Gawain accepts, beheading the Knight only to watch him pick it up again and walk away as if nothing happened. Despite that macabre setup, the audience naturally expects certain elements in a King Arthur-related tale: shining armor, castles, perhaps even a joust or two.
We first meet Gawain Dev Patel in a brothel, woken up thanks to a cold bucket of water thrown by Essel Alicia Vikander. Other pieces, like the halo-backed crowns Arthur Sean Harris and Guinevere Kate Dickie wear are more symbolic, recalling the gold halos depicted around the heads of saints in paintings of the period. Similarly, the pagans and Christians after them began to see that spring followed winter every year just as life may follow death as Christ demonstrated through the Resurrection.
It seems like many other Christians in the fourteenth century, the Gawain-poet may have viewed the reliance on life and growth to follow after winter every year as a beautiful analogy to the Christian view of the human condition.
To demonstrate the temporal significance of the festivals, the Doels write, 'The Mummers plays recorded over the past years have largely been intended for performance at the Christmas period and so have the Sword Plays of the north-east of England, in Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland' Somehow when these folk festivals are seen as an analogue to the Christian idea of the human condition they cease to appear quite so savage, as Lewis eloquently put it.
Kittredge is a particularly important scholar in the search for the answer to why the Gawain-poet made the Green Knight green because he examined many old Irish and Welsh tales to find a source for SGGK instead of investigating medieval folk-festivals. Kittredge cites a specific Irish tale known as The Champion's Bargain which is a smaller story found in the great epic saga of Fled Bricrend or Bricriu's Feast.
The carl had 'upon him the bushiness of a great tree the size of a winter-fold in which thirty yearlings could find shelter' p. The carl apparently means to challenge the men to test their courage by offering to allow any man to behead him if the carl could give a succeeding blow to the champion the next day. The men answer the carl's call but two of the men flee after beheading the carl and only Cuchulinn awaits to lose his head when the carl returns the next day.
The carl says to Cuchulinn after he brings the blunt side of the axe to Cuchulinn's neck without harming the hero, 'Rise, O Cuchulinn! Of the warriors of Ulster or of Ireland , none is found to be compared with you in valor or in prowess or in truth' p. After the carl proclaims Cuchulinn the greatest warrior of Ireland , he reveals himself to be Curoi mac Daire.
Kittredge immediately following his translation of the old Irish story writes, 'No argument is needed to show that The Champion's Bargain is the same story as the Challenge in SGGK ' p.
Kittredge points out that in both stories the challenge is gigantic, the challenger arrives during a feast and the challenger spares the knight. There can be little doubt that Kittredge has found a definite source for many of the characteristics of SGGK. However, the astute reader will recognize there are also several characteristics of the poem and in particular of Green Knight which are missing in The Champion's Bargain. Kittredge apparently noted that the Irish tale is not a perfect match because when refuting Chambers' interpretation of the Green Knight as a vegetation deity Kittredge also gives an account of a Welsh tale called The Green Man of Noman Land.
In this tale, Jack plays a game with an unknown man and wins until finally the unknown man wins. The unknown man reveals himself to be the Green Man of Noman's Land and that Jack must come to find him in one year or else he will behead Jack. This story incorporates the challenge and also supplements the green coloring and quest to find the castle during the winter as Gawain must do in SGGK.
About this tale, Kittredge admits: 'It shows how easily the developed Irish literary form of the Challenge might have been modified under influence of some current folk-tale of a quest with which it had originally only a slight and accidental resemblance' p. Another version of this tale is called The Green Knight of Knowledge and this story depicts a Green Knight who bids a man to find his dwelling in one year or else the man will lose his life.
Matthews suggests this story to be quite common because very similar versions were told in Ireland and Scotland. Kittredge notes that these stories help to identify the challenger as green but he notes there is no mention of a connection to nature as Chambers claims.
Kittredge openly denies the mythologizing of the Green Knight as a green man or nature god, he writes:. Whoever gave him that [green] color first, whether the English poet or some French predecessor, was influenced, of course, by current folk-lore, and that folk-lore may have descended to the innovator in question from primeval ideas about the forces of nature.
So much we must grant, but that is all. Neither the Irish author of The Champion's Bargain nor any of his successors in the line had any notion of associating the challenger with Celtic 'probably arboreal' deities, Arician groves, spirits of vegetation, or the annual death and rebirth of the embodied vital principle.
However, much to Mr. Kittredges' dismay many scholars after him have only strengthened the interpretation of the Green Knight as a nature deity with more factual research pertaining to the 'primeval folk-lore' to which Kittredge refers in the preceding quote. William Nitze's rebuttal to Kittredge sheds much light on the search for the meaning of the Green Knight because he argues that a writer may use a motif or theme without understanding the significance of the motif.
Nitze begins his essay by asking the reader to consider a scenario where the Gawain-poet and his Irish and Welsh predecessors may have used a vegetation myth without the knowledge of the origins of the myth.
Nitze jokingly asks how many people light a Christmas tree or burn a Yule log without having any notion of the original significance. To demonstrate that the Challenger motif may have a vegetative origin, Nitze examined a particular version of the Green Knight challenger story known as Perslesvaus. This story also uses the Waste Land motif because a hero must behead the challenger and come back a year later to receive a blow from another challenger.
Lancelot fulfills the oath by returning a year later but dodges the blow. A lady rules that Lancelot did fulfill the oath and the waste land is restored to health. Nitze interestingly explains the second challenger as an example of the Mummer plays which depict characters representing a nature god instead of literally being the nature god.
Nitze writes, 'The garlanded youths in Perslesvaus are not gods, they are the human representatives of one. They are, so to say, the actors in the play' p. Therefore, the land is restored to life instead of the challenger which is a variation on the Sword dances and Mummers festivals. When interpreting Perslesvaus , Loomis supports Nitze by writing, 'In these features we may properly detect traces of a myth in which year after year a golden chapeleted god is slain, and thereby his successor renews the fertility of the land and the welfare of the folk' p.
Nitze admits that while Perslesvaus is a vegetation motif with little need for interpretation, SGGK the Irish predecessor The Champion's Bargain only contain images of the vegetation motif.
Nitze argues, 'But, unless I am completely in error, vestiges of it are still to be seen in The Champion's Bargain 's reference to the "bushiness of a tree" upon the carl's head, in the dramatic contrast between winter and verdure in SGGK , and surely in the name and dress of the Green Knight' p.
To strengthen the interpretation, Nitze presents Kittredge's own admittance that the Green Knight does resemble the literary nature gods. Kittredge actually writes, "That the particular guise in which our Green Knight shows himself, owes something to another creature of the primitive imagination or primitive philosophy. He may have taken on, in part, the qualities of a Wood-Deity or Demon of Vegetation' p. With this confession, Kittredge manages to allow scholars to interpret the Green Knight as a nature deity because he does in fact resemble one.
Because Kittredge admitted a connection between the Green Knight and the primitive nature gods, Nitze concludes that the Gawain-poet may have written his poem with or even without the knowledge of vegetation myths.
Nitze writes:. The premise of the new hypothesis is the realization that such stories as SGGK cannot be understood unless we are willing to keep our minds open to the idea that, in addition to literary documents, popular ceremonies and rites may be of first-class importance in considering not only the derivation of a story but also the significance or "myth" that originally produced it. The fact that "mythologizing" has been discredited is due to abuse and not to any fundamental mistake in human reasoning.
Nevertheless this interpretation is valid because the Green Knight resembles the literary and folk-festival representations of the nature gods. Although the characters of the folk-festivals prove an excellent analogue for the Green Knight, researchers also investigate the mysterious foliate heads which appear in medieval churches. The meaning of the foliate heads is less understood than any literary source or festival because the heads cannot speak to us.
Like all art, the foliate heads carved in stone and wood are subject to the interpretation of the viewer. In , Lady Raglan offered an interpretation of the foliate heads she found in medieval churches as 'green men.
Raglan reports that these green man carvings are located in 23 counties across England. Cave spent years studying roof bosses on medieval churches and cathedrals. Cave found that although foliage was a regular theme in medieval churches, he found some roof bosses which were none other than the green men faces as Raglan coined them. He writes, "The foliate head grows commoner as time goes on and there are hundreds of examples on bosses of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries' p.
Like Raglan, Cave speculates that these foliate heads may come from the folk-festivals which were certainly a contemporary of the roof bosses Cave found in many churches and cathedrals. Cave writes, 'Many of these figures recall the Jack-in-the-Green which was a familiar figure on May Day in England fifty years ago, and which may possibly still survive in some places. Jack-in-the-Green was no doubt a survival of pre-Christian tree worship which had filtered down through the Middle Ages even into the nineteenth century' p.
Cave continues to speculate by writing: 'It seems therefore that it is quite a possible suggestion that the sprouting faces and kindred figures may have been intended for fertility figures or charms of some sort by their carvers' p. Interestingly enough, Cave made the connection between the foliate heads he found with the Jack-in-the-Green figures independently of Raglan's findings. Although both Raglan and Cave thoroughly demonstrate the widespread popularity of the green man in medieval churches, they do not answer the reason a pagan archetypal fertility symbol occurs so often in religious buildings.
Cave suggests the foliate heads are indeed connected to the folk-festivals 'when men dressed up in greenery' p. The Doels note that while the foliate heads rose in popularity during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there also was a major event which happened prior to the popularity explosion in Europe of the green man in carvings.
They write, 'It is perhaps significant that the Green Man as a symbol of the life force found greatest representation in ecclesiastical buildings after the Black Death, a virulent and deadly plague which cut the population by a third and destroyed communities' p. The Doels report that the green man foliate heads were not used as grotesques or gargoyles, they write, 'It is unknown for the Green Man to be carved on exterior corbel tables amongst a number of other "grotesques", presumably with the function of warding off evil' The Doels suggest the foliate heads may represent God the creator opening His mouth while creation literally grows abundantly out.
I think the color green has a large significance in the story. The Green Knight that appears before the King is not wielding traditional weapons, but instead carries a holly branch and an axe made of wood.
He is symbol of nature in every sense. The color green is also connected to the place where the Green Knight commands Sir Gawain to meet him. The Green Chapel is the most wild, natural places in the story. All green things in this poem seem to have a connection with nature. The Green Knight is nature and that is why he is immune to death. He himself is a representation of nature, and this is why he cannot die. The pentangle symbolizes the virtues to which Gawain aspires: to be faultless in his five senses; never to fail in his five fingers; to be faithful to the five wounds that Christ received on the cross; to be strengthened by the five joys that the Virgin Mary had in Jesus the Annunciation, Nativity, Resurrection, Ascension, and Assumption ; and to possess brotherly love, courtesy, piety, and chastity.
The side of the shield facing Gawain contains an image of the Virgin Mary to make sure that Gawain never loses heart. It is made out of green silk and embroidered with gold thread, colors that link it to the Green Knight. She claims it possesses the power to keep its wearer from harm, but we find out in Part 4 that the girdle has no magical properties.
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