’s benevolent tester. As for the Temptation episodes, Loomis relates them to a famous Irish story of the love affair between Cuchulainn and Curoi’s wife, and through it to the abduction of Blathnat, where the boy Cuchulainn takes over the weapon, the ‘flower bride’, and other magic ‘objects’ of the slain Curoi. Thus Frazerian approaches pay scarce attention to Morgan’s part in the plot, and practically exclude goddesses except as reified symbols of Mother-Earth or Spring Vegetation. Within this tradition we should also locate Matthews’s attempt to ‘fit together the pieces of the jigsaw’ and reconstruct the proto-story of Gawain as the Champion/ Child/ Consort of the Goddess Morgan,25 where she also tends to appear as a passive recipient or background for the hero’s deeds. The importance of Morgan in SGGK can only be properly assessed against a very broad context of Great Goddess mythology. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford’s study of Goddess imagery may well provide us with one such backdrop.26 Here Gawain is mentioned as one more example of the story of the Green Man, a direct descendant of Attis and other sacrificed year gods, who challenges Gawain and makes him ‘go through the initiation rite of overcoming

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Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (New York, 1920, 1957), pp. 12-13, where she develops ideas from her earlier study, The Legend of Sir Gawain: Studies Upon Its Original Scope and Significance (London, 1897). R.S. Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance (London, 1926, 1993), p. 290. Matthews, op.cit., pp. 172-4. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London, 1991).

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his fear of death at the hands of the man who was both his host and his executioner’.27 But it is elsewhere that this book offers clues to the nature of Gawain’s ritual sacrifice, and therefore to Gawain’s relation to the Goddess. Baring and Cashford argue that a primitive matriarchy of ‘Old Europe’ was disrupted by the arrival of the Kurgan peoples in the Bronze Age, with their patriarchal order, sky gods and hierarchical, warlike society.28 The Kurgans introduced the idea that ‘the “sacrifice” of “the other” in war would serve as a substitute for one’s own death’, replacing the primitive notion of sacrifice as a ritual of atonement to Mother Earth for killing and eating an animal or for ‘disturbing the soil and pulling up crops’.29 Then they describe the sacrifice of another human being as ‘a symptom of a radical disorder in the psyche in which the person or tribe has claimed for itself the powers of the deity’, adding that it is ‘an unconscious defence against fear’.30 From this point of view Gawain’s ordeal shows a dimension beyond the initiation rite in the patriarchal order. Gawain, Arthur’s court, and perhaps even the Gawain-poet himself make sense of the adventure as a manly test of the hero’s capacity to overcome fear. For Morgan and Bertilak’s wife, however, it is all rather a practical joke – a Christmas game, as Arthur would have it at first – to tease the Arthurian court’s psychosis of violent death at the hands of a godlike executioner. The laughter of courtiers at the end of the adventure, pretending it has been funny, has the hollow echo of whistling in the dark. The myth of the Goddess as represented by Baring and Cashford opens a further dimension to SGGK by analysing the nature of heroism. In their view the hero originates in the birth of consciousness, that is, the fabrication of a human subjectivity separated from nature: Heroism – the extraordinary act that elevates the idea of human nature – was one response to the power of death … The myth of the hero was a solar myth in that it was an imitation on earth of the sun’s conquest of the powers of darkness in heaven … The emphasis fell therefore on conflict and mastery … In the new myth the hero stands alone against the opposing force, supported by the father in heaven, in striking contrast to the old myth of the goddess and her son-lover, where the drama was one of the ever-changing phases of relationship. The focus has now shifted from the goddess to her son, from the cosmos to humanity.31

The relevance of this transition between mythological codes to SGGK will be easily apprehended, since Gawain’s status as solar hero is well established,32 while he is also Morgan’s nephew (line 2464), or her son in other Arthurian 27 28 29 30

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Ibid. pp. 411-2. Ibid. pp. 53-6. Ibid. p. 160. Ibid. p. 163. In this Baring and Cashford explicitly adopt Joseph Campbell’s concept of the ‘Great Reversal’, when death came to be welcomed as a rescue from the terror of death by the hand of other human beings and was no longer viewed as ‘a continuance of the wonder of life’. Ibid. p. 172. They cite Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 139. Baring and Cashford, op.cit., p. 174. By R.S. Loomis, op.cit.

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tales.33 The form generally taken by the hero’s adventure also coincides with Gawain’s quest:


the [solar heroes’] quest involves overcoming a challenge: slaying the Minotaur, beheading the Medusa, bypassing a dragon – guardians of the threshold. Yet these heroes cannot reach the treasure with their rational minds, which sunder everything into opposites, but only with the help of deeper instinctual levels of the psyche. These are characteristically personified as female – the ambiguous figures of Medea, Ariadne, Circe – that complexity of feeling and intuition often symbolized as the maiden tied to the dragon, so that both have to be encountered at once.34

The classical list of examples may, of course, be vastly extended by adding Beowulf’s fight with Grendel and his monstrous mother,35 and the medieval stories of knights fighting dragons to save a lady, win a treasure, or both. In SGGK, however, the dragon (if we exclude the ‘wormes’, ‘etaynes’ and ‘wodwos’ the hero fights rather cursorily on his way, lines 720-3) is functionally no other than the Medusa-like Green Knight, whose severed head returns to its place, and there is no hoard for the hero but self-preservation. The maid tied to the ‘dragon’ turns out to be Bertilak’s wife, and Morgan, like the Virgin Mary, embodies ‘that instinctual level of the psyche’ guiding the warrior-hero’s fate. For Gawain faces his adventure fully decked with talismans of the Goddess: the never-ending knot of his pentangle, the image of the Virgin on the other side of his shield, and later the girdle tied around his waist.36 In addition to showing the perspectives pointed out above on the significance of Gawain’s adventure and on his heroism, Baring and Cashford’s myth of the Goddess may reveal a new meaning in the hunting episodes of SGGK. The Paleolithic myth of the hunter was contained by the goddess myth, until both were apparently replaced by the Bronze Age myth of the warrior-hero, being itself a degraded version of that hunter myth.37 Paleolithic art told the two interrelated, yet distinct stories: The pregnant figures of statues suggest that the myth of the mother goddess was concerned with fertility and the sacredness of life in all its aspects, and so with transformation and rebirth. By contrast, the myth of the hunter was concerned above all with the drama of survival - the taking of life as a ritual act in order to live.38

Bertilak’s hunting in the forest is interlaced with his wife’s temptation of Gawain in the game of Exchange of Winnings that Bertilak has proposed to his 33

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Gawain is her son, for example, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae as well as Wace and Layamon’s versions of it, and in De Ortu Waluuanii Nepotis Arturi. In these texts Arthur’s sister is called Anna instead of Morgan. In later versions, including Malory’s, this feminine tends to split into two characters. Baring and Cashford, op.cit., p. 294. See especially Christina Dokou, ‘Grendelle: Beowulf’s Dead Mother’, The European Messenger, VII/ 2 (1998), 44-8. The knot is a symbol of the Goddess since ancient Crete: see Baring and Cashford op.cit. p. 120. As to how the knot symbolism pervades the text of SGGK, see Heng, ‘Feminine Knots ...’, op.cit. Baring and Cashford, op.cit., pp. 39-40 and 148. Ibid., p. 39.

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guest, giving readers the impression that Gawain himself is the actual quarry. There is, moreover, a ritual element in Bertilak’s approach to hunting. The activity is described in such detail, including the propitiatory offering of ‘the corbeless fee’ (line 1355), possibly to the Goddess,39 that one fears Gawain’s fate may be parallel to that of the killed and gutted deer, boar and fox. A sympathy with the hunted animal is characteristic of the myth of the hunter when it is still comprehended by that of the Goddess.40 If both Bertilak the animal-hunter and his wife the Gawain-hunter are instruments (or, as we shall see, aspects) of Morgan the Goddess, then the Exchange of Winnings is part of the Goddess myth. From the narrative point of view, however, they appear as part of Gawain’s warrior-hero myth. This paradox is also explained by Baring and Cashford’s study when it says that ‘from within the story of the hunter, which is concerned with mortal life in time, the foundation of the hunter myth in the goddess myth can be forgotten’.41 As a result Gawain, in his quest or hunt for the Green Knight, is too concerned with his own survival to remember that his adventure is just a game. It is his fear that makes him break the rules and take the Lady’s girdle. His robust warrior-hero consciousness makes him a poor player in the subtle hunting game, as he responds to it with undue anxiety. In short, the contribution of Baring and Cashford’s study to a mythological analysis of SGGK is to provide examples of how to read through a god-oriented narrative (the hunter and the warrior-hero myths) to the goddess-oriented image. Their perspective, despite its large idealisation of the feminine, helps counterbalance the mass of patriarchal grand narratives and readings of SGGK and analogous chivalric romances. Their attempt to reconstruct ‘the lost primordial myth scattered throughout the symbolic images, myths and fairy-tales of every civilization’ is too ambitious to be practicable and it has a smack of Jungian grand narrative that might easily be challenged in a number of ways, but their image of the Goddess remains plural and ambiguous enough to fit into various (con)texts, including SGGK.42 39

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The narrator does not make the recipient of the ‘raven’s fee’ explicit, but the association of ravens and crows with the dark forces of nature, often personified by a goddess, is attested in old Celtic and Germanic mythologies. In the Ultonian cycle Morrigan is known as ‘The Crow (or Crane) of Battle’. See Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 303-5. Graves points out that, when associated to the Goddess, ‘the raven denotes death and prophecy – Freya’s prophetic raven was borrowed from her by Odin, just as Bran borrowed Danu’s and Apollo’s Athene’s.’ Robert Graves, The White Goddess (London, 1971), p. 403. ‘In the mother goddess story the human hunter and the animals that are hunted are both contained in one vision. There is a continuum of relationship in which both hunter and hunted participate, so that the myth of the hunter is ultimately included in the myth of the goddess, along with all other aspects of life which are part of the whole.’ Baring and Cashford, op.cit., p. 39. Ibidem. See Baring and Cashford, op.cit., p. 40. The attempt to systematize all human mythologies as branches of a common tree has had extremely influential practitioners since J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, from C.G. Jung’s archetypes of the collective subconscious to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God. Baring and Cashford are indebted to such approaches as they claim that ‘the underlying vision expressed in all the vari-

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III. Aspects of the Great Goddess Once the central role of Morgan the Goddess in SGGK is acknowledged, it is necessary to point out the ways in which the Green Knight acts as her representative. The story is related to an old Irish tradition about women’s sovereignty,43 known in England through the stories of ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawain’. In some of these stories an old hag has the lead and a ‘carl’ or churlish tall knight is her servant to deal with men in their own terms of physical strength. Thus the Green Knight resembles those medieval ‘wodewos’ or Wild Men who were tamed by femininity and subservient to women.44 In Malory’s tales Morgan le Fay sends her champions to fight Arthur’s warriors, or attracts knights from Camelot to her castle, but she never pays a personal visit to her brother. The loathly lady’s churlish herald is her deputy among men, displaying some of her own traits, while it is usually Gawain or a similar hero who assumes the role of the Green Man, as consort of the Queen of May (who may be Arthur’s wife Guinevere or Morgan herself) and sacrificial year god.45 In taking over Morgan’s public role, the Green Knight displays the characteristic ambivalence of the ancient Great Goddess.46 His manners, like his looks, are an uncanny mixture of courtliness and wild rudeness, ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, inside-the-court and outside-the-court, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, human colour and greenness. He throws into disarray the rational minds of Arthur’s court, which ‘sunder everything into opposites’.47 The ambivalence is most explicit in the objects he holds in his hands: ‘in his on honde he hade a holyn bobbe, that is grattest in grene when greves ar bare, and an ax in his other, a hoge and unmete’ (206-8). There is no simple dichotomy here. Holly is

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ety of goddess images is constant: the vision of life as a living unity’, but this notion has often been questioned, not just by postmodernism and post-structuralist criticism, but even by anthropologists and historians of religion: for example, Lotte Motz, The Faces of the Goddess (Oxford, 1996) extends the study of female deities to early cultures as distant as the Eskimos and the Japanese, to argue that these goddesses have widely varying origins as ancestor deities, animal protectors and other divinities of complex nature. Many discontinuities could be traced within Baring and Cashford’s imagined unity, in addition to a marked tendency to associate the masculine with ‘culture’ and the feminine with ‘nature’. Yet as far as SGGK is concerned, the role of the goddess as a unifying narrative device has long been argued. See A. Carson, ‘Morgain la Fée as the Principle of Unity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Modern Language Quarterly, XXIII (1962), 3-16. It has been noted that ‘descriptions of the Irish Other World show Lug, the god of war, sitting in state accompanied by the goddess who represents the sovereignty of Ireland, just as Odin is attended by the valkyries’. Clark Colahan, ‘Morgan the Fay and the Lady of the Lake’, SELIM Journal, I (1991), 93. See Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (New York, 1979), pp. 14-5 and 138-40. See Baring and Cashford, op.cit. pp. 410-2, and especially Kathleen Basford, The Green Man, Cambridge, 1996. For the wider question of ambiguity in the poem, see T. Hunt, ‘Irony and Ambiguity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Forum of Modern Language Studies XII (1976), 1-16. See also H. Bergner, ‘The Two Courts. Two Modes of Existence in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”’, LXVII (1986), 401-16, who focuses on the exploitation of ambiguity, especially with regard to the courts of Camelot and Hautdesert. See Baring and Cashford, p. 294 cited above.

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an evergreen tree symbolizing the continuity of life through winter, and, as a sign of peace giving, it was a Christmas decoration indoors.48 It figures prominently associated to every appearance of the loathly lady in the ballad of ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawaine’ in the Percy Folio, where on three occasions it is repeated that ‘shee sate betwixt an oke and a greene hollen’ and that ‘she was cladd in red scarlett’.49 The oak is another ancient sacred tree, and Gawain goes through a forest ‘of hore okes ful hoge’ (743) just before reaching Bertilak’s castle. Scarlet, or bright red, is the colour of the holly fruit, of the glow in a ‘beaver-hued’ beard like that of the Green Knight,50 of the cheeks of Bertilak’s wife, of Mars, associated with the blood of war or sacrifice, and the Wife of Bath’s favourite hue as well as that of Morrigú, the Irish war-goddess.51 The ‘huge and monstrous’ axe involves even more complex connotations. As an instrument of death, it will symbolise destruction as well as justice at the Green Chapel. Nor should one be too rash assuming it is a masculine symbol of power. Much earlier than the Viking berserk wielding it became notorious, the double-headed axe was an attribute of Cretan and Summerian goddesses, perhaps standing for their power to bestow and withdraw life.52 The arms of Morgan carried by the Green Knight share a similar ambivalence, derived from Celtic mythology. Gawain does not seem to be capable of grasping the Goddess’s ambivalence. When he sees the young lady in the company of the old matron at Hautdesert, his rational mind proceeds by opposition, contrast, classification, and possible (sexual) use. The younger one seems to him even ‘wener then Wenore’ (945), a lusty ‘reche red’ colouring distinguishing her from the old one’s wrinkled cheeks (952); as a result, ‘More lykeerwys on to lyk / Was that sho hade on lode’ (9689). At first sight they seem to him like life and death, fertility and barrenness. He will gradually realise, to his cost, that the tempting one might also be more deadly. As Clark Colahan notes, ‘The fertility goddesses, let me hasten to add, are not unrelated to the battle goddesses, and in attempting to differentiate them I find that, especially in surviving literary works, the two categories over-

48

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50

51

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Ivy, by contrast, would be used in the exterior of the house. See Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 5-6. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765, reprint. Edinburgh, 1869), III, pp. 289, 291, 292. ‘The beaver’s coat, the latent red glow of which is brought out when the light catches it and may remind one of fire or the sun, seems to have fascinated people in the Middle Ages, and to have become, like ruddy-brown hair in men, symbolic of vigorous life … The strength and ruddiness of the host are emphasized at once with a fire image – “His face was fierce as fire.”’ Brian Stone, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1959, repr. Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 124. See Campbell (1964), p. 303, and Charles Squire, Celtic Myth and Legend (1905, reprint. Van Nuys, Ca., 1975), p. 169: when Morrigú appears before Cuchulainn ‘She has red eyebrows, and a red dress, and a long, red cloak, and she carries a great, gray spear.’ Baring and Cashford, pp. 112-5 and 193. They also compare the double-axed Sumerian Virgin Goddess Inanna, whose virginity ‘had nothing to do with sexual “purity” … The goddess is virgin because she carries within herself her own fertilizing power’ (p. 192), to the Virgin Mary, who in some images is shown carrying the symbols of death and birth (ibid. p. 579).

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lap’.53 A small stone relief of a Celtic deity with a Latin inscription naming her ‘Riigina’ (‘Queen’), from Lemington, Gloucestershire (first or second century AD), shows her holding a spear in one hand and a bucket in the other: the marks of protection and plenty.54 The twin symbols correspond neatly to the bleeding lance and the holy grail that Perceval sees carried by ladies in procession at the Fisher King’s castle in Chrétien’s Contes del Graal. The knight is then rebuked by his guiding loathly lady for not asking about their meaning.55 Incomprehension breeds fear and hostility in the warrior hero. It was this that, according to Baring and Cashford, split up the image of the Goddess in the Bronze Age: ‘life and death were no longer regarded as two complementary aspects of her divine totality, but as opposites excluding each other. One brought hope and joy, the other terror and despair’.56 Although the ambivalence of Morgan le Fay is evident even in Malory’s tales, where she is both Arthur’s mortal enemy and one of the fairy queens who take him to Avalon to tend his wounds, the aspect that prevails in Gawain’s mind, being akin to Cuchulainn’s, is that of the Morrigan, the sinister battle goddess. Hence his uneasy unfriendliness towards her. From yet another perspective, the Goddess can be said to have not just two, but probably three or more significations, which would be signified in SGGK by the Green Knight / Bertilak, the Young Lady, and the Old Lady / Morgan le Fay. Needless to say such polysemy makes her even harder to understand for Gawain. Her triple aspect has been variously described as maiden, nymph and hag;57 poetry, magic and prophecy;58 Eros, Fertility and Thanatos;59 in the Neolithic she is said to have stood for Sky, Earth, and Waters Beneath the Earth, in old Crete for the triad Life-Death-Regeneration, in Anatolia for young woman, birth-giving woman and old woman, and so on.60 In sum, it may not be possible to interpret the female mythology of SGGK in any unilateral way. We cannot even decide whether the old lady in the castle is Morgan or not, though her presence as a loathly lady, as Wilson suggested, must be a reflection of the hero’s fears and taboos about women;61 neither can we definitely state whether the Goddess appears in three female forms, or just two, the young lady (and Guinevere) as Life and the old hag (and Morgan) as Death, with the Green Knight (and Bertilak) as a male impersonation of the re53 54 55

56 57 58

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Colahan, op. cit., p. 92. See Miranda Green, Celtic Goddesses: Warriors, Virgins and Mothers (London, 1995), p. 75. Chrétien de Troyes, Li Contes del Greal, ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona, 1989), lines 464683, pp. 316-7. Baring and Cashford, p. 169. See Graves, op. cit., pp. 245, 386, 383-408, where she is primarily the poet’s triple muse. These are her Indo-European functions according to Jean Markale, Druidas: Tradiciones y Dioses de los Celtas (Madrid, 1989), p. 130. M. Luisa Dañobeitia, ‘A Triple Progression in the Pentangle: A Study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Proceedings of the First International Conference of S.E.L.I.M. (Oviedo, 1989), ed. Patricia Shaw, Antonio Bravo, Santiago G. Fernández-Corugedo, Fernando García, p. 56. Baring and Cashford, pp. 13, 84, 131, etc. Wilson, The Magical Quest, op. cit., p. 140.

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generative aspect of the Goddess;62 nor can we assign a final meaning to Gawain’s devotion to the Virgin Mary, though one might suspect that the young lady replaces her as the Life-preserving aspect of the Goddess in Gawain’s psyche.63 On the other hand we can be positive about the crucial significance of the ‘feminine narrative folding into and between the masculine’ that Heng discovered, forming ‘an interlinked, overlapping tracery, culminating in a pattern not unlike … the pentangle’.64 None the less the key number, if any, would not be five but certainly the triad or trinity, preventing the Goddess from conforming to the extremes of evil (Eve) and good femininity (Mary) in Gawain’s Christian morals.65 Professor Shaw’s discerning analysis of the older woman in Middle English texts shows how loathly ladies simply act as foils for the beauty, vitality or desirability of their younger counterparts, but it emerges from her paper that each of the terms in the dichotomy tends to divide into triple categories: the young lady as victim, virtuous maiden, or unfaithful mistress, and the older woman as ‘the embodiment of physical repulsion’, ‘the crafty and wicked enemy of innocent youth’, or ‘the domineering virago’. Indeed, she concludes that ‘there are really no positively good, noble or sympathetic elderly women’.66 It can be assumed that such narrow categories result from a culture whose fears of wise old women and seductive young ones are exhibited, and problematized, by Gawain’s relations with female characters.67

IV. Gawain’s women. ‘perfore I epe pe, hapel to com to py naunt, Make myry in my hous. My meny pe lovies, And I wol pe as wel, wyye, by my faype, As any gome under God, for py grete traupe.’ And he nikked hym naye, he nolde bi no wayes. (SGGK, 2467-71)

What would have happened if Gawain had made love to Bertilak’s wife? Would he have really been beheaded by the Green Knight? Probably not. But then he would have fallen under the sovereignty of Morgan, who would have compelled him to solve the riddle of ‘What women most desire’ and, on failing to solve it, 62

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Analogous with the old castrated priest of Cybele carrying out the ritual with the younger personification of Attis. See Baring and Cashford, op. cit., p. 407. That would explain why the last allusion to the Virgin’s help comes immediately before Gawain accepts the girdle from the young lady. Heng, ‘Feminine Knots and the Other …’, op.cit., pp. 501 and 503. A similar dissociation was that between the sinister Morgan le Fay and the helpful and protective Lady of the Lake. See Loomis, op. cit., pp. 192-3. Patricia Shaw, ‘Loathly Ladies, Lither Ladies and Leading Ladies: the Older Woman in Middle English Literature’, in Obra Reunida de Patricia Shaw, Vol. I: Mediæval Studies (Oviedo, 2000), pp. 96-7. In another paper Professor Shaw pointed to the representation of Death as loathly lady in the fifteenth-century narrative poem Deth and Liffe, unusual because in English ‘Death’ is normally masculine. Ibid., p. 191. See P.C.B. Fletcher, ‘Sir Gawain’s Anti-Feminism’, Theoria, XXXVI (1971), pp. 53-8.

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Gawain would have had to marry the old hag, so the story would have been a different one, namely, that of ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawain’. For modern readers the best-known rendering of it is The Wife of Bath’s Tale, but there are various other extant versions, such as Gower’s Tale of Florent, or the anonymous Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, and it seems to have been more popular with medieval audiences than SGGK. Since Gawain evades the temptress’ love, however, he is also able to reject the Green Knight’s invitation above to stay at Morgan’s court.68 In so doing Gawain thwarts the fulfilment of the old myth of the Goddess, which would have required his union to her, and, thus denying her status and power, he returns victoriously to Arthur’s patriarchal court.69 For Gawain seems to understand his relationship to Morgan as a conflict for power in which one either wins or loses, survives or is killed. In his language there is no place for female rule, which is envisaged as an alien threat to the established order.70 The mythological source of Gawain’s case-history concerning women leads us back to Cuchulainn’s encounter with the great war-goddess Morrigú during the war between the men of Ulster and another powerful woman, Queen Medb of Connaught (later perhaps the fairy lady, or ‘wee woman’, who appeared to peasant women in W.B. Yeats’s story) for the Brown Bull of Chuailgné. Charles Squire summed up the episode thus: He asks her who she is, and she tells him that she is a king’s daughter, and that she has fallen in love with him through hearing of his exploits. Cuchulainn says that he has other things to think of than love. She replies that she has been giving her help in his battles, and will still do so; and Cuchulainn answers that he does not need any woman’s help. ‘Then’, says she, ‘if you will not have any love and help, you shall have my hatred and enmity. When you are fighting with a warrior as good as yourself, I will come against you in various shapes and hinder you, so that he shall have the advantage.’ Cuchulainn draws his sword, but all he sees is a hoodie crow sitting on a branch. He knows from this that the red woman in the chariot was the great queen of the gods.71

This might be regarded as a motive for Morgan’s love-hate relationship with the Arthurian heroes. But times have changed. The new hero, Sir Gawain, has taken up the manners of chivalry, and the Goddess must approach him in subtle ways, in the shape of the churlish challenger, the courtly host, or the tempt-

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See also J. Eadie, ‘Morain la Fée and the conclusion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Neophilologus, LII (1968), 299-305. The fulfilment of the goddess myth is the union of zoe (the mother goddess as eternal and infinite life) and bios (her son-lover, as finite and individual life). In their interpretation of medieval Christian art representing the relationship between Mary and Christ Baring and Cashford (op. cit., 608) recall a paradigm that might also be applied to the Great Goddess Morgan and the humanized Solar god Gawain. Campbell’s words also apply to Gawain’s view of Morgan: ‘Isolt, the Lady of the Lake, and the Goddess Mother of the pietá in their final sense are at one: opposed in every measure to the judgements of this day world of ours, of the Sons of Light.’ Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God IV: Creative Mythology (1968; repr. Harmondsworth 1984), p. 186. Squire, op. cit., p. 169.

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ing lady. She now has the advantage that the demigod has also been more humanized, and is therefore more liable to feel fear than his Celtic ancestor. The medieval hero, who often jilts ladies who have fallen in love with him through his fame, will sometimes react with almost psychopathic fear to situations in which he is first confronted by another warrior or by monsters, but where a female force seems to be behind them as his actual antagonist. The Gawain-poet was probably far more familiar with French romance than with Irish myth. For example, in the early thirteenth-century La Mule sans Frein there is a variation of the beheading game to which SGGK might be more directly indebted than to the Irish Bricriu’s Feast. The game takes place in a cave, the French Gauvain undergoes it in the course of a quest for a bridle, and later he spurns the love of the lady for whom he had fetched it. Such an attitude often puts him at fault in the French tradition, where each famous knight – Erec, Cligès, Launcelot, Yder, Perceval – has an ‘amie’ and his love for her is the source of his virtue. As Keith Busby argues, ‘although he is reputed to have a fondness for both adventures and ladies, he never seems capable of performing his adventures in the service of any particular lady. Herein lies his prime weakness as a hero’.72 Busby uses the term ‘hero’ in the restricted sense of ‘romance hero’ when he notes that the ultimate reason why ‘Gauvain is never quite raised to the status of a hero … may lie in his origins as a literary figure, not as a tantalisingly obscure figure in Celtic antiquity, but as a warrior who first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace’.73 However Busby tries to disqualify Weston’s thesis of the solar hero, it is compatible with his own argumentation. Whether Gawain is a sun-demigod or a human warrior, his uneasy relations with women are characteristic of the archaic epic hero. More recently Eugenio Olivares has also dismissed Gawain’s mythological connotations as speculative to focus on the English hero’s origins in the twelfth-century pseudo-histories and French romances ‘cuya marcialidad no le deja demasiado tiempo para devaneos amorosos’.74 Yet Gauvain cannot shun women altogether – his manhood should not be questioned and his French character is all too worldly to assume celibacy – so he must love them and leave them in flitting Donjuanesque affairs.75 Launcelot and Tristam typify the fin’ amans because their love is for married women, whereas Gauvain never seduces a wife in his long literary career. Even in his apparent respect for the patriarchal institution of marriage Gauvain remains an archaic hero by late twelfth-century standards. Perhaps his problem is that of remaining so archaic in the world of romance, where the ascendancy of courtly ladies loomed large in the minds of other knights. In addition, his respect for marriage proves untrue if we recall how he 72 73 74

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Keith Busby, Gauvain in Old French Literature (Amsterdam, 1980), p. 279. Ibid., p. 402. Eugenio M. Olivares Merino, Del Amor, los Caballeros y las Damas: Hacia una caracterización de la cortaysye en Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Jaén, 1998), p. 152. Eugenio Olivares explains this through Gauvain’s unfavourable contrast with the new heroes, like Launcelot or Tristam, who fought for love rather than fame: ‘Gauvain pasó así de ser casi célibe, a convertirse en una especie de Don Juan cuyo apasionamiento era insostenible.’ Ibid., p. 153.

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meddles in Yvain’s conjugal life to estrange him from his wife in Chrétien’s Yvain, and one should also bear in mind the existence of the anti-matrimonial satire De coniuge non ducenda (1225-1250), now translated as Gawain on Marriage because he is the spokesman against it.76 By the fourteenth century Gawain would be, of course, even more old-fashioned. For Chaucer, who might offer some precious few glimpses of the English Gawain before the Gawain-poet, Gawain has an aura of primitiveness, besides his proverbial courteous speech and countenance, and his famous sojourns in Fairyland. ‘That Gawayn, with his olde curteisye’ (Canterbury Tales, V, 95) is cited in The Squire’s Tale to add exotism to the outlandish knight arriving at Cambyuskan’s court with magic gifts. In some respects Gawain also belongs with the decadent epic ethos of The Knight’s Tale.77 Gawain’s adventures tend to re-enact something like Duke Theseus’s war with the Amazons, though they result in far less decisive victories, and therefore in an even more unsettled confirmation of the order of patriarchy than Theseus’s. Given the progressive decline of Gawain’s morals in French romance, continued in the Vulgate Cycle, it is little wonder to find a very inconsistent and flawed Gawain in Malory’s works, most of whose models were French. In his first knightly adventure (Book III, Chapter 7, in Caxton’s edition) Gawain chases a white hart into a castle and ends up beheading a lady ‘by misadventure’ when he was about to execute a beaten enemy who was asking for mercy. His act is found so shameful that Gawain is compelled to submit to a ladies’ court presided over by Queen Guinevere, and ‘they judged him for ever while he lived to be with all ladies, and to fight for their quarrels; and that he should be courteous, and never to refuse mercy to him that asketh mercy’. There is little in his subsequent career to show that he complied with this judgment. In the end, it is Gawain’s reckless revengefulness and incapacity to forgive his brother-in-arms and best friend Launcelot’s killing of his blood brothers by accident that lead to the most fatal division within the Round Table and to its downfall. One explanation for Gawain’s declining prestige is that Christian authors were trying to discredit him due to his status as a pagan hero.78 However, Gawain seems to be more than an archetypal sun-hero. He is, above all, the archetypal warrior-hero. His significance within Malory’s whole set of narratives manifests itself in its prefiguration in The Tale of Balin, a translation of the Suite du Merlin that may have been Malory’s earliest work. Balin’s destiny is, like Arthur’s, marked by his ability to pull out a sword (though from a scabbard, not an anvil), and his fate is to give King Pellam the Dolorous Stroke (with a spear) that would turn him into the Maimed King, whose wasteland should be redeemed through the Quest of the Holy Grail. It is in the present tale that Merlin first proclaims the Quest. Balin’s other fate is to kill his own broth76 77

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See Matthews, op. cit., p. 98. See Lee Patterson, ‘The Knight’s Tale and the Crisis of Chivalric Identity’, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London, 1991), pp. 165-230. See Matthews, ‘The Fall From Grace’ in op. cit., pp. 120-146.

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er Balan, probably a prefiguration of Launcelot’s fatal wounding of his closest brother-in-arms Gawain in Malory’s Tale of the Death of Arthur, because it is also prophesied by Merlin in this Tale of Balin. Most crucially, however, Balin’s first deed with his new sword is to behead the Lady of the Lake (in Caxton’s Book II, Chapter 3), so as to avenge his own mother’s death. Even though Balin says he is fulfilling a filial duty, Arthur cannot forgive the unseemly act and expels Balin from court. Thus Balin’s disgraceful starting point is analogous to Gawain’s, just as both are similarly involved in revenge and a kind of fratricide. The beheading of the Goddess is, like that of her representative in the adventure of SGGK, a foundational act of Malory’s Arthurian warrior. The recurrent motif of the (usually) white deer associated with the slain lady underlies the symbolic significance of the sacrifice, perhaps ultimately dating back to the replacement of the Goddess myth by the Hunter myth.79 In his first chivalrous deed Malory’s Gawain kills the lady when he was chasing a white hart belonging to her. In another Malorian episode (Book IV, Chapter 6) Arthur falls into a trap set by Morgan le Fay when he and other knights were chasing a hart. But the association deer-lady is most evident in Mary de France’s Guigemar, where the hunter-hero wounds a white hind which turns into a damsel, who in turn pronounces Guigemar’s doom to suffer for love. Indeed, Elizabeth Williams has identified a functional sequence deer-pursuit/ bride-winning in Arthurian loathly-lady stories. In her opinion, however, the deer-pursuit motif is not essential to such stories, and its main function, as in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, is to separate the hero from his companions and confront him with the dilemma on which his fate hangs, which is just as easily achieved by other means. In Gower’s ‘Tale of Florent’ it is brought about by getting him ambushed, while the Wife of Bath’s more down-market hero notoriously commits a rape, so his separation from society is effected by the mundane process of arrest.80

But then Williams has to admit that the choice of motif in poets like Chaucer and Gower ‘may well reflect quite a sophisticated artistic preference’, whereas ‘far less polished’ poems, such as the Wedding of Sir Gawain, opt for the deerhunting motif. We may conclude, therefore, that hunting the deer is in fact essential to the more popular versions of the story, an impression confirmed by the existence of popular ballads like King Henry, first collected in the eighteenth 79

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Graves’s large-scale study of the great goddess originated in a book that he was calling The Roebuck in the Thicket (see Graves, op.cit., 488). Later this became the title of a chapter in The White Goddess, where he also states that the roebuck that the primitive poet tried to hunt in the grove was ‘originally a White Hind’ (ibidem, 251). Images of hinds are among the commonest used by Paleolithic cave painters. For instance, a notable scenic frieze recently found in the cave of El Pendo, Cantabria, dated about 20,000 BC, contains some sixteen animals, most of them hinds. The scene is presided over by a large hind faced by a smaller horse bending its head below her neck. See also the symbolic connotations of ‘Doe’ in Baring and Cashford, op. cit., pp. 71-2. Elizabeth Williams, ‘Hunting the Deer: Some Uses of a Motif-Complex’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. M. Mill, J. Fellows and C. Meale (Cambridge, 1991), p. 198.

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century but related to an older Irish analogue, and The Bonny Hind, as well as the common folktale motif of ‘The Princess Transformed into Deer’.81 By a cunning role reversal, in SGGK Gawain, who is in quest, therefore a hunter, of the Green Knight, becomes the quarry himself, identified with the deer (and then with the boar and the fox) in the Exchange of Winnings. This is, in general terms, what happens in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell and other stories in which the hero (sometimes Arthur, but then it is Gawain who, as he does in SGGK, must take action) goes hunting and ends up being faced by the loathly lady’s riddle on women’s sovereignty. The myth of the Goddess does not really replace the warrior-hero myth of Gawain, nor is the Goddess completely replaced by the hero: both co-exist, though sharing their sovereignty in different degrees, according to the various tales. Thus in SGGK there seems to be a sustained attempt on the part of the hero to displace the present Goddess, and his relation to women is almost submerged, showing up most conspicuously in Gawain’s anxious diatribe against women’s wiles and his stern refusal to join Morgan’s court. In The Wedding of Sir Gawain and related stories, on the other hand, the Goddess in her loathly form states her own case, which is not to have absolute rule, but to share it: for she will give her bridegroom beauty (turning from an old hag into a young girl) in return for his love. Between these two extremes, there is a whole complex of chivalric stories in which the warrior-hero struggles in vain to overcome the shame of slaying the deer-lady, another version of the Goddess. V. True Thomas What has been argued so far suggests that texts and plots should not be regarded as isolated, water-tight compartments, or as finished works. Rather, they are read as flowing stories in a process of mutual influence, intertextuality, and constant re-interpretation. Going one step further, we will now examine the relation between SGGK and the romance of Thomas of Erceldoune,82 whose story seems to be even more departed from that of Gawain and the Green Knight than any of the stories about Gawain or related heroes considered above. In spite of their very different plots and characters, both SGGK and Thomas of Erceldoune (hereafter TE) are about the meeting of a man and the Goddess in her own mysterious realm – the sojourn in Fairyland that Chaucer 81

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King Henry and The Bonny Hind are number 32 and 50, respectively, as edited in F.J. Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Vol. I (Boston, 1882-4; repr. New York, 1965). The former is related (by Child, op. cit., p. 298) to The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, while the latter presents the motif of the slain lady (this time killed by her own brother) identified with the hind, in addition to the ‘hollin tree’ beneath which she is buried. The Irish analogue of King Henry is called The Adventures of the Sons of King Daire and it is discussed and summed up by Matthews, op. cit., pp. 97-8. ‘The Princess Transformed into Deer’ is Type 401 in Aarne, Antti & Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale (2nd revision) (Helsinki, 1981), p. 131, but here she is disenchanted by the hunter-prince, who spends three knights in a deserted castle. This is unrelated to the loathly lady story, but it may have a distant resemblance to Gawain’s stay at Hautdesert. See J.A.H. Murray, ed., The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune (London, 1875; repr. Felinfach, 1991).

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regarded as Gawain’s chief exploit. TE, and the popular ballad Thomas the Rhymer related to it, may well provide some insight into what might have been a ‘matriarchal’ version of Gawain’s adventures. The thematic link between SGGK and TE must be sought in the narrative of The Turk and Gawain, itself a possible source of TE.83 Halves of the pages of the part of the manuscript containing it are torn off, but the existence of a challenge similar to the Beheading Game in SGGK is clear enough.84 The romance opens with the arrival of the dwarfish Turk (whose name later turns out to be ‘Gromer’, like that of Ragnell’s brother in The Wedding of Sir Gawain) who defies any of the members of the Round Table ‘To give a buffet and take another’ (line 17). It is therefore possible to identify the Turk as the representative of the (feminine) Other, like the Green Knight. After the missing half page it is Gawain who has given him the blow, and he must therefore wait for the Turk’s return blow, but not before he has made him ‘three times as afraid as ever man was on earth before he sees the Court again’ (lines 39-41). The Turk then takes Gawain on a journey northwards (line 51), much like the one Gawain takes in SGGK with only the Virgin Mary as his guide and consolation.85 Moreover, the Turk is a friendly guide to Gawain, like the Fairy Queen who guides Thomas of Erceldoune into the other world, and whom he at first mistakes for the Virgin Mary. Thus, the Turk warns his hungry companion against eating the fairy victuals tempting Gawain, and offers him plenty of safe food instead (lines 83106). In the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer the Fairy Queen also offers food to the hero, though in that of King Henry and in The Wedding of Sir Gawain there is a comic reversal of the traditional nourishing role of women, and the hero finds himself forced to feed the loathly dame who has the upper hand.86 Despite the various differences, the main topics are intermingled among these narratives. For example, instead of giving Gawain a return blow like the Green 83

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See E.B. Lyle, ‘The Turk and Gawain as source of Thomas of Erceldoune’, Forum of Modern Language Studies, VI (1970a), 98-102. The reverse, however, might also have been argued plausibly. John W. Hales & F.J. Furnivall, eds., Percy’s Folio Manuscript (London, 1867-8), vol. I, pp. 88-102. Now re-edited by Thomas Hahn, Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1995). A journey north often had connotations of a journey to Hell or to the Pagan Otherworld in medieval literature. It should also be noted that in SGGK Gawain is given a guide by Bertilak, but this frightened guide, who should have led the hero down to the Green Chapel, only worries him and finally abandons him before arriving there. For food and the nourishing function as feminine symbols in medieval narratives, see C.W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Ca., 1987). Food is also important in comparing Thomas the Rhymer to The Romance of Thomas of Erceldoune, since the latter does not include the food offered by the Fairy Queen, one of the key differences (another is the loathly lady theme, not present in the ballad) leading Lyle to argue that, in spite of the chronology of extant texts, the medieval romance was derived from some early version of the eighteenth-century ballad. See E.B. Lyle, ‘The relationship between Thomas the Rhymer and Thomas of Erceldoune’, Leeds Studies in English (New Series), IV (1970b), 23-30. In the article cited above Lyle (1970a) argued that both the ballad and the romance were derived, through some intermediate version, from The Turk and Gawain.

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Knight, at the end of their adventures against giants the Turk asks Gawain to give him a sword stroke. After some protest, Gawain complies and beheads his friend, who survives miraculously like the Green Knight. The sacrificial act seems to break the spell threatening Gawain in the Otherworld signified by the taboo against eating fairy food, for at last the Turk allows him to eat. Then they release the knights that the giants kept imprisoned, and Sir Gromer the Turk offers Gawain the crown of the Isle of Man they have just liberated but, as in SGGK, the hero prefers to return to Arthur’s court. Compared to SGGK, the relation of Gawain with his Other, the Turk, is remarkably friendly and co-operative. But their contrast is much sharper with TE, where there is no ritual beheading, no fights against giants (these marvellous encounters are alluded to, though somewhat cursorily in SGGK, lines 715-23), and no rejection, but acceptance, of the invitation to stay in the fairy realm. In comparison with most chivalric romances one would find TE strangely devoid of tension, conflict and epic action. The Goddess in Thomas’s romance does not need a stalwart emissary to bring a challenge to the world of men: it is the hero who immediately falls in love with the Queen of Fairy and decides to follow her ‘whepere pou wylt to hevyne or hell’ (most unlike Cuchulainn’s hostile meeting with the Morrigú), even if her beauty was to be marred, and ‘seven times by her he lay’.87 In this very different, yet deeply related story, the hero, who is not a warrior but a poet has a fruitful communion with the Goddess, with no mediating champion to fight, and she becomes his truthful guide herself. Eventually he must return to his own mortal world (after one year, or the formulaic seven years in the ballad), but she endows him with the prophetic gift of ever speaking truly, hence the many prophecies attributed to ‘True Thomas’, as he is known in the ballads.88 It is a far cry from the feelings of guilt that Gawain takes away from the Green Chapel. Thomas’s experience, corresponding to the Sacred Marriage in the Goddess Mythology, is mutually enriching, for she will be articulated in his poetic textuality, while he participates in her eternity. VI. The Goddess reading of Gawain Our aim has not been to offer one more reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its hero, but to open to question the mythologies that have often guided readings of it. After interrogating some assumptions, a strategic use of the Great Goddess myth has pointed to different ways of interpreting Gawain’s

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Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. Murray, op. cit., p. 7, lines 107-24. The prophecies circulated independently from the extant romance texts and ballads. They are edited in Murray, ibid. However, in the ballad text that Walter Scott edited there is an ironic ending where Thomas refuses ‘the tongue that can never lie’ that the Queen of Elfland offers him as wages for serving her. He argues such a truthful tongue would be useless for buying and selling, or for speaking to noblemen and courting ladies, so she just gives him a page’s livery: ‘a coat of the even cloth and a pair of shoes of velvet green’.

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character traits in medieval romance.89 Finally, a relatively marginal Gawain adventure such as The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, and the romance of Thomas of Erceldoune, related to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by means of Sir Gawain and the Turk, have all been ‘grafted’ onto the epic hero Gawain,90 in an attempt to unsettle the most widespread perceptions of him (the perceptions that might be represented by Thomas Malory). To the extent that the analysis may have succeeded its result would be a more matriarchal, and problematic, understanding of Gawain’s status. To judge from the number of versions, manuscripts and survival in popular ballad versions, Gawain’s adventure of the Green Chapel was a minor episode in his epic life, as it has been preserved in a single manuscript and a seventeenthcentury minstrel-ballad, whereas there are four manuscripts of Thomas of Erceldoune in addition to the ballads, and several medieval and popular ballad versions of the story of Gawain’s marriage, including those of Chaucer and Gower where the hero does not bear his name. All this means that those other texts about a Gawain-like hero’s amorous adventures with Great Goddess-like ladies were probably more popular than his dealings with the Green Knight, and would easily affect readers’ responses to Morgan’s role in SGGK. Gawain’s on-going war against women’s sovereignty, a power usually embodied by a magic realm, whether ruled by Morgan or Ragnell, was a well-established fact about him, probably familiar even to fourteenth-century English readers. Whether the Gawain-poet contemplated it or not it was possible then as now to understand his honourable mission on behalf of Arthur’s Round Table as a crusade against the threat of feminine rule to the existing order. As for why the Green Knight (or Morgan le Fay) seems to be trying to horrify Guinevere in particular, by turning the talking face of his severed head towards her, ‘the derrest on the dece’ (SGGK, lines 444-5), this gesture has a counterpart in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell when the loathly lady, having married Gawain, shows monstrous table manners at the wedding banquet, ridiculing the whole Round Table and Guinevere, the exquisite hostess, in front of their guests. In spite of the queen’s pleas to Ragnell for the wedding and banquet to be held in private, Ragnell insists on doing it all openly, ‘In middis of alle the route’ (The Wedding, lines 569-80). For it is the feminine role embodied by Guinevere that the Goddess aims to unsettle in the first place: Ragnell’s proclamation of women’s sovereinté means to publicly disturb the complacency of ‘the noblest of ladies’. The effects of the Goddess reading should be borne in mind in order to grasp many readers’ response to Gawain’s 89

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We have been aware of the complications that the use of the term ‘character’ may have, especially one as complex, diverse and contradictory as Gawain’s. Yet we believe it is still possible to analyse character as an entity consisting in ‘The unity created by repetition, similarity, contrast, and implication [that] may, of course, be a unity in diversity; it still contributes to the cohesion of various traits around the proper name, on which the effect we call “character” depends.’ Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London, 1983), p. 40. For a definition of the Derridean strategy of grafting, see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (London, 1983), p. 140.

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adventures. Such effects might be compared to what Alan Sinfield called the ‘Buchanan disturbance’, that is, the influence of George Buchanan’s History of Scotland, which justifies the overthrow of a tyrannical monarch (Mary Stuart), on the conventional reading of Macbeth, which justifies violence to preserve the absolutist (and therefore, tyrannic) state of James I. For the Goddess reading might also be called ‘dissident’, even ‘perverse’, its task being ‘to work across the grain of customary assumptions and, if necessary, across the grain of the text, as it is customarily perceived’.91 The Goddess reading, however, does not replace the Arthurian one and other customary readings of Gawain’s adventures. The essential ambivalence of the Goddess prevents her myth from being read in any unique or universal way. Instead, it tends to co-exist along with other myths and their associated meanings in the same texts. It also produces meanings across different texts and stories, suggesting dialogic or intertextual relationships between them. For example, between SGGK and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell. The latter is the Gawain story that would fit most neatly into what Bakhtin called ‘the menippea as a genre’, characterised by ‘its bold and unrestrained use of the fantastic and adventure’ and ‘the creation of extraordinary situations for the provoking and testing of a philosophical idea, a discourse, a truth, embodied in the image of a wise man, the seeker of this truth’.92 The seeker in both stories is Gawain, but in The Wedding the Great Goddess takes the centre of the narrative in her most grotesque fashion, as Dame Ragnell with her lavishly described red face, bleary eyes, wide mouth and boar’s tusks, and teeth hanging over her lips (lines 231-45 and 247-56). She threatens not to save Arthur from her churlish brother Sir Gromer unless Gawain marries her having made the proclamation in all the shire and summoned all the ladies to witness it (557-61), and she finally outrages them all by gorging herself with ‘three capons and also curlues three, / And great bake metes’ with gruesome three-inch long nails at her wedding banquet (605-21). Her ‘sovereinté’ triumphs when Gawain kisses her and admits she is the one to choose when she will be fair or foul, in addition to giving himself ‘Bothe body and goodes, hart, and every dele’, all for her own, ‘for to by and sell’ (656-84).93 Chaucer’s choice of a version of this tale for a character like the Wife of Bath was very apt. Nor could many readers of SGGK fail 91

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Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford, 1992), pp. 95-108. From M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963), trans. C. Emerson, in The Bakhtin Reader, ed. Pam Morris (London, 1994), p.189. The truth tested by this satire is the patriarchal order of chivalry, set against its Other, women’s sovereignty. Such comic disorder is only ‘set to rights’ by a fairy tale ending, when Ragnell says Gawain’s wisdom has freed her and Gromer from a magic spell, and she becomes an obedient and seemly wife to him; a happy end whose conviction is undermined by the comment that ‘She livid withe Sir Gawen but yeris five; / That grevid Gawen alle his life, / I telle you securly. / In her life she grevid him nevere; / Therfor was never woman to him lever’ (820-4): was it necessary for the story to add this detail about their short married life? Does it imply that she died or that they separated after five years? In any case, it is suggested that Gawain was used to being grieved by women, as Ragnell was his favourite only because she did not do so.

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to recall this extremely popular Gawain story when they followed his questing path through the Wirrals of Cheshire and his chamber encounters with the Lady of Hautdesert. Their suspicion about the actual authority of the chivalric discourse he embodies is confirmed when his text shows fissures on his admission that it is not unusual for him to be made a fool through ‘wyles of wymmen’. Thus the unflinching epic warrior, the lady-slayer, the reckless avenger and the Goddess’s fool interrogate each other’s claim to truth in all the Gawain stories. University of Oviedo Campus de Humanidades ‘El Milán’ c/. Teniente Alfonso Martinez, s/n. 33011 Oviedo SPAIN

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