Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: an Advent Calendar
25 windows on the great medieval Christmas poem
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Welcome to the 101st post on Some Flowers Soon. The number got me thinking of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the alliterative poem about a Christmas “game” at the court of King Arthur composed of a symbolic number of stanzas (101) and lines (2525).
So, for Some Flowers Soon 101, here’s an advent calendar of linked illuminations of the poem, its words, its numbers and its history — plus a story about the time I hung around in a cave with Simon Armitage. (You could also think of it as a set of answers to a fiendish Christmas quiz, or a selection box with too many green ones.)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was composed in the late fourteenth century, and survives in a single manuscript copy in the British Library, with four colourful, cartoonish illustrations. The poet is unknown, but from his dialect is assumed to have lived in the North-West Midlands of England. His work was almost entirely unknown until transcribed for publication in the nineteenth century.
The Gawain manuscript is known as Cotton Nero A.x., which means that — along with the Old English epic Beowulf — it survived the fire that broke out in 1731 in the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, a collector of ancient manuscripts.
I held Cotton Nero A.x. — a codex of vellum pages about the size of a pocket paperback — while making a BBC radio documentary about Gawain in 2004. We were not allowed to record the walk to the secure archive room in case our footsteps gave an acoustic clue to its location. In that air-conditioned environment it gave off a strong smell of smoke —not from the Cotton disaster, but from the days when it was kept in an office with a coal fire at the British Museum.
The documentary was called “From Camelot to Birkenhead”, an allusion to the fact that Gawain is said to ride through the Wirral peninsula, which in the fourteenth century was a forest full of outlaws, and now is a borough containing the town Birkenhead, just across the Mersey from Liverpool. The programme was fun to make, but unfortunately doesn’t seem to be on BBC Sounds, so you can’t hear the section where I try to interview Simon Armitage while panting my way up a path in the Peak District.
Here are the opening pages of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight manuscript, showing the beheading of the Green Knight by Gawain that begins the poem, when a Christmas party at King Arthur’s court gets out of hand. The Green Knight picks up his head, tells Gawain to come and find him next year so he can return the favour, and rides away into the winter night.
The poet lavishes many lines on how “enker grene” [intensely green] the Green Knight is. In his modern retelling, Gawayne and the Green Knight: a Fairy Tale (1904), Charlton M. Lewis, a Yale professor, also went to town:
Cassock and hood and hose, of plushy sheen
Like close-cut grass upon a bowling-green,
Covered his stature, from his verdant toes
To the green brows that topped his emerald nose.
His beard was glossy, like unripened corn;
His eyes shot sparklets like the polar morn.A pacier retelling of the story, “The Greene Knight” ballad, was composed around 1500. It gets the drama of the head-chopping done in one brisk six-line stanza:
This old poem, too, was rescued from flames: it survives in the Percy Folio, named after Bishop Thomas Percy of Dromore in Ireland (1729-1811), who found a “scrubby, shabby” collection of papers “lying dirty on the floor” of a Shropshire parlour, where it was “being used by the maids to light the fire”.
It feels appropriate that the Gawain manuscript should smell of the days of open fires, as it contains some of the coldest evocations of winter in English poetry. As Sir Gawain travels through the West of Britain on his quest to find the Green Knight, his hardship — as translated by W.S. Merwin — is bleakly imagined:
Nearly slain by the sleet he slept in his armour
Among naked rocks more than enough nights
Where the cold stream runs splashing down from the crest
And the hard icicles hung high over his head
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