The Green Knight: a “Green Man” in Arthur's court

A journey in search of the Green Man through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: following the traces of the symbols will take us among archetypes, chthonic gods, diabolical figures and popular songs, to reconstruct in its entirety one of the most fascinating mysteries of Celtic folklore.

di Mariachiara Valentini

The poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written around the XNUMXth century by the mysterious “Pearl-poet” (so called because Pearl it is a more famous poem by the same author, contained in the same manuscript as Gawaine), is a chivalric novel belonging to Arthurian cycle. The contemporary notoriety of this text is mainly due to J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote a translation from the original Middle English to contemporary English around 1950. 

It is a story as simple as it is fascinating: we are in the Christmas period, in the court of King Arthur. All the knights are gathered for lunch around the Round Table, and next to the beautiful Guinevere sits Sir Gawain, a young knight, nephew of the king, known for his courtesy and virtue, but not yet the protagonist of great deeds . Suddenly a strange figure bursts into the room: it is the Green Knight, an imposing and mysterious man completely green in hair, beard, clothes and skin, riding a green steed. The Knight challenges the court by proposing the classic medieval game of beheading: anyone will be able to inflict an ax blow on him if he himself can return the blow exactly one year and one day later. Sir Gawain, eager to distinguish himself, accepts: he decapitates the Knight with his own axe, but instead of dying he collects his head and reminds Gawain of the challenge, which will be held at the Green Chapel.

Il November XNUMXst of the new year, Gawain finally sets off towards the North, all adorned in red and gold, until, in Christmas time, arrives at a majestic castle. Here he is hosted by the mysterious local gentleman, his wife and a disturbing elderly lady. Gawain's stay at the castle turns out to be rather unusual: the very kind master of the house is a skilled hunter, and offers him the exchange of winnings. In this medieval game, the two men had to exchange what they had obtained during the day every day for three days: and so, while the guest gave Gawain his hunting spoils, Gawain reciprocated it with the kisses received from his young wife .

But a shameless court is not the only thing that the beautiful lady gives Gawain: she had also given him her green silk belt, a magical belt that would have made Gawain safe in death. Gawain, terrified of being beheaded, had hidden the precious gift well, and lied about the exchange. At the dawn of the new year Gawain leaves for the Green Chapel, a few miles from the castle: to his surprise, he discovers that the Chapel is a small cave covered in vegetation. The Green Knight shows himself and claims his turn, striking with his ax three times: the first time to test Gawain - who retreats -, the second to understand if the young man has found the courage to bear the blow, and the third hits him in the neck, making a small cut. At Gawain's astonished expression, the Knight reveals himself Sir Bertilak, the one who hosted him in his castle, and who plotted the trials and temptations against him, to test his loyalty. 

This story, a sort of fairy tale for adults, fits into a traditional genre Christmas folktales from British and Irish folklore, featuring an act of beheading followed by the restoration of life. And in fact most of the critical studies on Gawaine focuses precisely on the figure of the mysterious Green Knight. The Green Knight not only does he have green armor on which forest-inspired reliefs such as leaves, branches and birds stand out, but he is green in complexion and has long green hair and beard, similar to a bush. It is inevitable to associate the Green Knight al green man of Celtic folklore, whose origin, however, is even more nebulous than that of the Knight. And paradoxically, in fact, it is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which can help us understand something more about the dark Green Man. 

First of all, green is not just the color of fairies and nature: it represents, in the Celtic tradition, the color of the dead and their world. One thing does not exclude the other, and in fact second CS Lewis (the author of Chronicles of Narnia) the Green Knight is a concidentia oppositorum: in his figure the magical world and that of the dead coexist. On the one hand, in fact, the Green Knight is a symbol of the power of nature, archetype of the eternal life cycle and perennial fertility: as the decapitation scene shows, he cannot die.

The Knight then presents himself as the male counterpart of the archetype of Great Mother as Nature, symbolized in Greece by Artemis and Demeter: centuries of Christian tradition, in fact, have moved the meaning of the Great Mother from the natural world to the human one, subsuming her in the figure of Maria everything that for the ancients and pagans had been the archetype of Mother Nature. This has led to a progressive loss of importance of nature itself in favor of the human being, with the result that the Christian female symbol no longer represents generating nature in whole, but only the woman as generator. The Madonna as a symbol of fertility narrows the field too much, thus leaving a potentially harmful void for the human community, a void which is thus filled in several ways by the pagan traditions that resisted the spread of Christianity and by the "newborn" ones that developed thanks to the revival of Neoplatonism by Marsilius Ficino (think, for example, of the return of the concepts of anima mundi need Sophia). 

Il green man then it represents a way of filling that void in the form of images and words: there are many popular stories, songs and songs that refer to it. He represents lush nature as an active force, precisely as a masculine archetype, and self-regenerating. It is no coincidence that the green man is not represented in his youth (an age that usually symbolizes the moment of greatest vigor in man's life) but as a mature man with a thick beard, which brings him closer to the archetype of the senex, the Wise Old Man. 

This feature helps us, as the Old sage it is not only the opposite (and therefore complementary) archetype to that of the Great Mother, but it is a symbol that emerges in various forms, including that of the gnome. The term gnome was introduced around 1493 by Paracelsus to indicate the chthonic spirits: the gnomes are none other than the heirs of those that the Greek world called the Cabiri, "those mysterious chthonic gods, the sons of Hephaestus, to whom an enormous miraculous power was attributed" [Jung, Symbols of transformation, 1912/1952]. In addition to being known for their ithyphallic aspect, and therefore connected to sexual potency, the Cabìri were the first wise men, the teachers of Orpheus, bearers of a great creative force and, as chthonic, belonging to the abyss, to the depths of the earth.  

This brings us back to the second characteristic of the color green: its connection withUnderworld, the world of the dead. "Death is greener than gress”, says an ancient English proverb – death is greener than grass. In the Celtic tradition, not only is green the color used to indicate the world of the dead, but it is the color of the dead themselves: the Side, the ancestors in the Irish tradition, were distinguished by the color green. 

Returning to Green Knight, when he appears in King Arthur's court brandishing his mighty axe, he carries in his other hand a holly branch, an evergreen plant typical of the Christmas period. Traditionally evergreen plants are associated with death, but holly specifically is full of deeper meanings: in Celtic tradition, this plant is the symbol of that period of the year when the veil between the living and the dead thins – the Christmas, which in ancient Scotland was the day dedicated to the feast of the dead. According to legend, a branch of holly brought into the house before Christmas would result in the death of a family member in the coming year. Furthermore, tradition has it that as long as the holly branch is exposed in the house, creatures from the world of the dead can come into contact with the living, as long as they return to Erebus when the branch is removed. The presence of holly supports the thesis ofGreen Man as a bridge between life and death: according to some scholars the Green Chapel would be the entrance to the world of the dead, and the Green Knight a symbol of Hades himself. 

However, reduce the green man exclusively to the god of the dead would mean losing the most important aspect, that linked to nature and the life cycle. And in fact, if it is true that the Christmas period corresponds to the feast of the dead, it is also true that Christmas day corresponds to the day of Undefeated Sun (Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the day of birth of the unconquered Sun), a celebration that can be traced back to the cult of the Egyptian sun: in Egyptian religion the sun traveled through the two heavens on board the solar boat, being reborn every day at dawn after having traveled the abyss of the Duat (the underworld or lower heaven). The path of the sun (in its three forms of Khepri/Khepher, the scarab as the rising sun, Ra, as the sun in its maximum splendor, and Atum, as the setting sun) symbolizes the eternal cycle of death and rebirth, and the nickname of Invictus it derives precisely from the fact that the Sun can never be defeated by death, but is always destined to be reborn. 

Let us therefore see how elements of the Undefeated Sun are present in the Green Knight, both given the period in which the story takes place and due to its intrinsic characteristic of regeneration: the cyclical nature of life is represented not only in the actual non-death of the Knight at the moment of decapitation, but also by the fact that exactly one year and one day pass from the moment of the first test, indicating the completion of a cycle and the beginning of a new one, corresponding to the first day of the year.

Il green man/Green Knight in some ways recalls the Italic-Latin divinity Janus, usually depicted with two faces, precisely because he presides over the past and the future, and is generally referred to as god of threshold: he is the god of the passage between today and tomorrow, between the end of the year and the beginning of the new, between life and death. Since the cult of Janus is very ancient and cannot be linked to the Hellenic tradition, its origins are to be found in rural cults linked to the cycle of harvesting and sowing, cults which in a more elementary way celebrated the cycle of life and the thin veil between life and the death. Just as Janus presides over both life and death but above all over the passage between the two, so the green man it is not only a symbol of the god of the dead nor only the archetype of the fertility of nature: much more simply, it represents both.

At the end of the poem, the Green Knight reveals himself to be Sir Bertilak, the kind, hunting-loving lord who so kindly hosted Gawain. There hunting has great importance in the plot, and its development occupies a good part of the poem. It is no coincidence, in fact, that the Green Knight is Sir Bertilak the hunter: in British tradition, in fact, the typical dress of hunters was green. In many medieval tales, many of which come from Anglo-Saxon territories, there is an ambiguous character: the hunter dressed in green, who often challenges the protagonist/hero to some game, and who in the end turns out to be the Devil.

Many studies have been dedicated to the figure of the Devil in green, and some scholars have come to associate him with both green man that the Green Knight. It is very likely that the “Pearl-poet” knew these tales and was influenced by them, and this would explain why the Green Chapel is located so far north: in the Middle Ages, the North was precisely the cardinal point associated with the Devil. According to this current of research (see for example DW Robertson, Why does the Devil wear green?) the use of the color green in a character's clothing (and in particular the hunter's dress) is a very frequent symbolic device to characterize the Devil. In the case of Sir Bertilak we could say not so much that the Green Knight actually corresponds to the Devil, but rather the fact that his hunter's uniform is influenced by this tradition in the sense that it indicates that - like the hunter in the stories - he turns out to be the Devil – Sir Bertilak is not really what he shows himself to be so openly to Gawain, but hides a deeper and more primal identity. 

The hypothesis that the Green Knight is an expression of the knightly guise of green man it is in fact the most solid one, and this means that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight it is one of the most complete and extensive sources we have on the figure of the Green Man. However, given the strong syncretism that characterizes the green man, shedding light on its origins could be an undertaking destined to never be completed. However, the characteristics that we have identified as typical of the Green Man are conspicuous and present strong similarities with a divinity in particular of the Celtic tradition, the god Cernunnos. Cernunnos brings together several attributes: he is god of fertility, hunting, war, wild nature and the afterlife.

If already on a figurative level Cernunnos and the Green Man present some similarities (age, beard, deer antlers), it is from a symbolic and archetypal point of view that the closeness becomes undeniable: both, in fact, relate to fertility , hunting, nature and the afterlife – in short, they preside over the cyclical nature of life and time. Furthermore, the serpent, an animal often associated with Cernunnos, is a typical symbol of the chthonic world, a character that in green man, as we have seen, is expressed in a more subtle way, such as the connection with the holly plant. It cannot therefore be excluded that the Green Man is a sort of "descendant" of Cernunnos, in whose iconography the purely animal element disappears: this hypothesis, which seems to be corroborated by all the results reached by research on the green man.