The Green Knight as Mythic Symbol of Death and Rebirth
The youthfulness of Arthur and of Arthur's folk ... introduces the theme of youth in contrast to age which is
an aspect of the spring-winter (or New Year-Old Year) theme. The poem thus launched is sustained right
through as a Christmas-New Year festival poem. The note of feasting--contrasted with the winter
deprivation . . . --keeps recurring. . . . .
Arthur looks for a marvel, Christmas being the season of marvels (what could be more marvellous than a
birth in the dead season) and indeed the ceremonial banquet has hardly commenced, the first course
brought in with "crakkyng of trumpes" ["fanfare of trumpets"], when
Ther hales in at the halle dor an aghlich mayster.
[There passed through the portal a perilous horseman.]
He is no mummer disguised as a Green Knight who rides into the hall; he is the Green Knight.
The huge impression--the Green Knight on the green horse-- is massively built up. He is not just faerie but
robustly substantial and a fiercely humorous character. The emphasis on his glittering array--the jewel-like
greenness of his green colour and that of his horse, the glittering green jewellery, the rich embroidery of
multiplied "bryddes and flyghes" ["birds and flies"]--is unmistakably significant of life resurgent. . . . .
The "vegetation" aspect of the Green Knight will be immediately recognized. His green beard is like a bush,
and together with his long green hair covers his chest and back all round down to his elbows. He carries a
holly branch in one hand ... and in the other a huge axe (the weapon fertility symbol). He is as green as
green verdure. It would indeed be singular not to feel that he is an up-cropping in poetry of the old
vegetation god. After his head has been chopped off he is as vigorously alive as before, like a pollard tree,
like John Barleycorn in the old ballads against whom came "three kings from the West, their victory to try,"
and who, though killed and buried, "sprang up again. And that surprised them all."
My own experience is that the reader instinctively feels him to be an intruder from a pre-Christian,
pre-courtly world. Something of the old untamed, unreclaimed north of Europe has come back here
(though the Green Knight will be discovered not merely to typify the destructive, menacing aspects of wild
nature hostile to pioneering humans in their struggle to maintain their clearings in forests and swamps). He
carries no knightly arms but wields a Danish axe--the stress is on the primitive and heathen nature of the
weapon. A "salvage" intruder, he "breaks the good feast," disturbs the ceremonious courtly order with his
presence and his challenge; the contrast is, at one level, between "nature" and "sophistication." He evokes
a half-amused, half-horrified fascination. If he is life, he is wild, uncouth, raw life. His demeanour and his
behaviour in this castle of courtesy are outrageously discourteous; he behaves, as if radically a "villeyn,"
with contemptuous humorous rudeness. In essence he is the other--the other than human. (pp. 279-82)
The chopping off of his own head is to this amazing fellow but a "Crystemas gomen." With a savage yell ("a
runisch rout") he flings out of the hall, fire struck from the flints by his horse's hooves.
Source: Speirs, John. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Scrutiny 16.4 (Winter 1949): 274-300.
The Green Knight as a Fiend
Probably the most striking of the story's symbols is the challenger's greenness. During the Middle Ages, of
course, green was variously associated with life, rebirth, youth, love, faithfulness, and chastity. More
significant at the moment, however, is that the medieval people of Great Britain regarded green as the
color of the other world. First, it was the color associated with the dead. The answer to an old riddle was
"Death is greener than the gress." In "The Cruel Mother." an old ballad, one of the ghost children returns
"clad in green. / To shew that death they had been in," and in the Campbell text of the famous "Twa
Sisters" the drowned girl is said to become a "ghaist sae green." In addition, and perhaps not quite
incidentally, the folk from the land of the dead were conceived not as the wispy, ectoplasmic vapors of our
own day, but as quite corporeal beings, virtually animated corpses.
Second, green is the color of the fairies. This fact is too well established to be argued, but one might cite as
evidence the ballad of "The Wee Wee Man," in which there appear four and twenty little people "A' comely
cled in glistering green," and "Thomas Rymer," in which the queen of fairyland is introduced wearing a shirt
fashioned "o the grass-green silk." Such a color association is pertinent here because fairies in medieval
days were by no means universally regarded as charming little folk who spent all their energies dancing in
the moonlight. To be sure, they were sometimes thought to be harmless enough, but occasionally they
were regarded as man-sized creatures capable of inspiring fear and horror in the human beings with whom
they came in contact.
Another matter of importance to one's interpretation of the Green Knight is that green was not merely the
color of the dead and of the fairies, but of both. (pp. 479-80)
In the light of such facts, and considering how tenacious and derivative superstitions tend to be, it is not
surprising to find green associated in the medieval mind with still a third variety of otherworld creature.
Chaucer's Friar makes this association clear in his story about a "gay yeman" dressed in green. The latter, of
course, is neither an ordinary yeoman nor a ghost nor a fairy, but, as he admits with candor, a "feend"
whose "dwellyng is in helle." In fact a good many stories depict Satan or one of his crew dressed in green.
Since the old Germanic devil is in part descended from Odin, a "wilder Jäger," and since the characteristics
of a hunter are especially well suited to the activities of the Christian devil, and since the German hunter's
traditional color is green, the devil appears with some frequency as a hunter and a knight in a green mantle.
In case any doubts remain in our minds, D. W. Robertson, Jr., points out that "there was a clear and well
known ... authority for dressing the devil in green clothes"; in one of the chapters of his encyclopedia, the
fourteenth-century humanist Pierre Bersuire included a passage which makes explicit the fact that green,
being a hunter's color, is quite well suited to the devil while stalking human prey.
Robertson . . . concludes, however, that since the Green Knight is not a hunter and that since he is green as
well as dressed in green, he is not a likely candidate for fiendhood. Both of these points may be worth
questioning. I would suggest, first, that since hell was often confounded with the land of the dead and
fairyland, and since the inhabitants of the latter were at least occasionally green as well as dressed in green,
it would seem plausible that the Gawain-poet might have thought of heightening the horror of his demonic
villain by making his very flesh green. Furthermore, it seems to me that Sir Bercilak is emphatically a hunter,
not only when he is out pursuing the deer and boar and fox, but also and more subtly when he and his wife
are stalking Gawain. As Henry Savage has pointed out, "the two series of events are linked ... by a certain
parallelism in their situations which would probably be quite apparent to the lady or gentleman of the
fourteenth century." R. S. Loomis, moreover, has come up with striking evidence [presented in his Wales
and the Arthurian Legend (1956)] that the prototype of the Green Knight may have been not only a noble
huntsman, but that "both in Welsh and continental folklore, this phantom hunter has been identified with
the Devil or with some wicked mortal." In short it seems possible to say that since every medieval man had
at least some acquaintance with demonology, then every medieval man meeting a character so
ostentatiously green as the Green Knight might have suspected, sooner or later, that he was confronting a
fiend.
Granted that green is the color of the supernatural, is there any further evidence on which to base the
hypothesis that the Green Knight is fiend-like? From earliest times Satan and his helpers have been
supposed to entice men into error. It is common knowledge not only that Satan pursues Christians with
constant temptations, but that God allows this--as in the Book of Job--in order that the virtue of His
children may be tested and strengthened by exercise. (pp. 481-83) . . . .
There are still other clues, consonant with the foregoing, which suggest that [Sir Gawain] achieved part of
its impact on a medieval audience by means of its demonic overtones. I would like to call brief attention to
the holly carried by the Green Knight, . . . .
Holly was assuredly brought into the homes of the early English to insure a prosperous New Year. It is and
was, undoubtedly, a holy symbol. But this is not the whole story. As evidence of a different sort we have,
first, the relatively well-known superstitions that the first visitor to step over the threshold on New Year's
Day must be a dark-haired man who carries something dark in his hand, but never variegated holly, and
that during the time the holly is displayed, creatures from the other world may make calls on their earthly
friends and enemies, with the stipulation that they return as soon as the holly is removed. Moreover, the
Christmas season occurs at the same time as the ancient Welsh feast of the dead. Therefore, although the
Green Knight proclaims his spring of holly to be an innocuous symbol of peace, it is surely possible to think
that it may have provided the Gawain-poet's contemporary listeners with another good reason for
suspecting that the challenger might not be bringing good fortune.
Source: Randall, Dale B. J. "Was the Green Knight a Fiend?" Studies in Philology 57.3 (July 1960): 479-491.