And whan sir Mordred saw kynge Arthur he ran untyll him with hys swerde drawyn in hys honde, and there kyng Arthur smote sir Mordred undir the shylde with, with a foyne of his spear, thorowoute the body more than a fadom. And whan sir Mordred felte that he had hys dethys wounde he threste hymselff with the myght that he had upp to the burre of kyng Arthurs speare, and ryght so he smote his fadir, kygne Arthure, with hys swerde holdynge in both hys hondys, uppon the syde of the hede, that the swerde perced the helmet and the tay of the brayne. (Malory, 1237)

There can only be one ending to the Arthurian saga - the battle on Salisbury Plain, where Arthur and Mordred, father and son, kill and are killed by each other. Camelot lies in ruins behind them, and the King himself is taken to Avalon on a bier by three, weeping queens, for healing or burial. He becomes rex quondam, rex futurus of a kingdom that can no longer exist. But what if the story could end differently? What if Guinevere’s infidelity could be erased, and its terrible consequences with it? What if there could be a happy ending to the saga?

In her groundbreaking essay on reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as revisionist history, Fisher argues that was the anonymous author’s intent in writing his poem. She suggests that he ‘tries to revise Arthurian history in order to make it come out right’(138), and that he accomplishes it by marginalizing its female figures and by decentring their disruptive influence. Although her argument holds true for both Guinevere and Morgan, it falls apart when it comes to the Lady, whose central placement in and central importance to the text is undeniable. She may work in confined spaces, she may be unnamed, but her power over Gawain and his fate is undeniable. Indeed, as I will argue in this essay, Gawain’s real test is one of sexual fidelity, administered by her to him within the castle. Ultimately, his successful negotiation of it (even taking into account his slight slip on the third morning) is the poet’s way of allowing Camelot itself to pass the test that it fails with such tragic results.

With that in mind, we need to look very carefully at the events of the third fitt of the poem. At the end of the second fitt, Bertilak proposes a game that he and Gawain can play, if the knight is amenable. For the next three mornings, he will go hunting in the woods, while Gawain will remain in bed at the castle accompanied by the Lady. Whatever he gets, he will give to Gawain, and vice versa. Gawain agrees to this, and they spend the next three days accordingly. For the first two mornings, Gawain manages to escape without offending Bertilak or the Lady and without compromising his own honour. He gets kisses from her, and passes them onto his host, who is greatly amused. However, on the last day, he makes a small mistake by accepting a green girdle from her, which she swears will save his life. This, he holds back from Bertilak, seeing it as a means of salvation.

Although the game may seem designed to try Gawain’s fidelity to a promise, its sexual aspect is important to a view of this poem as revisionist in nature. The temptation that the Lady poses to him is not only a test of his honour and his faithfulness, but of his sexual self-control as well. This emerges strongly on the last day when

that prynces of pris depresed hym so thikke,

Nurned hym so neghe the thred, that nede him bihoved

Other lach ther hir luf other lodly refuse. (1770-1772)

Because of this, this scene needs to be read as the Gawain poet’s attempt to negotiate the thicket of courtly love, to find a way to the problem that Lancelot could not solve in his relationship with the queen. Knights were supposed to have ladies for whom they fought in tournaments and battles, to whom they gave tokens of their affection and with whom they flirted. At the same time, these relationships were never meant to become sexual, although they obviously did. Gawain faces this dilemma in this fitt. On the one hand, Gawain cannot insult the Lady by rejecting her advances, because that would be ‘crathayn’ (1773). On the other, he cannot accept them because that would be ‘synne’(1774) and treachery against his host. Fortunately, Gawain manages to find a way of refusing her without insulting her by laying aside her attempts at seduction with ‘luf-laghyng a lyt’ (1777). He manages to find a way to satisfy the requirements of courtly love without taking it to a sinful extreme. In this, he succeeds in a way that Lancelot does not with Guinevere, and escapes without sinning. Indeed, his only fault in this scene seems to be accepting the green girdle from her with the significance the Lady attaches to it and I will return to the significance of that later in this essay.

However, what of the Lady herself? Who is she and what is her importance to the larger Arthurian saga? Is there any connection between her and Guinevere? Interestingly, many critics have argued that she is the other aspect of Morgan, who sent the Green Knight to court, whose dual nature is evident in a number of Arthurian texts. To cite the most obvious example, she works her entire life to destroy Arthur in revenge for Uther’s murder of Gorlois, yet takes him to Avalon for healing when he is on the point of death. She is both healer and destroyer in the saga, and the Gawain poet might be making this split manifest.

Nonetheless, although I think Morgan’s presence in the text is significant and will discuss it in more depth later, I have to concur with Fries’ sensible suggestion that the Lady is not Morgan but may be intended as a parallel for her:

As a powerful shapeshifter, who has already transformed Bertilak into the Green Knight, she can change the appearance of others as well as herself; but nowhere in her history can she be two people in the same place at the same time. The Lady, nevertheless, with her pronounced tendencies toward luxuria [Latin: lechery--MWT], seems a likely candidate for Morgan's fate: a double, perhaps, deliberately designed by the knowing poet.

As Morgan’s textual twin, therefore, she should be seen as the person administering the real test to Gawain. In the same way as Morgan devises the test of Camelot’s fidelity and uses her supernatural powers to transform Bertilak into the Green Knight, the Lady administers it by her sexual powers.

Finally, we need to consider the Lady’s connection to Guinevere. If the potentially adulterous situation between Gawain and the Lady is the poet’s attempt to rewrite Guinevere and Lancelot’s adultery in order to ‘save’ Camelot, then there must be some connection made between the two women within the text. In the Lady’s, we are told that she is ‘wener than Wenore’(945) the first time we meet her at the castle. As Fisher points out, this is not simply a conventional aesthetic observation, although the formula was common particularly in French poetry. (144) It is a means of linking Guinevere and the Lady from the outset of the piece, and shaping our reaction to the events in the bedchamber.

Similarly, it is significant that Morgan’s sending of the Green Knight to the court has another, more personal motive behind it: ‘for to have greved Gaynour and gart hir to dyghe’(2460). Although this revelation seems somewhat absurd, considering that Guinevere was calmed with a few words by Arthur when the Green Knight did appear, it is nonetheless important to our reading of the poem as revisionist. At the very point when the reason for the test is revealed, Guinevere is mentioned and she is given as a central reason that the Green Knight was sent to court. It does not take much of a logical leap to see that, if Guinevere had indeed died, she could not have committed adultery and Camelot would have been saved. Nor does it take much of a stretch of the imagination to see that the poet is clearly evoking the story of Camelot’s failure at the moment when it has been weighed by the Green Knight and found only slightly wanting.

As I have mentioned, Gawain’s one and only mistake is to accept the green girdle from the Lady. But what does the green girdle itself represent and how does it tie into the poet’s revisionist project? Gawain receives it as ‘juel for the jopardé that him jugged was’(1856), but that is not the spirit in which the Lady gives it to him. The exchange begins with the Lady demanding some parting gift by which to remember him, and him refusing to give her one because it would not do her honour to ‘dele yow for drurye that dawed bot naked’(1805). It begins with an exchange of lover’s gifts, and not of supernatural defenses against the Green Knight. Similarly, the poet himself refers to it as ‘luf-lace’(1874) a few lines later. Clearly, the green girdle is meant to represent not only infidelity to a promise, but sexual infidelity as well.

Moreover, the colour of the girdle is significant, if we are to view it in this manner. In medieval times, green was the colour of infidelity and fickleness in love. This symbolism that survives today in Henry VIII’s famous Greensleeves:

Greensleeves was all my joy

Greensleeves was my delight,

Greensleeves was my heart of gold,

And who but my lady greensleeves.

Your vows you've broken, like my heart,

Oh, why did you so enrapture me?

Now I remain in a world apart

But my heart remains in captivity.

Going back to the idea of this being Gawain’s real test, the Green Knight himself suggests this interpretation of the piece in his revelatory speech at the end of the fourth fitt. He implies that Gawain’s real test comes on the three mornings he spends with the Lady in the bed-chamber by linking the two feints with the two mornings Gawain kept his word, and the gash with the third morning on which the Knight was faithless to his promise:

At the thrid thou fayled thore

And therfore that tappe ta the. (2357-2358)

Interestingly, he goes on to clarify why he only gave Gawain a ‘tappe’ for breaking his oath by holding back the girdle:

But that was for no wylyde werke, ne wowyng nauther,

But for ye lufed your lyf; the lasse I yow blame. (2367-2368)

If Gawain had acted out of greed or lust rather than self-preservation, would the Green Knight have lopped off his head completely?

The answer to this question lies in what the Green Knight and the Green Chapel represent. There has been much debate about these issues with various critics seeing him as a dying vegetation god, a Christ-like figure, a demon, a sidhe. Although all those interpretations are interesting, these scholars seem to overlook an important fact about his colour: in medieval times, green symbolised unfaithfulness and fickleness in love, as I have already mentioned.

Nonetheless, the real clue to his symbolic importance lies in his connection with Morgan, Arthur’s powerful, vengeful half-sister. He tells Gawain that he was transformed into the Green Knight and sent to Camelot ‘thurgh myght of Morgne laFaye, that in my hous lenges’ (2446). Morgan is a famous tester of chastity and sexual fidelity in the Arthurian myths. The most famous example of this comes at a banquet where she sends a horn out of which only a faithful wife may drink and survive. As an adulteress, Guinevere cannot do so, and only escapes through the intervention of Lancelot, who denounces it as an insult to the queen.

However, it is one of Morgan’s lesser-known tests of fidelity, which links up beautifully with this poem and demonstrates the poet’s intent very clearly. Tolkien discusses it in his footnotes to his translation of the poem:

To annoy Guenever and the knights of the table she built a chapel in the valley, from which no one who entered might escape who had been faithless in love. Several of Arthur’s knights were made prisoners but were released by Lancelot. (116)

It does not take a leap of the imagination to see a connection between Morgan’s chapel and the Green Chapel within the poem. With that in mind, it is doubtful that Gawain would have left the chapel alive if he had given into the significant temptations offered by the Lady.

Moreover, at its beginning and its end, the poem signals its preoccuption with the fatal consequences of infidelity. It is framed by references to another famous catastrophe caused by illicit love:

Sithen the sege and assaut watz sesed at Troye,

The burgh brittened and brent to brondez and askez

. . .

And fer over the French flod Felix Brutus

On many bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he settez

with wynne. (1-2, 13-15)

Although the poet ostensibly mentions the fall of Troy as a part of Britain’s fictional and mythical history, the implications of the poet framing his story with allusions to this event go far beyond an uncomplicated attempt at establishing the kingdom’s background. Troy burnt ‘to brondez and askez’ because Paris could not overcome his adulterous love for Helen of Sparta, because of their infidelity. The parallels with Camelot’s downfall are obvious.

Taking that a step further, Gawain needs to be seen as standing for Camelot within the text. He is not acting as a private individual, but as the public representative of his society. The Green Knight stresses this in his explanatory speech at the end of the poem, where he says his test was a means of verifying ‘the gret renoun of the Rounde Table’(2458). As I have already shown, the real test takes place within the castle and not within the chapel, and is of Gawain’s fidelity and not his bravery. It is of his ability to play the game of courtly love by the rules. If Gawain is seen as representing Camelot, then the poet’s revisionist project becomes very evident. In the larger cycle, Camelot fails this test. It is destroyed by the adultery of its queen, and the inability of its king to forgive her. However, in this poem and through the figure of Gawain, the kingdom passes it and remains ‘the hapnest under heven’(56).

However, why test Gawain’s self-control and not Lancelot’s, if the poet’s project is to revise the history of the Summer Country? Lancelot is only mentioned once in passing as one of the knights who come ‘for to counseyl the knyght, with care at her hert’(557). The most obvious and historical explanation lies in the fact that Gawain and the Green Knight is an English poem, and the majority of English poets spurned Lancelot and his importance in the mythos as an invention of the French. Nonetheless, given Gawain’s normal characterisation, there seems a greater importance to the poet’s choice of him as the central protagonist.

In a significant number of texts, Gawain is portrayed as an incorrigible womaniser. Winny relates one of the more amusing incidents in his introduction to the text I am using, citing it as a possible source for aspects of the plot. As in this poem, Gawain is roaming in the woods when he comes across a knight who invites him to stay at his house, and who then rides ahead to prepare for him. Seeing this, a group of shepherds warn him that this knight will not be disobeyed in anything, and will put to death anyone who offends him. Undaunted, Gawain continues to the castle, where his host’s beautiful daughter falls in love with him and repeats the shepherd’s warning. That night, the knight orders Gawain to sleep with her. This poses a dilemma for Gawain, who will be killed if he disobeys and will deserve death if he obeys. Moreover, there is an enchanted sword in her bedroom that guards her chastity! If he tries to make love with her, he will be killed by it! Eventually, unable to control himself, Gawain risks it and is nicked by the sword. Still unwilling to give up his lovemaking with her, he continues regardless of his injuries. It takes a more severe injury to persuade him to stop. (xiii) The story continues to demonstrate Gawain as the so-called perfect knight, but that is sufficient to illustrate Gawain’s amorous nature in the majority of texts! (As an aside, if this is indeed a source, the connections between the injuries and the sexual transgressions are interesting and link up beautifully with our connection between the three mornings in the bedroom and the three blows in the chapel.)

Consequently, according to Fisher, part of the poet’s revisionary strategy is the rewriting of Gawain himself. In the same way as Camelot is made perfect, the womaniser is transformed into a pure, chaste knight, who can resist the seduction of the lady, who can be a true servant of the Virgin Mary. She notes that some critics have argued that the poem deals with this discrepancy by having him confront his traditional reputation at the castle. (141) I would concur with that viewpoint, because the conversation between Gawain and the Lady is full of references to his reputation and her disappointment that he is not living up to it. This is best expressed in the Lady’s rebuke of him:

Bot that ye be Gawan, hit gotz in mynde.

. . . .

So god as Gawayn gaynly is halden,

And cortaysye is closed so clene in hymselven.

Couth not lightly haf lenged so long wyth a lady,

Bot he had craved a cosse, bi his courtayse. (1293, 1297-1300)

By rewriting Gawain as a flawless knight and testing his sexual fidelity, the poet is clearly trying to rewrite Arthurian history so that it has a happy ending, so that the king does not have to die. Nevertheless, despite his best attempts to do so in this piece, he knows it has to end as it always does - with the battle on Salisbury Plain between Mordred and Arthur. Gawain may triumph and Camelot may pass the test for the moment, but there will come a time when Lancelot will fail and the country fall. The green baldrics assumed by the Round Table at the end of the text are a curiously prophetic symbol of the infidelity that will destroy it, an admission on the poet’s part that a ‘mon may hyden his harme, bot unhap ne may he’(2511). However, for a brief moment, he has created a possibility of an alternate history where a knight makes the right decision, and where Arthur need not become rex quondam, rex futurus, but can remain the fair, young king of a Camelot at the beginning of an everlasting summer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. ed Tolkien and Gordon. Oxford: Oxford UP. (1936)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. ed Winny. Ontario: Broadview Press. (1992)

Ashe, Geoffery. The Dream of a Golden Age: King Arthur. Thames and Hudson: London. (1990)

Barber, Richard. The Arthurian Legends: An Illustrated Anthology. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. (1979)

Fisher, Shiela. “Leaving Morgan Aside: Women, History and Revisionism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Medieval English Poetry. ed Trigg. London: Longman. (1993)

Fries, Maureen. “From The Lady to The Tramp: The Decline of Morgan le Fay in Medieval Romance” (27 September 2002) "http://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/twomey/sggk/fries.html" (1994)

Malory, Sir Thomas. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory: Volume III. ed Vinaver. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1967)