Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Introducing people of all ages to mythology... in pre-college educational curricula, youth orgs, the media, etc. Share your knowledge, stories, unit and lesson plans, techniques, and more.

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Myrtle
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Post by Myrtle »

This is interesting. Zimmer says in The King and the Corpse Edited by Joseph Campbell (page 80)
"The romance [Sir Gawain and the Green Knight] seems to miss something of its own suggested depth. It does not insist upon its meaning. One cannot even be sure that the thirteenth and fourteenth century French and English poets, who constructed this romance out of earlier materials, consciously intended the reading that inevitably emerges when the traditional episodes which they successfully synthesized are comparatively construed.1

(Footnote 1: Their case resembles that of the dreamer not understanding the symbols presented to him by the creative genius of his own interior. They knew how to gather, combine, and modify traditional motifs according to the traditional spirit and laws of their inherited story art, but it does not follow that they altogether understood what the combinations signified.)"

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Post by Clemsy »

Myrtle,

That is fascinating. Thanks for the reference... I can certainly see his point. More later.

Clemsy
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Post by boringguy »

Hi all,

Clemsy,

Sorry, probably not a timely response for your class project here, but maybe a thought anyway.

I'm reminded of this from Eugene Petersons' "The Message" a work labeled 'the bible in contemporary language'. From Romans 15

"Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope."


And Campbell from an Open LIfe;

"People are wandering in a wasteland without any sense of where the water is - the source that makes things green."


Well I have to admit I haven't read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I have only bits of the story from others telling of it, so I may be shooting from the hip here, but I'll take a shot.

I have a friend who the other day, had to inform a number of people on the team she leads at work that they were losing their jobs. The company would help them relocate, retrain, or otherwise help them find new jobs for a short period of time, and she would be part of that effort as well. She was understandable upset as she had trained many of these people and they were her friends. She related to me her thoughts as to how if she only gives knowledge, the systems answer to solving these peoples problem, in helping them move forward, then in a year or two that probably doesn't mean much. Probably not having created anything 'green'. If however she gives whatever help she can with presence, authenticity, and compassion, she may have given something that lives a lifetime. Green Hope, I think.

Isn't that the story of Sir Gawain, that as long as you simply play the roles of relationship as tribe would have you, then you likely create nothing green. Only in relationship of community from presence, authenticity, and compassion, do we make life green.

Is that the journey of Sir Gawain, and the message of Green Knight?


Clemsy;

" In the story, he's not only in control, but also rather arrogantly superior."
" There he is, intruding in the well ordered domain of the chivalric code, riding his horse right into Arthur's hall."

Hmm, sounds to me like the Green Knight wears the mask of trickster well. :wink:


bg
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Clemsy
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Post by Clemsy »

Hi BG,

The GK does, indeed, have something of the Trickster in him. Gawain's authenticity, and by proxy that of Arthur's entire court, is being tested. That he comes out of it less than perfect simply makes him human and the GK is well satisfied with that.

One wonders how the GK would have reacted with Galahad, whose perfection is... inhuman.

Myrtle's Zimmer reference is quite attractive. Rather than the unknown author consciously testing the chivalric/Christian values by pagan standards, perhaps that impulse welled up from the subconscious.

A purer source, methinks, and no less pagan.
Last edited by Clemsy on Mon Dec 08, 2008 4:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

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Post by Martin_Weyers »

It's a long time ago, that I've read the story of the Green Knight, so hopefully I'm not rambling too much.
boringguy wrote: Isn't that the story of Sir Gawain, that as long as you simply play the roles of relationship as tribe would have you, then you likely create nothing green. Only in relationship of community from presence, authenticity, and compassion, do we make life green.

Is that the journey of Sir Gawain, and the message of Green Knight?


Clemsy;

" In the story, he's not only in control, but also rather arrogantly superior."
" There he is, intruding in the well ordered domain of the chivalric code, riding his horse right into Arthur's hall."
Truly, in human society, we need social relationships as well as a sense for nature. The world of nature can be brutal; The world of man can be droughty. Too much of a welfare state may incapacitate men; On the other hand it's great if a company helps people to realign, instead of simply firing them.
Clemsy wrote: Myrtle's Zimmer reference is quite attractive. Rather than the unknown author consciously testing the chivalric/Christian values by pagan standards, perhaps that impulse welled up from the subconscious.
Wherever it's welling up from - the story of the Green Knight deals with equlibrating the Christian world. And a symbolic reference that transcends everything intended by the author is a trait of true art. (Zimmer seems to suggest though, that the authors of the Green Knight haven't tapped the full potential of the story.)

If memory serves, the knights meet annually in the night of Pentecost, which can be considered as the Christian way of celebrating the plant nature of life by planting a tree, adoring an ox with flowers (and, in former times, slaughtering afterwards), etc. (And from the image of the tree as a symbol for eternal life beyond the phenomenons of life & death, it's only a small leap to the Sephiroth, the cabalistic tree of life, I've mentioned before in this thread.)

(So the GK appears at Pentecost? Or at christmas, as Clemsy seems to suggest in an earlier post?)

Getting involved with the Green Knight means getting involved with natural religion. At the same time knightly virtues are presented as necessary skills to pass the different trials of the adventure: They help to succeed on the path between fear and desire, as the Buddha put it - and that is exactly the lesson Gawain (as well as everybody who is in danger of loosing his job) has to learn.

Much of the story of the Green Knight seems to resurface in the Grimm's fairy tale of Iron John, the story of another wild man, rude and wise at the same time. Here it's a young boy who has to learn the lesson how to deal with the wild man, and embed his wisdom into a (Christian) life - while his parents have penned him up. (If you're interested in that fairy tale and it's message for today's men, you may like to read Robert Bly's Iron John, available through the JCF Bookshop: http://www.jcf.org/new/index.php?categoryid=89)
Works of art are indeed always products of having been in danger, of having gone to the very end in an experience, to where man can go no further. -- Rainer Maria Rilke

boringguy
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Post by boringguy »

Hi Clemsy,

Yes I see upon futher investigation that I am confusing stories a bit here. :oops: ( note to self; shooting from the hip not generally the best idea) :wink:



I agree if one still views green in the context that I think Campbell and Peterson are refering to, then one might still find in the GK the message that without Gawain's imperfection, tempered by code of morality and ethic, the green of life is lost equally, if not more so, than if one hasn't morality or ethic. Doesn't the "kiss" after all, according to the deal, belong to the Green (Knight)?

Martin I agree as well, could real art fail to grow with the artist as well as the audience?


Clemsy;
A purer source, methinks, and no less pagan.
Yes, :) , no less pagan, no less christian, no less buddhist ...........


bg
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Post by Myrtle »

Hi everyone,

Which translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight did you read? I read the Jessie Weston translation.

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Post by Clemsy »

Marie Borroff's... which I quite enjoyed, even if the anthology we use excerpted it in a most unfortunate manner. (It leaves out the entire scene in the Castle of Painted Pinnacles, summarizing the whole tmeptation sequences in a short italicized paragraph. I used another translation for this part which was, unfortuantely, modernized, sacrificing the "bob 'n wheel" verse structure which I think is fun.)

Borroff seems pretty true to the original. I'd like to get my hands on the whole thing.

Now that I've been in the high school for a few months, I've come to suspect the scholarship of those who put the anthologies together. Sometimes the footnotes are so wrong I'm surprised the pages don't burst into flame.
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

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Post by Myrtle »

Clemsy,

What do you think of Weston's translation?

Myrtle

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Post by noman »

Hello Clemsy and all,

I may not be as hip on mythological symbolism compared to some of the people I meet on the Web. I just learned about the ‘Green Man’ of the cathedrals within the last two years or so from my fellow mythophiles. This pagan influence is popular today, I think, due to our artsy love and respect for nature. The Green Man has the potential to become the neglected and mistreated deity in our neopagan pantheon, the source of our salvation from the cruel nature-hating, nature-controlling Judeo-Christian God - notwithstanding the fact that he is,(as one of Clemsy’s student’s pointed out), unfortunately, a man.

From wiki:
The term "Green Man" was coined by Lady Raglan, in her 1939 article "The Green Man in Church Architecture" in The Folklore Journal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Man
This modern name may be a little misleading because the images in those cathedrals are rarely, if ever, green. When we encounter the crucifix from the pre-Columbian Mayan culture we call it ‘the foliated cross.’

Image

It’s hard to see in this image but there is a Christian-shaped foliated cross that the King Pacal is falling down. It is from about the 8th century AD.

When I was visiting the little town of San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, I couldn’t help but notice remnants of the foliated cross in a Christian context.

Image

And the Celtic cross, as you know, looks a little foliated.

Little digression there. But I think the Green Man should properly be called the ‘foliated man’. The Green Knight, to my knowledge, was never called ‘the foliated knight!’ And since these foliated men of folklore don’t have much of a biography it’s hard for me to make that connection between them and the Green Knight.

But, hey, I’m a novice. Maybe there is some connection. But I look to the Classical western tradition for answers. In considering the Green Knight tale, I was curious about our expression ‘green with envy’. My first thought, was that younger more immature people tend to get jealous easier. But I found this explanation on the Web:
Would like to know the origin of the phrase,
: "green with envy"

"Why do we turn green with envy? Judith S. Neaman and Carole G. Silver report that 'green' and 'pale' were alternate meanings of the same Greek word. In the seventh century B.C., the poetess Sappho, used the word 'green' to describe the complexion of a stricken lover. The Greeks believed that jealousy was accompanied by an overproduction of bile, lending a pallid green cast to the victim.

Ovid, Chaucer, and Shakespeare followed suit, freely using 'green' to denote jealousy or envy. Perhaps the most famous such reference is Iago's speech in Act 3 of Othello:

O! beware my lord, of Jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_boar ... /2195.html
In Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare speaks of envy as 'the green sickness'.
The idea of being ‘green with envy’ has been around for a long, long time.

The two things that a knight is most likely to be jealous of is life, especially if he is facing death, and another man’s woman. The Green Knight, to me, is an abstraction of pure jealousy. He rides into the castle court with authority that he is due and says, in effect, ‘Who will deny me as their kin and cut off my head? Which one of you knights is man enough, and honorable enough, to take ME on’.

In The King and His Corpse, Zimmer’s first comments on the Green Knight makes much of the color green as a symbol of death:

P76 Pale green, furthermore, is the color of livid corpses: the paintings of Buddhist art in Tibet, which adhere in their color symbolism to a very definitely prescribed tradition, employ such green to denote whatever appertains to the kingdom of King Death.

- Heinrich Zimmer, The King and His Corpse, 1948
I’m not about to say that Zimmer, or any one here is wrong, with this death and rebirth motif. But just want to add to it. JCF associate Myrtle already mentions the source of the Green Knight character from another story.

P80 The imposing older matron within the castle is revealed to be Morgan the Fay, once the mistress of the wise and powerful Merlin, whose wizardry she learned and whom she then conjured into a living grave. It is declared that she was the one who had sent the Green Knight on his mission to King Arthur’s court and by her magic had given him the power to play that trick with his head. One of her sons, it seems, had been refused admission to the exclusive circle of the Round Table, and being a revengeful woman she had wished to discredit the valor of the knights.

- Heinrich Zimmer, The King and His Corpse, 1948
Think the Green Knight could be jealousy incarnate?

Campbell liked to point to the pagan influence of these medieval myths, not just in imagery, but also in values. But in the Green Knight tale I think we’re looking at straight-up Christian values. Though I don’t know how well this will go over with most of today’s high schoolers with their ‘hook-up’ culture.


One more thing I’m a little hesitant to mention – because I don’t like to admit I got the idea from popular song lyrics.

Guinevere had green eyes
Like yours mi’lady like yours

- Crosby and Nash

I doubt that there is any source material where Guenevere is depicted with green eyes. There might be. I don’t know. But I think this idea of her having green eyes falls right into the jealousy motif – as the married woman, whose eyes can test even the most honorable of men.


- NoMan

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Post by Neoplato »

Well.... what about the Lorax? He "spoke for the trees for the trees have no tongue". The Onceler was the incarnate of materialism and greed vs. the one who spoke for the Earth. Thus the interpretation of Dr. Seuss.

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Post by noman »

I didn't know about the Lorax, NeoPlato. But I knew about this guy.
Image

Talk about envy incarnate. And he just happens to be green.

- NoMan

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Post by Clemsy »

What's cool about stories like these, especially when considering Myrtle's contribution to this thread, is that there really isn't a limit to the interpretations one can devise.

Like interpreting a dream.

That being said, Noman, "green man" per se is simply a facile title to use within this context. The image, with the attending 'beheading game' which harkens back to earlier Celtic tales, (Cúchulainn, Queen Mab) bridges the gap between Christian Britain and its pagan past.Consider the story's description of the Green Chapel, and Gawains' reaction to it:
Then the knight spurred Gringalet, and rode adown the path close in by a bank beside a grove. So he rode through the rough thicket, right into the dale, and there he halted, for it seemed him wild enough. No sign of a chapel could he see, but high and burnt banks on either side and rough rugged crags with great stones above. An ill-looking place he thought it.
Then he drew in his horse and looked around to seek the chapel, but he saw none and thought it strange. Then he saw as it were a mound on a level space of land by a bank beside the stream where it ran swiftly, the water bubbled within as if boiling. The knight turned his steed to the mound, and lighted down and tied the rein to the branch of a linden; and he turned to the mound and walked round it, questioning with himself what it might be. It had a hole at the end and at either side, and was overgrown with clumps of grass, and it was hollow within as an old cave or the crevice of a crag; he knew not what it might be.
"Ah," quoth Gawain, "can this be the Green Chapel? Here might the devil say his mattins at midnight! Now I wis there is wizardry here. 'Tis an ugly oratory, all overgrown with grass, and 'twould well beseem that fellow in green to say his devotions on devil's wise. Now feel I in five wits, 'tis the foul fiend himself who hath set me this tryst, to destroy me here! This is a chapel of mischance: ill-luck betide it, 'tis the cursedest kirk that ever I came in!"
Helmet on head and lance in hand, he came up to the rough dwelling, when he heard over the high hill beyond the brook, as it were in a bank, a wondrous fierce noise, that rang in the cliff as if it would cleave asunder. 'Twas as if one ground a scythe on a grindstone, it whirred and whetted like water on a mill-wheel and rushed and rang, terrible to hear.
This scene stands in direct contrast with Arthur's court: it's over the threshold of the known and ordered into the wild and unpredictable. The chapel is a mound in a grotto and in Britain that means faerie. Of course Christian Gawain would think he's at the very gates of hell.

Bertilak's castle seems to function as a balance point between the two.

However, this is really my own interpretation, although I see elements of it here and there. For instance, this from Wiki:
Some argue that nature represents a chaotic, lawless order which is in direct confrontation with the civilisation of Camelot throughout Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The green horse and rider that first invade Arthur’s peaceful halls are iconic representations of nature's disturbance. Nature is presented throughout the poem as rough and indifferent, constantly threatening the order of men and courtly life. Nature invades and disrupts order in the major events of the narrative, both symbolically and through the inner nature of humanity.
Given the varied and even contradictory interpretations of the colour green, its precise meaning in the poem remains ambiguous. In English folklore and literature, green was traditionally used to symbolise nature and its associated attributes: fertility and rebirth. Stories of the medieval period also used it to allude to love and the base desires of man.[27][28] Because of its connection with faeries and spirits in early English folklore, green also signified witchcraft, devilry and evil. It can also represent decay and toxicity.[29] When combined with gold, as with the Green Knight and the girdle, green was often seen as representing youth's passing.[30] In Celtic mythology, green was associated with misfortune and death, and therefore avoided in clothing.[31] The green girdle, originally worn for protection, became a symbol of shame and cowardice; it is finally adopted as a symbol of honour by the knights of Camelot, signifying a transformation from good to evil and back again; this displays both the spoiling and regenerative connotations of the colour green.[31]
That reference to faeries and spirits signifying witchcraft, devilry and evil could be a classic case of mythic reversal, no?

Some of the interpretations in this Wiki article are interesting.
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

Clemsy
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Post by Clemsy »

Myrtle, I hadn't read Weston's translations. However, I gave it a Google and found THIS, which is prose, and THIS which is verse (pdf file).

Weston takes great pains to maintain an AABB rhyme scheme, which Borroff doesn not. Very cool, but perhaps my younger audience would find the Borroff a bit more approachable. I really found myself taken with the verse form. May be geeky of me, but the bob 'n wheel is a lot of fun.
...in alliterative verse, a group of typically five rhymed lines following a section of unrhymed lines, often at the end of a strophe. The bob is the first line in the group and is shorter than the rest; the wheel is the quatrain that follows the bob.
I saved that Weston file... I'll give it a closer look. Thanks for the ref!
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

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Post by Myrtle »

Clemsy, thanks for the info about the bob and wheel. It's great. It reminds me of the Greek chorus.

...there really isn't a limit to the interpretations one can devise.
I agree.
Myths are infinite in their revelation - J. Campbell/Power of Myth

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