The Transformation of Sir Gawain’s Greenness

As a narrative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight imaginatively creates moral suspense -- real suspense around the strength of bravery, integrity, and virtue.  It does so for a community and individuals who might often seem exemplars of honor:  King Arthur and the knights and ladies of his Round Table.  I find this of interest now years after I first read works like Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, White’s The Once and Future King, and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, because of the personal and communal transformation that occurs in Sir Gawain.

When I was a lad, I was most impressed by the ability of Arthur and Lancelot and Galahad and the like to defeat their enemies and achieve success.  Sure, I was aware of some shortcomings in the characters.  But it was their larger-than-lifeness that then captured my readerly fancy.  Now as an adult, I appreciate most the depiction of Arthur and Gawain and the like as simultaneously virtuous and flawed characters who, nevertheless, press on with a sense of duty and fidelity to themselves and to their communities.  At least this is my reaction after recently reading Merwin’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and after reflecting on the symbolic transformation of the green belt at its ending.

We all probably know something about how the original use and meaning of one thing changes into a new use and meaning.  Take the term “green,” for instance.  If twenty years ago you said, “He is really green,” you probably meant that the male in question was inexperienced, rough around the edges, new at something, a novice.  Now, without additional context, if you uttered the same sentence, you would probably be understood to mean that the male in question was environmentally conscious or politically active.  The transformation in the meaning of the term is one from being inexperienced to being an activist.

This is a transformation of the type when something S goes from meaning A to meaning B.  What about when something S goes from meaning A derisively to meaning A proudly?  Two examples come immediately to mind:  one from moral culture, the other from science.

Culturally, the term “queer” originally was used by straight people to describe homosexual people.  Even if “queer” meant merely “odd,” it still pointed to difference, and difference that was disapproved of.  Later, the term “queer” was adopted by homosexuals as a way of self-championing their identity.  They co-opted the term.  Hence, there is now established in academic research “queer studies” and “queer theory.”  Another transformation of terminological significance happened in science.  Originally, the term “big bang” was coined by opponents of the cosmogonic theory now described by the term.  The term, however, stuck, and it later became associated with the theory in a positive, approving way that allowed it to gain greater notice and acceptance as a credible idea of cosmological origins.

Illumination from the original manuscript.

Something similar to this second example occurs in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Green takes on significance beyond the story’s end for the characters, and it does to in a way different from the original meaning it is given.

In Sir Gawain, the green belt, or sash, is transformed by Arthur and the Court from, as Gawain had originally intended, a sign and seal of his sin (like a scarlet A, to mix literature) into a sign and seal of honor amid the recognition of human fallibility.  This transformation of the token signifying weakness becomes a collective badge of the privileged attempt to help each other to overcome it.

The green belt acknowledges for Gawain something painful and shameful about the past, namely, cowardice and infidelity to his knightly code.  However, it also, for him and for others, points to the greater strength and integrity that can and should be theirs as lords and ladies, full of honor, in the future.  Consider this passage near the poem’s end:

And he wore the shining belt around him
Slanting down to the side like a baldric
With the thong knotted under his left arm
In token of his fault and the stain of it.
And so he comes to the court, whole and unharmed.
Joy woke in that household when the King heard
That good Gawain had come. They were happy to hear it.
The King kisses the knight, and the Queen too,
And many other knights are eager to welcome him,
Asking how he had fared, and he told them the strange story,
Admitting all the hardships he had endured,
What had happened at the Chapel, and how the knight acted there,
The love of the lady, and the belt last.
He showed the scar of the wound on his neck
That he had from the knight’s hand as a mark of blame for his bad faith.
He suffered at having to tell it.
Grief and remorse made him groan.
The blood made his face hot
At the shame of making it known.
"Look, sire," he said, and held up the belt,
"This ribbon belongs with blame branded around my neck,
This is the harm and loss that I endured
For the cowardice and coveting that I was caught in there.
This is the token of untruth I was taken in
And I must wear it as long as I live,
For no one can hide the wrong he does, nor be free of it,
For if ever it takes hold, nothing can cut it away."
The king comforts the knight, and all the court also,
And they laughed loudly about it, and agreed, out of friendship,
That the lords and ladies who belonged to the Table,
Each knight of the brotherhood, should have a baldric,
A bright green sash at a slant around him
Worn for the sake of the knight, the way he did.
So it became a part of the fame of the Round Table,
And was an honor forever after to whoever wore it,
And is written in the book of the best romance.
Thus in the days of Arthur this adventure came to pass.

 - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (trans. W.S. Merwin; New York: Knopf, 2002), pp. 169, 171

As with most poems, I think that we can miss some important subtleties on our first reading.  Multiple readings bring out the poetic nuances, just as sniffing a glass of wine three times instead of one before tasting it brings out the wine’s complexity and enhances its taste.  Because of the economic conclusion of the story, we may miss some of the complex texture of the poem’s moral, social, and psychological fabric.  The transformation of the significance of the belt is most obvious (the transformation of the sign from shame to honor), but there are other, related transformations to ponder.

To appreciate the nature of the transformations, however, we must understand the stubbornness of shame, or the stickiness of our susceptibility to cling to it, or our difficulty in shedding the feeling of it:

He showed the scar of the wound on his neck
That he had from the knight’s hand as a mark of blame for his bad faith.
He suffered at having to tell it.
Grief and remorse made him groan.
The blood made his face hot
At the shame of making it known. …
“This is the token of untruth I was taken in
And I must wear it as long as I live,
For no one can hide the wrong he does, nor be free of it…”

Medieval illumination, Bercilak's wife at Gawain's bed

Our guilt often prompts us to feel (or actually to be) scarred. We feel marked, emblazoned with the tell-tale signs of our liabilities, our badness, there for all the world to see.  We do not like to talk about it.  When we do, we are often prone to recriminations and are downright inconsolable. Far more attention is given to the description of Gawain’s self-loathing and self-conscious deportment than is given to the transformation that follows.  Why?  Perhaps because that is so close to our own experience.  We wallow in our sense of being bad, not just having done something bad, and our sense of feeling as if everyone notices clearly in us what we feel deeply.  We are embarrassed to make it known, yet we seem unable not to show signs of it to others.  This need not be the end of our stories; it certainly is not for Gawain’s.

What is so amazing at the end of the poem, first, is the transformation of individual shame into collective celebration.  Notice how quickly the poem describes the successful reassurance that the king and the others provide Gawain.  The language is direct and Spartan:

The king comforts the knight, and all the court also,
And they laughed loudly about it, …

Lamenting turns into laughing.  Yet because this development is so rapid, its significance can be missed -- but it should not be.  It is at the heart of the conflict’s resolution.  Would that the poem said more of how the king and the court comforted the knight.  What exactly did they say?  How exactly did they do it?  Comforting someone depressed, or being comforted ourselves when we are depressed, is no easy task.  Yet the poem makes it seem effortless.  Perhaps that is the magic of the Round Table.  Or maybe the secret is not a secret but right there before us -- in community:  “…the king comforts…and all the court also.”  It is not a task for a single individual, but for a community, a community that must, furthermore, be willing to go to great lengths to achieve success.

Second, then, is the transformation of the community as it rallies around the individual, Sir Gawain, and as it expresses moral solidarity with him:

[The king and the entire court] agreed, out of friendship,
That the lords and ladies who belonged to the Table,
Each knight of the brotherhood, should have a baldric,
A bright green sash at a slant around him
Worn for the sake of the knight, the way he did.

Gawain’s mental, moral, and psychological state changes because the attire -- and the outlook and the lives -- of everyone around him changes, too.  This is the length to which friendship goes.  He is no longer isolated and marginalized.  We recognize weaknesses, flaws, and faults in our peers.  More than that, we bear one another’s burdens.  In the process, we understand better certain ways in which we ourselves are human, and we practice better certain ways to support each other in our humanity.

This solidarity can be, as it is for Gawain, liberating.  He not only becomes free from what he previously thought he would never escape, the lasting shame of his critical moment of past weakness.  Now he is strengthened by the green token of his error, enlivened to advance in the strength of those who press onward with him: 

So it became a part of the fame of the Round Table,
And was an honor forever after to whoever wore it

Shame is transformed into honor.  The reminder of sin here does not go away, but it is not crippling.  Ever-present weakness is co-opted as an expression of collective welfare.  

In Sir Gawain, the mystery at the beginning surrounds the Green Knight:  who is he, where does he come from, whence does he derive his superhuman strength?  We learn in due course the answers to these questions, and we discover that the magic of Morgan le Fay lies behind the Green Knight’s superhuman powers, powers that were designed to test and to highlight the all too human limitations of King Arthur and his own knights.

Although not impeccably, Sir Gawain proves his mettle in confronting the Green Knight in his chapel and returning alive, with his head intact, to the Round Table.  Something of a reversal of metamorphoses takes place.  The Green Knight reverts to being Bercilak de Hautedesert, and the knights of the Round Table become, as it were, a band of green knights.  Bound by the knots of the shared green sash, they are transformed, stronger now together as humans in their virtue, honor, and resolve than they were previously on their own.