Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

by W. S. Merwin

  In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the poets and the nobility of the Aquitaine and of the domains of the counts of Toulouse looked to Arabic Spain, not to Paris, as the source of the arts and manners and cultivated pleasure. The rulers, and the poets, came to know the civilization of Arabic Spain from long and often seductive sojourns south of the Pyrenees, as friends and allies of the Spanish kings of Aragon and Castile. The relations between Spanish and Arab kingdoms on the Iberian peninsula were not composed of unmixed hostility. The cultures had been living as neighbors for generations. Some Arab kingdoms were protectorates and allies of Christian kings. Many of the knights and nobles of the Aquitaine and Languedoc must have arrived as boorish bumpkins at the Hispanic courts with their Moorish dancers, musicians, comportment, and poetry. Spanish Arab poets, since the ninth century, had written manuals about the refinements desirable in amorous relations, adapting Ovid's Ars amoris as one of their sources, but elevating it, treating love as a spiritual devotion—the most famous example was Ibn Hazm's The Dove's Neck-Ring. The knights and poets from north of the Pyrenees had further contact with some of the splendors and admirable characteristics of Arab culture, of course, when they went east on the Crusades. The occupation of Antioch and Acre allowed them to see, and come to admire and emulate, the elegance in the arts and manners of their adversaries, and to develop a taste for them.

  Much of what they admired and took pleasure in came to be incorporated, in one way or another, in the traditions of chivalry and the conventions of troubadour poetry and music. More than half of Guilhem d'Aquitaine's poems are in stanzaic forms adopted from Arabic poetry, and his lines bring from the same models an element new to European poetry: rhyme.

  I had been drawn, as a student, to this astonishing flowering of beauty out of a ground of violence, by the troubadours and what I could grasp of their poetry. Almost anything in the whole of the surviving poetry of the first two or three generations of troubadours could serve as an example, but perhaps nothing better than the opening stanza of one of Guilhem's love songs:

  With the sweetness of the new season

  woods fill with leaves and the birds sing

  each of them in its own tongue

  set to the verse of a new song;

  then is the time a man should bring

  himself to where his heart has gone.

  I had been more or less familiar with the early troubadours for decades, when a lifelong reading of Dante, which had begun at the same time, led me at last to try to translate the Purgatorio, the part of the Commedia that I have long loved best. That brought me back to the troubadours with renewed focus. It was in the Purgatorio that Dante gave most scope to the arts and artists he loved, and to the poets whom he recognized as forbears. Readers of modern poetry in English will be familiar with Eliot's dedication of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound with the phrase il miglior fabbro. The whole verse, in the Purgatorio, is il miglior fabbro del parlar materno (the better workman in the mother tongue). The poet the words refer to, who is being pointed out by Guido Guinizelli, a revered Italian predecessor of Dante's, is Arnaut Daniel, whom the Guido of the poem, and so presumably Dante, regards as the greatest of the troubadours. The reference is an indication of how intimately Dante and his Italian predecessors knew the troubadours and their language, and although sometimes the parlar materno has been assumed, rather thoughtlessly, to be Italian, that is unlikely, since Arnaut Daniel did not write in Italian but in Occitan. Beyond that, the parlar materno must be poetry itself.

  In his poem, Dante places Arnaut Daniel at the end of Canto XXVI, among those whose sin is carnal love, a position he might have earned through his eminence in troubadour love poetry with its erotic assumptions, if nothing else. And Dante, in that passage of his own poem, accords to Arnaut Daniel a supreme gesture of respect and gratitude. When Dante, the pilgrim on the mountain, has addressed the burning shade of the troubadour, Arnaut answers him, not in Italian, but in the language of his own poetry, Occitan, in verses that echo poems of Daniel's that Dante would have known by heart. The eight lines of his reply are among the most beautiful of the entire Commedia. (It was this canto of the Purgatorio that I first tried to translate.)

  When Guido Guinizelli points out Arnaut Daniel to Dante as il miglior fabbro, he says of him:

  verses of love and stories (prosa) of romance

  he was peerless in all of them

  Besides his celebrated, linguistically and metrically dazzling poems, Daniel was well known for his romances, and particularly for one about the love of Lancelot and Guenever. There were several romances about the legends of Lancelot and Guenever in the generations before Dante wrote, but some Dante scholars have been convinced that the one Paolo and Francesca were reading, in Canto V of the Inferno, the story that awakened them to their love of each other, was Daniel's, which was lost long ago, along with all of Daniel's other prosa.

  Before Arnaut Daniel's generation, Bernart de Ventadorn (circa 1120– 1190), another great troubadour—some would say the greatest of them all—and one who, like Dante, made love his single theme, directed the envoy of one of his last great songs to a friend, perhaps a singer, to whom he gave the code name of Tristan. Daniel's lost romance, and Bernart's use of the legendary name from the Welsh story, were indications of the degree to which the current of Celtic myth had been made familiar, by minstrels and storytellers, and through written manuscripts, in the castles of Aquitaine and the domains of Toulouse, by the time of the first troubadours, at the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth century. The Tristan and Iseult story and something of the Arthurian legend were known, in that region, to the same listeners who were captivated by the manners, music, erotic conventions, and poetry of Arabic Spain, and both currents mingled in the nascent traditions of the troubadours and of courtly love.

  All of it, almost at once, was carried north into Normandy and the Île-de-France, and then to England, in what must have been a moment of great cultural excitement. The chivalric tradition in its turn came to influence the Arthurian legends, and the resonance echoed back and forth, from language to language, across the Channel, through the following centuries. I turned back to the Gawain poem, written some two hundred years after Daniel's romance of Lancelot and Guenever, and Bernart's use of the radiant name of Tristan, to look again at a finished Arthurian romance when that cycle of stories had traveled so far and had made its way back once more to the land and to the sound of the language of its origin.

  One great medieval scholar, G. L. Kittredge, was convinced that the Middle English poem that we have was based on a French romance that has been lost. The story as we know it now had passed from original versions, perhaps in Welsh, into the Romance languages, and then back to the Welsh marches at the end of the fourteenth century.

  The Gawain poet, that late in his tradition, had made use of it in a manner that was at once mature and original. As a student I had approached the story through commentaries and analyses of its themes— the challenge, the testing, the rituals of passage. I had read, or read at, various translations, and had spent enough time and study on my copy of Tolkien and Gordon's edition of the poem, looking up word after word in the glossary, for the volume to be dog-eared and falling apart. And yet I realized that I could not say I had really read it. The Gawain of the poem had even become blurred, in my recollection, with memories of the Gawain I had first read about in children's books about the knights of the Round Table, with the Gawain of Tennyson's Idylls, and with figures in Malory. Random reading, over the years, had brushed in some of the context of the Arthurian legend, yet the various layers of the tradition were indistinct, and this time I wanted not just to study the poem but to read it. The translations had not given me a sense of a poem that had once held the attention of an audience in the great hall, many of whom already knew the story in one form or another. I began to try to turn the poem, line by line, into the English I understood, hoping in that way to get closer to what it was like. I was doing it for myself
, to begin with.

  The Gawain poet's language and his verse are inevitably contrasted with Chaucer's, whose vigor, splendor, and elegance are inseparable from his rhythms and meters, above all his newly adopted iambic pentameter. The Gawain poet's lines, with their alliterated, stressed meter, are characterized by their energy and the dramatic, musical repetition of stressed sounds. His verse seems closer to oral poetry than the metrical forms that were about to succeed it. It demands to be heard, and I feel sure that it must have been read aloud in the poet's own time.

  The rhymed “bobs” at the end of each section may be a nod in the direction of something that was coming in—rhymed, metrical verse, to which the poet would turn with very different effect later, in Pearl. But they may also be a link to Celtic, particularly Welsh, narratives of the earlier Middle Ages in which sections of prose were rounded off in a few lines of verse, giving the story a formality of pace, and a setting for emphasis or perspective. As I translated I wanted to keep what I could of the movement of the lines, what I felt as their vitality and rush, their pitch and momentum, and to keep an alliterative recurrence of sounds that would echo in modern English the stressed alliterative patterns of the original. I did not want, though, to cramp and twist the lines in an effort to make an exact replica of a verse form in what has become, in six hundred years, another language. And for every reason I wanted to keep as close as I could to the meaning of the original words, so as not to mislead my first reader—myself.

  As I tried to hear something of the poem, line by line, I came to notice, or imagine that I noticed, in the fullness and articulation of the diction, the hint of an accent that seemed familiar. Something of the kind had happened years before as I read and reread passages of David Jones, particularly his late fragments in The Sleeping Lord. What I thought I was overhearing was an intonation that I recognized—though it had never been mine—from my childhood in the mining city of Scranton, Pennsylvania. There, above my head, I had heard among my elders the sounds of the Welsh language and the intonations of the Welsh accent in English. This was something to which I accorded no importance, nor indeed any interest at the time, and certainly I never supposed then that there was any connection between the stories of Arthur and the Round Table that I read at home and at school—indeed, as often as not they were told as though they had happened in England—and the accent that I knew from Welsh churches and in the shops along Main Avenue and on the streets, and from my piano teacher, Ivor Price, and my father's minister friends, the Reverend Thomas Tyvian Williams and the Reverend R. J. Richards with the beautiful, willowy, long-haired daughter named Gwyneth. No one around me at the time ever suggested that the accent, and the language it came from, had anything to do with the latter-day, predigested versions of the Arthurian stories that I encountered then, and my sense now of a far-off suggestion of that intonation in the lines of the fourteenth-century poem written on the edge of north Wales may be purely subjective and imaginary, but I know it must have influenced the way I heard the lines in translating them.

  Though we know little more about the Gawain poet than his century and his country, the poem is evidence that he once lived and breathed. And behind the legendary Arthur there was an actual king of Britain, eight hundred years before the poem was composed, who fought the Saxons to a standstill at the end of the fifth century. The knights of the Round Table also had evolved from the warriors mourned in Aneirin's great litany of elegies The Gododdin, written after the battle of Catraeth, some time between a.d. 580 and 600, in what is now Scotland. Some of their names—including, perhaps, Gawain's—before they were transformed in legends, are there in sections of the poem such as this one:

  They charged as they rushed to be fighting

  they were drunk with pure mead their lives were short

  Mynydawg's men who won fame as warriors

  for their fill of mead they laid down their lives

  Caradawg and Madawg and Pyll and Ieuan

  Gwgan and Gwiawn and Gwyn and Cynfan

  Peredur with steel in his fist Gwawdur and Aeddan

  where the fight swirled they stood firm and smashed shields

  and though death bore them down they dealt it again

  not one of them returned to what he knew …

  Merlin himself (no Arthurian tale is complete without a glimpse of him or at least of his influence) had an historic forbear. There may even have been two of them, who came to be merged in a single legend. A few great prophetic poems by one of them have survived. Yet after centuries of study and speculation the historic figures seem to be as elusive and illusory as the fictions that continued to emanate from them long after they had disappeared.

  But historic antecedents have only a remote bearing on a great fiction such as this one. Other personages, such as the ancient enchantress Morgan with her vast subterranean influences, and Guenever, Arthur's queen, and heroine of adventures and temptations of her own, are part of the fixed cast of characters of the Arthurian body of legend, and readers or hearers of the poem would have been expected to know who they were as soon as they were named.

  It is not references such as these, though, that give the poem its power and authority. It is the insistent presence of the unknown, all the way through, that does that, as it draws the story forward. What are we recognizing, what kind of reality do we ascribe to the great castle in the forest, appearing promptly, in answer to a prayer, on Christmas Eve, and its suddenly revealed proximity to the Green Chapel, which no one in that whole wilderness said they had heard of until then? Who is the beautiful siren, the lady of the castle, the temptress of the third section of the poem? What are we being shown in the three days of grotesque, excited slaughter (which one translator describes as “joyous … sheer delight … physical sport at its best … innocent”—and for all we know the poet himself may have regarded the organized mauling and murder of living creatures in that way, even as he shows us the panic and pain and describes the screams of the wounded) set up in artful contraposition to the scenes of seduction behind the curtains of Gawain's ornate bed?

  Above all, who is the Green Knight? The question leads us through the whole poem and is inseparable from the spell of the tale. And in the end, what do we really know about him? Why, indeed, is he green (literary predecessors of his included figures who were gray or black), and how did he come to be so? His own eventual explanation of who he is, toward the end of the poem, seems perfunctory and inadequate, more dubious than his presence had been at any point up until then. The poet's creation of him eludes and mocks latter-day efforts to explicate and interpret him, to say what he might represent, and extract from him his “meaning.” Which is not to say that he has none, but only that it is not separable from his disturbing figure.

  “Where shall I find you?” Gawain asks, before the end of their first meeting. “Where is your place?” The Green Knight promises to tell him that later, but when Gawain next asks him he simply urges him to “search carefully … until you find me …”

  Many men know me as the Knight of the Green Chapel,

  So if you ask, you cannot fail to find me.

  Yet when Gawain sets out, in due course, to look for him, without knowing where to begin his solitary search except in the wildest and least explored region he comes to, no one has ever heard of a green knight or a green chapel. When he has at last discovered them—or they have appeared to him—and the Green Knight tells Gawain his name, we seem to know less about him than before, and the name seems to restrict him, to remove a dimension, to be a patch out of a poorer illusion, and less credible than the unnamed figure of the story. Is he, perhaps, after all, Merlin himself (more than one commentator has suggested it)? Merlin's powers underlie and antedate those of Morgan or of any other character in the legend. What does the form of the Green Knight's spell—his looming appearance, his challenge, his later emergence—tell us about the power of this giant vision whose voice in the great hall of Camelot at Christmastime created “a silence like death,” an
d who towers over the story from the moment he is seen, giving it its unflagging urgency, its undertone of dread, and who summons Gawain, that paragon of knighthood and courtly love, far beyond anything he thinks he knows, and sends him home at last with his life granted to him, and successful in the eyes of the world, but forever humbled in his own?

  In the figure of the Green Knight the poet has summoned up an original spirit with the unsounded depth of a primal myth, a presence more vital and commanding than any analysis of it could be. Is he the Green Man of the forest, a descendant of Druidic tradition and of giant forbears as far back as Huwawa, the Keeper of the Forest in the Gilgamesh epic? Is he the Great Terror, or Death in Life, whose wife is Life in Death? He may be all of them, and finally none of them, or anything so neatly designated. We seem to recognize him—his splendor, the awe that surrounds him, his menace and his grace—without being able to place him, which I think is something that attests to the authenticity of the poem, and the power of a great story. We will never know who the Green Knight is except in our own response to him. At this date there seems to be a kind of extended metaphoric consistency in the fact that we do not even know the poet's name.