Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

by W. S. Merwin

  Also by W. S. Merwin

  POEMS

  The Pupil, 2001

  The River Sound, 1999

  The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, 1998

  Flower & Hand, 1997

  The Vixen, 1996

  The Second Four Books, 1993

  Travels, 1993

  Selected Poems, 1988

  The Rain in the Trees, 1988

  Opening the Hand, 1983

  Finding the Islands, 1982

  The Compass Flower, 1977

  Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, 1973

  The Carrier of Ladders, 1970

  The Lice, 1967

  The Moving Target, 1963

  The Drunk in the Furnace, 1960

  Green with Beasts, 1956

  The Dancing Bears, 1954

  A Mask for Janus, 1952

  PROSE

  The Mays of Ventadorn, 2002

  The Lost Upland, 1992

  Regions of Memory, 1987

  Unframed Originals, 1982

  Houses and Travelers, 1977

  The Miner's Pale Children, 1970

  TRANSLATIONS

  Purgatorio, 2000

  East Window (The Asian Translations), 1998

  Sun at Midnight (Poems by Muso Soseki) (with Soiku Shigematsu), 1989

  Vertical Poetry (Poems by Roberto Juarroz), 1988

  From the Spanish Morning, 1985

  Four French Plays, 1985

  Selected Translations 1968–1978, 1979

  Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis (with George E. Dimock Jr.), 1978

  Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems (with Clarence Brown), 1974

  Asian Figures, 1973

  Transparence of the World (Poems by Jean Follain), 1968

  Voices (Poems by Antonio Porchia), 1969, 1988

  Products of the Perfected Civilization (Selected Writings of Chamfort), 1969

  Selected Translations 1948–1968, 1968

  The Song of Roland, 1963

  Lazarillo de Tormes, 1962

  Spanish Ballads, 1961

  The Satires of Persius, 1960

  The Poem of the Cid, 1959

  ANTHOLOGY

  Lament for the Makers: A Memorial Anthology, 1996

  For Paula

  FOREWORD

  The story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that has survived into our day in this poem had been told in different versions for many years, perhaps for centuries, before it reached the form that we have now. Fore-shadowings of it may have existed in folk tales, and earlier variants of parts of it had been written in tales and romances, many of them as segments of the growing cycle of Arthurian legend that evolved through the later Middle Ages. Many of the earlier narratives have been lost. Some of them, no doubt, were no longer current by the time the author of the present poem, whoever he or she may have been, put it into the form and words that have come down to us.

  We do not know the poet's name, and cannot say for certain when the poem was composed. All we have is internal evidence from a single manuscript that was found, early in the nineteenth century, by J. P. Gilson of the British Museum. It had been in the library of an Elizabethan bibliophile, Henry Savile (1568–1617) of Yorkshire, and had been acquired by a later collector, Sir Robert Cotton.

  The manuscript (now known as MS Cotton Nero A, Art. 3) contains three other poems, all in the same fine, precise, slightly ornate script. Scholars believe that the writing dates from around 1400. It is the hand of someone used to writing, which suggests a cleric or someone resident in a monastery, or at least trained by priests. The other three poems in the same manuscript, Purity, Patience, and Pearl, use their stories as vehicles of Christian exhortation and piety. We do not know that the person who copied out the four poems had actually composed any of them, or that they had all been written by the same poet, but from stylistic and temperamental affinities in them, most scholars have concluded that the same gifted person was the author of all of them.

  If it was around 1400 that they were written out into one manuscript, either by the author or by a copyist, they must have been in existence for some time before that, through the later years of the fourteenth century, a hundred years before Columbus's fateful voyage. So they may have been written during Chaucer's lifetime, but scholars agree that Chaucer probably never knew any of them. The language of the poems is highly sophisticated, and they display a telling mastery of poetic and narrative form; yet they seem more archaic, more remote from modern English, than anything in Chaucer.

  The difference is one of place rather than of time. Chaucer's language and his poetic life were centered in London. The Gawain poem appears to have been written in Cheshire or Lancashire, somewhere near the Welsh marches. The Gawain poet speaks with what seems to be firsthand familiarity of the landscape of North Wales and Wirral, as though his audience would know the region he was talking about. When Gawain rides in search of the Green Knight,

  He has all the isles of Anglesey to the left of him

  And rides across the fords between the headlands

  Over by Holyhead, and out on the far shore,

  Into the wilderness of Wirral, where there were few living

  Who had love at all for God or anyone.

  From the scholars' opinion that the same poet wrote all the poems I derive an image of him in later life making a fair copy of what he had written in earlier years. The intimate, grisly knowledge of the hunt and the familiarity with late-thirteenth-century castle architecture and armor suggest that the author was a man, though the lais of Marie de France, written in the late twelfth century, should save us from assuming that too readily. In the late nineteenth century there was disagreement among some scholars as to the chronological order in which the poems probably had been composed. They hoped to be able to derive from that progression some understanding of the poet's life. By 1918, when Hartley Bateson published his edition of Patience, they were coming to rely on considerations of meter in the different poems to suggest the most plausible order of their composition. They concluded that Purity and Patience, written in the stressed alliterative line that was a descendant of Anglo-Saxon poetry, were the ones that had been written first.

  I discovered Patience when I was nineteen (it was not part of any course, which probably added to its attraction), and can remember the pleasure I took then in the tumbling diction and the vivid recounting of the tale of Jonah.

  A wild rolling whale, as fate would have it,

  That was flung up from the abyss, floated by the boat

  And was aware of that man as the water reached for him,

  And rushed to swallow him, opening his maw.

  The others still had hold of his feet and the fish had him,

  Threw him into his throat without a tooth touching him.

  Then swiftly he slips down to the sea bottom.

  Lord! Cold was his comfort and his care huge,

  For his case was clear, and the woe that was upon him:

  From the boat into the wild waves to be snatched by a beast

  And flung into its throat all in a moment,

  Like a mote in through a minster door, so vast were his jaws!

  He slides in past the gills through rheum and slime,

  Spinning on down a bowel that he took for a road,

  On, heel over head, whirling about,

  Until he blundered into a cavern as big as a hall …

  I had that “mote in through a minster door” in my head even before I knew the other poems in the manuscript.

  In Purity, with a sumptuous account of Belshazzar's feast, the poet uses description to intensify the dramatic suspense of his story, as he does in the Gawain poem.

  Pearl is believed to be the last wr
itten of the four poems. It is clearly distinct, metrically, from the other three. The verse is still densely alliterative, but the artfully designed poem is cast in rhymed stanzas. The story is an allegory so rich in symbolism that some critics have maintained that the narrative is entirely symbolic, though others have been as sure that it has its source in the poet's biography. It tells of the death of a very young child, the narrator's daughter. She is the pearl with whose loss the poem begins. In his grief the narrator falls into a swoon and begins to dream. He comes to a vision of a garden of unearthly beauty. There, on the far side of a stream, he sees a figure who is both a child and a maiden with a crown on her head. She is his transfigured daughter, and she discourses to him at length on the consolations of Christian faith and eventually allows him a glimpse of her in the heavenly Jerusalem. When he sees her there, he rushes toward her, and wakes.

  Purity and Patience are linked to an earlier English tradition. Pearl, with its rhyme schemes and stanzas and dream allegory, is closer to models from France, such as the Roman de la Rose.

  The Gawain poem is thought to have been written some time after Patience and Purity, and before Pearl, presumably while the poet was still in his mature youth. Pearl, unless the story is pure symbolism, suggests that the poet had had a daughter. We can tell from the poems that he read French and Latin and was familiar with Mandeville and the Vulgate Bible. If the Gawain poem was written near the Welsh marches, the poet may have spoken Welsh as well as English.

  Yet such biographical speculation is scarcely more than learned guesswork. At the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the poet tells us how many stories have been left untold. His own masterful narrative comes late—almost at the end of the evolution of Arthurian tales, romances, and poems that had been welling up from their Celtic sources in Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, and Brittany throughout the later Middle Ages. They had spread out through Teutonic and then Norman England, onto the Continent, south to the Pyrenees and east to Germany, and back again, through those violent centuries, impelled by an apparently inexhaustible magic whose spell has continued in retellings from Malory to our own day.

  Somewhere in the development of that body of legend the source of its enchantment became personified in the figure of Merlin, the great wizard and poet, the representative of Druidic antiquity, of the green world, whose immeasurable presence was depicted standing behind Arthur, foretelling, fostering, directing, and to a degree inventing him. One modern mythologist, Heinrich Zimmer, in The King and the Corpse, speaks of Merlin as “not only the master of the forest who entices the chosen one into the field of perilous tests, he is also the founder and guide of the knightly Round Table and the teacher of King Arthur, its lord. In the normal daylight world, that is to say, he calls together the numbers of the elect and then sends them out, one by one, into the darkness to confront the tests by which they are to become transformed. Merlin is the master of the entire cycle—the shapeshifter, the mysterious, benign, yet frightening pedagogue, the summoner, the tester, and the bestower of the ultimate boon.”

  By the time of the Gawain poet, the fabric of Arthurian legend had come to comprise one of the great bodies of myth and legend known to us, an imaginary world, a metaphoric landscape and history. It is no accident that J. R. R. Tolkien (who, with E. V. Gordon, in 1925 produced the authoritative text and edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that I have used for this translation) in time produced his own great modern Arthurian romances, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Tolkien was a great scholar of the Arthurian cycle, a vastly erudite linguist and a born storyteller. He too, in his turn, was enticed and guided by the enchantment of Merlin.

  The Gawain poet, long before him, was a spellbinding narrator with a great gift for using cumulative detail to build up the suspense of his narrative and draw its strands together. He told his story so well, in fact, that I would rather not spoil it for any reader who does not know it already in one version or another by giving a synopsis here, though I want to mention a number of things about it. I would like to allow readers new to the story to have their first full encounter with it in the poet's own telling of it.

  He has woven together two distinct threads of narrative into one. The first is a mortal challenge, and the other is a tale of erotic temptation. Both are of Celtic origin: Welsh, Irish, or both. There are several earlier forms of the challenge story. One occurs in a Middle Irish narrative, Bricriu's Feast, that dates from around 1100. Jessie L. Weston, in The Legend of Sir Perceval, tells of a French source of the challenge in a romance originally composed by a Welsh poet named Bleddri, who was famous in his day for his knowledge of the “tales of the British kings and nobles.” Another French source, with a Welsh antecedent, may have been Le Livre de Cardoc, part of the unfinished twelfth-century Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes.

  The erotic temptation story has many precedents in Arthurian tales, more than one of them in French romances where Lancelot is the hero, but in two of them, Hunbaut and Le Chevalier à l'épée, the hero is Gawain. The Gawain poet may have known antecedents of different parts of his story in several languages. He speaks of having heard his Gawain tale “in the hall,” told or sung by a minstrel, whether we are meant to take that literally or accept it as a deliberate archaism, a poetic convention used to invoke an earlier legendary, heroic time.

  That archaism, that “once upon a time” perspective, is a constant, assumed setting in most of the Arthurian tales, part of their spell. It is so thoroughly integrated in them that it is able to enhance and illuminate familiar details of the contemporary life of the narrator and his audience, things such as court rituals, food, the ideals and some of the actual facts of knightly behavior.

  In historic time, the Gawain poem was written during the Hundred Years' War, an era of grotesque and all but constant violence between the English and the French, most of it happening in the west of France, while the Arthurian stories traveled back and forth in waves, as entertainment, across the same areas. The campaigns of that century (the fourteenth), in the wake of the ruthlessness of the Crusades, the merciless slaughter of the Albigensian repression, and the establishment of the Inquisition, followed the claims of the French-born or French-oriented Plantagenet kings of England, Henry II and Richard the Lion-Heart. They raged across Normandy, the Île-de-France, and Aquitaine, heading up into battles of hideous butchery, but more often conducted in devastating chevauchées: highly armed mounted raids in great force that swept over long arcs of terrain, bringing slaughter, rape, and torture to everyone found there who was not worth taking prisoner, and burning whatever could not be plundered and hauled away.

  The looting of France in that century was one of the main incentives that drew the English of all social stations to the ever-renewed wars across the Channel. Many of the great fortunes and estates of England in that period were built from that ceaseless pillage. In terms of strategy, the huge raids were thought of as a kind of total war, meant to weaken an adversary by visiting terror and destruction upon his subjects. Towns, castles, manors were sacked, and the spoils divided, before they were burned, and the raiders sold or sent back to England such obvious forms of wealth as coin and jewels, furniture and animals, loading the plunder on barges. Hostages—sometimes the most important plunder of all— were held for ransom. Almost any prisoner might fetch something; and some, indeed, were worth a fortune. Captors sometimes divided the price of important prisoners whom several of them had taken. One English knight's share in a French knight captured in Edward III's 1346 campaign on the Cherbourg peninsula was 1500 pounds. After that expedition and its raids, Froissart wrote, in Caen, that the King “sent to England his navy of ships loaded with clothes, jewels, vessels of gold and silver, and other riches, and of prisoners more than 60 knights and 300 burgesses.” This, along with the wholesale, reckless, indescribable cruelty of the raids, was part of the reality of warfare, the background against which the romances were written and told and read, and the knightly ideals continued to evolve.
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  The chivalric point of view, which served to glorify and, literally, to romanticize this tirelessly indulged appetite for robbery and murder, was well established during the first generations of the Plantagenets. Aliénor— or, as she is most often called now, Eleanor—of Aquitaine, whose life spanned most of the twelfth century, was more gifted, original, and admirable than her first husband, the king of France (Louis VII), her second husband, the king of England (Henry II), and either of her sons who became kings of England, Richard the Lion-Heart and the notorious King John of the Magna Carta. She established a cultural tradition that included much that we think of as chivalry: an imaginative spirit and attitude toward existence that maintained the elaborate codes and manners of courtly love and the criteria for knightly prowess and magnanimity. The ideals and their spirit found expression in the poetry of the troubadours, and for most of her life Aliénor was a preeminent patron and close friend of troubadours. Some of the poetic conventions that had come from the assumptions of chivalry and of courtly love survived not only savage treatment from Aliénor's estranged husband Henry (who destroyed her first Court of Love in Poitiers, in 1174) but their own early forms in the medieval world. The word “roman” was used in the eleventh century for the language of the south of France, the language of the troubadours, which came to be called Provençal, or, more accurately, Occitan. The tales of knightly adventures and amorous encounters came to be called romances. The distant beloved, the loved one scarcely known and yet loved for a lifetime, perhaps the object of all the poems written by a poet, and the hopeless longing for an unattainable beloved, recurred with variations. From their early places in chivalric amatory mores, and in the troubadours' poetry, they were passed on to Italy, to Guido Cavalcanti and Dante and Petrarch, and then to the poets of France, and to the Elizabethans, to the nineteenth-century Romantics, and to much that we mean by the word “romantic” in our own day.

  My own interest in the sources of that tradition and its relation to the early troubadours and the origins of their poetry had been with me since my years as a student, and eventually it led me back, by a circuitous route, to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Aliénor's grandfather Guilhem IX, Duke of Aquitaine, is often referred to as the first of the troubadours. He certainly was a talented poet, a sensual man of headstrong, independent mind; and though he may not have been the first of the troubadours (there is no way of knowing) he was certainly one of the first. He had the position and the means, besides, to encourage what was to become the great current of troubadour poetry and music. His own songs, or eleven of them, are the earliest troubadour poems that have survived into our age, and it is possible to trace their influence on the songs of the generations that followed. What we know of him is revealing not only about the troubadours but about the culture of his age and of the centuries between his lifetime (1071–1126) and the end of the Middle Ages.