Video essay link;https://youtu.be/TuIUdrpys1U?si=sqHnY9qlR67jYScs
The Essay:
Gawain and the Green Knight is one of my favorite Arthurian legends, I typically make a point of reading it around Christmas and new years as different translations either place the opening scene as a Christmas, Yule, or a New Year’s Feast. I felt for my first video essay of the New Year, I should start the year right with a beheading.
The story of Gawain and the Green Knight begins with a Feast in which a green man approaches the knights of the round table with a challenge. The challenge is completely meaningless to the knight himself as he turns out to be inexplicably immortal, and so the purpose of his challenge is purely to test the mettle of king Arthur’s court with a frightening display. This is sometimes told as the work of Morgan Le Fay sending the knight specifically to challenge Arthur and scare the shit out of Guinevere because fuck Guinevere.
Guinevere, a lot like Helen of Troy, gets way too much attention from scholars and artists. I’m with Morgana, fuck Guinevere. Literally every man she interacts with can do better and there are so many women in arthurian legends we don’t talk about enough.
So anyway, Gawain being young dumb and….you know…is the one to hop up and challenge the green knight because he wants to prove himself in front of the other, more experienced knights. Gawain is basically a nepotism case similar to a prince Hal type character but without a sexy Falstaff.
Anywhoozle, the knight challenges Gawain to strike him with an axe, one blow against the green knight to be repaid in a years time. Now, Gawain could just knick the dude and in a year just a get a knick in return, some lesson about mercy, or he could kill him and the Green Knight doesn’t come back at all. But, as said, the green knight turns out to be immortal so when Gawain goes for the killing blow, lobbing off the knights head, the knight picks it up and says, ‘see you in a year’.
Gawain spends the next year shitting his pants. He doesn’t really prepare because he assumes he’ll die, and he goes back and forth on his commitment, ultimately deciding upon the honorable action of going out to meet the knight as promised.
It’s a death sentence and he knows it, but if he wants to be a true knight in the spirit of chivalry, he can’t go back on his word. He even considers how being merciful could have gotten him out of this whole thing in the first place.
But he’s not really all that valorous just yet, he’s still a dumb kid and he still doesn’t want to die. He meanders around telling people about his plight kind of fishing for an out. Near the green chapel where Gawain is set to meet the knight he comes upon a castle where the Lord invites him to stay as he awaits the approaching date.
The lord proposes a bargain to Gawain: he goes hunting every day, and he will give Gawain whatever he catches, on the condition that Gawain give him whatever he may gain during the day; Gawain accepts. Then the lady of the house shows up and tries to force herself onto him. When the lord returns and gives Gawain the deer he has killed, Gawain kisses him without explaining how he gained a kiss. The lady comes each day and each night Gawain ends up kissing the Lord without explaining why. On the third day, the lady offers Gawain a magic girdle that will protect him from all harm. Finally temped, or in some tellings continuing to be tempted by the lady, he takes it. But when the Lord returns he doesn’t divulge having gained the sash, he only kisses him.
Gawain goes out to meet the knight with the sash hidden on him, thinking he has found a way to trick the knight out of completing Gawain’s fate.
The knight, several times, moves to behead him but stops at the last moment, causing Gawain to angrily tell him to deliver the blow. The knight does, but only causing a slight cut. He then reveals himself as the Lord of the castle, aware of Gawain’s deceitful behavior with his wife and his having the sash. The knight assures Gawain that the whole thing was meant to be a test, cooked up by Morgan Le Fey, and not initially intended for Gawain and they leave on good terms, though Gawain is ashamed for wasting everyone’s time and acting stupidly.
He goes on to wear the sash as his symbol of humility.
JRR Tolkien called the green knight the “most difficult to character to interpret” in Arthurian legend and CS Lewis called him “as vivid and concrete as any image in literature”. There’s never really been any agreement by scholars about why the green knight is the green knight. Some say he’s cursed by Morgan Le Fay, some say he’s a Representation of the green man, paganism, or Satan.
No one can really agree on why he’s entirely green. His skin, hair, clothes are green, sometimes his horse is even green. Sometimes he’s a giant.
In Egyptian symbolism I can tell you that green skin is associated with Osiris and rebirth, which is also a common pagan interpretation, but green skin is also associated with witchcraft at the time point. So who’s to say.
His name is either revealed to be Bertilak, or Bredbeddle, sometimes he’s an ally of Morgan Le Fay, sometimes he’s an ally of Arthur. Sometimes he’s interpreted to represent Christ.
The other story featuring the Green Knight which is distinct from Gawain , King Arthur and King Cornwall, is a somewhat confusing tale that comes from the Percy Folio, a collection of Arthurian and medieval tales that was largely ripped up to use to start fires. The ballad is only about half finished and involves a magician king of Cornwall who Guinevere might have had a kid with and that Guinevere says has a better round table than Arthur does and in general is better than Arthur, so Arthur gets rightfully upset about that.
The green knight, in this story, is an ally of Arthur and fighting a sprite, Burlow Beanie, on his behalf. The sprite had apparently been spying on Camelot.
This story really doesn’t make anything about the green knight any clearer. In it Gawain is a womanizer which is apparently consistent with 17th century French interpretations of the characters.
Common modern interpretations of the green knight involve a focus on the knight’s relationship with Gawain and their frequent kissing and fondness for each other, with frequent reference in text to their respective attractiveness, described as a queer expression of male intimacy. While kissing was common between men at the time of the ballad the church was beginning to tamper down on homosexual versus homosocial expression in media and Gawain is thought to explore that turning point. Gawain is argued to be a passive, womanly figure by some feminist and queer sources, and many feminist interpretations of the story focus on the narrative that women ultimately control the flow of the story and its themes while the men are victim to their codes of masculine behavior.
Tangential,
I also learned because of researching this that Medieval scholars believed beavers had an agreement with Satan and paid him tributes in exchange for spiritual freedom from Christianity. Happy new year.
A mascaron is an ornamental face, usually human but not always, and it is generally thought to have been a deterrent to evil spirits.
Whether this is the actual intended purpose, like with much cultural appropriation in history, is actually unclear.
As an art nouveau nerd, mascarons saw a resurgence in both art nouveau and beaux arts starting in the mid 1800s on as purely decorative features. But the green man is one of the most prominent motifs of mascarons in art and architecture throughout history.
Professor Ronald Hutton traces the green man to India, with evidence that the imagery traveled Through the middle east to christian Europe during the medieval ages where it became a staple of illuminated texts, with many European descended people unaware of the cultural appropriation. Early examples of green men from the second century have been located in modern Iraq and Lebanon.
Considering the Green Knight is a late 14th century Arthurian story, it’s likely that our difficulty with understanding the foliate figure comes from a lost cultural touchstone of the crusade period.
Considering that many grail stories were, typically, crusade stories associated with Arthur, the green knight could be symbolic of Muslim and moorish culture impacting Britain.
In that vein, the Green Knight can be seen as a similar figure to the Muslim foe in the story of the Fisher King.
The story, as told by Joseph Campbell in his program Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth; the Fisher King assumes, as a Christian visited by an angel, that he is the only individual to hold or protect a grail, attacking a Muslim on sight and killing him, only to learn that the Muslim man also carried a heavenly grail.
Many Arthurian stories allude to a greater presence of diversity in medieval Europe than what many modern people would assume and the Green Knight could be a reference to a knight of middle eastern descent.
This is of course speculative based on artist interpretations of the green knight using the green man motif.
The green knight isn’t the only green figure in English folklore; from the 12th century predating the green knight story are The Green children of Woolpit.
I’m intrigued by this story shedding more light on the significance of ‘green’ because this isn’t a myth like something Arthurian; it’s more a local curiosity, with near contemporary sources citing first hand accounts.
During the reign of King Stephen, during harvest time one year, two children were said to appear in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, beside one of the wolf pits that gave the village its name.
The children, brother and sister, were said to be green skinned, in foreign clothes; They spoke in an unknown language and only ate broad beans. They were taken in and eventually became willing to eat other food and speak English, and lost their green coloring.
The boy died young, shortly after the people of the village had decided to baptize the children, but the girl grew up, married, and gave some explanation about where she and her brother come from.
Sir Richard De Calne of Wilkes wrote a first hand account of the green children and is the main named source of those who wrote about the children, claiming to have taken them into his manor, where the girl was a servant for many years. It’s been determined from first hand sources that she may have been given the name Agnes.
She allegedly had said that she and her brother had been herding their father’s cattle when there had been a terrible noise and they had followed the cattle toward caves, eventually becoming lost and finding themselves at the wolf pit. Agnes said she had come from a place where everything and everyone was green like her, she described living in a near constant state of twilight and darkness, and according to one account she called her home Saint Martin’s land.
Now, we could maybe make the argument that people in medieval Briton referred to people of olive skin tone or clear foreign bearing as green skinned. There’s also arguments that have been made that the children were clearly of some indigenous origin. Medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argued this was a skewed comparison between the English and the indigenous Britons.
Or.
We can accuse them of being fairies.
Many people have accused them of being fairies, particularly intrigued by the story of their travel through magical caves and coming out somehow in England. They were green because they represent life and death like the green man. And the eating of beans is further evidence of paranormal interference because beans are the food of the dead.
Beans are the food of the dead.
Scholars in medieval analyses keep saying things like this like it’s common knowledge and when I try to find sources it can get weirdly cyclical of just a group of scholars being like ‘yeah, we all know that’. Just like how we all know beavers as a group made a deal with Satan. Beans are the food of the dead.
In a few retellings of the story the children may even be aliens, though most stories point to them being otherworldly in some vague way. The green children of Woolpit have inspired a lot of literature and folktales, as you can imagine, through there does seem to be an account of a real event somewhere in there buried under superstition.
Agnes, who is believed to have been the girl, was said to have grown up completely normal–surely disappointing those who kept tabs on her. She married a clergyman, Richard Barre, and by all accounts there wasn’t much to note about her except that Richard De Calne of Wilkes’ household accounts refer to her as ‘very wanton’ and ‘impudent’.
So is the argument to be made that Green was a cultural shorthand by medieval writers for a foreign or indigenous person, or is it strictly otherworldly? The Green Knight is, after all, beheaded and survives; but, does the enchantment of Morgan Le Fay actually have anything to do with his being called green by the English or is this a lost idiom?
I feel like there’s so much more to explore in this space in terms of how the English, particularly while sculpting their history in recording the Matter of Britain through Arthurian legend, characterized other ethnicities. And how have modern authors and medievalists and other historians reinforced those images without fully understanding them?
One last take I’ll leave you with today on the color green and its literary and social significance is Green Sickness, described often in Shakespeare as the plight of maidens. Green sickness was first described in the 1500s in medical texts as a terrible illness which befell largely women once they reached puberty. Also called Virgin Sickness, this is also the idea behind someone inexperienced being called green.
Personally, I had always interpreted that naively as a leaf being young and green, and not a comment on female qualities. Green sickness, initially, could of course affect men but as the social connotations wore on, ‘green men’ were seen as weak and womanly. Unpatriotic, foreign.
It could very well be that the green children of Woolpit were called green because of their foreignness, their age or nutritional deficiencies–they were noted for eating only broad beans after all. The green boy died, and his being called green could reflect his apparent illness. The green girl, Agnes, was noted for being ‘very wanton’ before being married off to a clergyman and silenced this way. And I phrase it as such because as time wore on, green sickness came to be associated with any love longing, yearning, or sexual interest outside of the social expectations of women.
The common cure for a woman with green sickness in the middle ages was to stop her from learning, schools were clearly just stressing her fragile countenance, and to marry her off quickly. Pregnancy was considered the number one cure for Green sickness for quite a while, because green sickness referred to what we would call iron deficiency anemia and stopping a girl’s period was one way to ensure she had a lot of blood in her. Women with ‘green sickness’ were often described as weak, frail, having headaches, and it was also associated with pica, eating non food stuff–all signs of iron deficiency.
Moreover, a cure for Green sickness aside from pregnancy was eating concoctions made in iron pots or with small iron shavings in it–inexplicably curing the physical manifestations of green sickness.
The psychological impact of puberty, however, needed social engineering and before a woman could express possibly divergent sexual interests; she needed to be impregnated to prevent it.
As I had mentioned, English society was tamping down on homosexual versus homosocial expression at the time of the Green Knight’s writing. So, to the idea that green was strongly tied to sexual impulses against common social acceptance, the queer scholars have a solid point about the green knight.
It’s not necessarily that green had one meaning but that green has too many. Green sickness is also why witches, what we would consider emancipated or unmarried women, were depicted as green. Why fairies could be repelled by iron. And if people of middle eastern origins were called green because of association with the green man motif, liberal use of green symbolism as being against Christian values clearly impacted racial stereotypes as well.
Green is just a very loaded color.
Read Gawain and the Green Knight on Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14568/14568-h/14568-h.htm
Some Sources:
Adamson M.W., Food in Medieval Times, Westport 2004.
Bartlett R., England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225, Oxford 2000.
Brewer D., The Colour Green, in: A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, eds. D. Brewer, J. Gibson, Woodbridge 1997.
Brewer K., Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages, London 2016.
Briggs K.M., The Fairies and the Realms of the Dead, ‘Folklore’ 1970, 81.
Clark J., ‘Small, Vulnerable ETs’: The Green Children of Woolpit, ‘Science Fiction Studies’ 2006, 33.
Clark J., Martin and the Green Children, ‘Folklore’ 2006, 117.
Clarke C.A.M., Signs and Wonders: Writing Trauma in Twelfth-Century England, ‘Reading Medieval Studies’ 2009, 35.
Cohen J.J., Green Children from Another World, or the Archipelago in England, in: Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages. Archipelago, Island, England, ed. J.J. Cohen, Basingstoke 2008.
Harris P., The Green Children of Woolpit: a 12th Century Mystery and its Possible Solution, ‘Fortean Studies’ 1998, 4.
Hutchings J., Folklore and Symbolism of Green, ‘Folklore’ 1997, 108.
Aliactast 