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This lecture is about Fitt 3 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Fitt 3 is considerably longer than any other fitt in the poem: it’s about 871 lines, and the next longest Fitt is Fitt 2 at 634 lines. Not only is Fitt 3 the longest episode in the poem, the most extended part of the narrative; it’s also the most complex and elaborate part of the poem. We don’t just get a straightforward linear narrative going from A to B to C as in the other sections; instead, we get this quite disorienting alternation between parallel events. So to start with, let’s get a clear sense of what happens in this fitt, and how it is structured. Because when you lay it all out in front of you, you start to see that there is a reasonably consistent pattern to these events.
Gawain arrived at the castle on Christmas Eve, and has been staying at this castle for four nights – it is the 28th December when Fitt 3 starts.He’s ready to go back into the wilderness to find the Green Knight. But his host tells him that the Green Knight is very close by, he promises to guide him there when New Year’s Day comes along; and he persuades Gawain to stay in this castle for another three days and nights. (This is slightly confusing, because he actually has four days until New Year’s Day; it’s a small continuity error; the poet likes to arrange things by threes in Fitt 3, so don’t worry about the chronology too much.) And after those three days, Gawain will get up early in the morning on New Year’s Day and travel the short journey to the Green Chapel so he can have his head cut off.
But of course it’s not quite that simple. During these three days, to pass the time, Gawain’s host proposes a little game. The host will go out hunting each day, and Gawain will stay in bed and rest; whatever the host catches while he’s out hunting, he will give to Gawain at the end of the day; and whatever Gawain manages to get while staying at home, he will give to his host at the end of the day. It doesn’t sound like the best game in the world. It seems like Gawain is going to be burdened with a lot of dead animals he has no earthly use for; and it’s hard to see what he could possibly win in the course of the day, given that he’s a guest in this man’s house. Short of stealing his host’s slippers and then giving them back to him, there’s no clear way for Gawain to actually play this game.
But here’s what happens: on the first day, the lord of the castle goes out hunting, slaughters a lot of deer, and gives them to Gawain when he gets back; Gawain is visited by the lord’s wife, gets a kiss from her, and gives this back to his host. On the second day, the lord kills a wild boar, and gives the head to Gawain; Gawain gets two kisses from the wife, and gives them back to his host. On the third day, the lord kills a fox, and gives its skin to Gawain; Gawain gets three kisses from the wife and a magical girdle that will protect him from all injury. And he gives the three kisses back to his host. As you can see from this outline, there are one or two other interesting things that happen here. But the main thing to notice is that on each day, we get a description of the start of a hunt; then this is interrupted by a description of what’s happening to Gawain in his bed-chamber, in what are often called the temptation scenes; then we go back to the hunt and see how it ends. And then the two strands come together when Gawain and his host meet in the evening to exchange their winnings.
One of the great mysteries of Fitt 3 is the relationship between the hunting scenes andthe temptation scenes. The Gawain-poet has obviously made a conscious decision, not just to describe the hunts and the temptations one after the other, but to sandwich the temptations in between the start and the finish of each hunt. That seems to suggest that we shouldn’t just look at these two strands of the narrative separately, side by side; rather, we should see them as being interlinked, perhaps not unlike the lines of the Pentangle that overlap and link in with each other. Just as there is a continuity between the qualities represented by the various points of the Pentangle, so this structural device suggests that there is some kind of continuity, some meaningful association, between the hunting scenes and the temptation scenes. The nature of that relationship is what I’m going to focus on, primarily, in this lecture.
At times, the poem seems to encourage us to think about the relationship between the two strands by transitioning from one to the other in a suggestive way. For example, at the start of Fitt 3, we see the beginning of the deer hunt. And then we move from this to Gawain’s bedroom in the course of the movement from one stanza to another. So here is the wheel, those four short lines, at the end of one stanza, and then the beginning of the next stanza:
The lord for blysseabloy
Ful oft con lance and light,
And drof that day with joy
Thus to the derk night.
Thus laykes this lord by lynde-wodes eves,
And Gawayn the good mon in gay bed lyes,
Lurkes while the daylyghtlemed on the wowes
Under covertourfulclere, cortayned about. (1174-81)
So the lord is ‘for bliss abloy’, transported with bliss, out of his mind with joy, galloping through the forest, driving the day to the dark night; and driving it with joy. The lord is playing, he’s having a wonderful time and the day is passing quickly and pleasantly for him. But then in the second stanza here, we see the contrast between the lord playing by the edges of the forest and Gawain lying in his lovely bed. Notice that time isn’t passing quickly for Gawain: this is a good example of the non-linear narrative technique used in Fitt 3. We’re told about the lord driving the day towards the dark night, we have this rapid snapshot of almost his entire day; and then we go back in time to a place where the daylight is just starting to leme, to gleam, on the walls; where Gawain is not riding in crazed ecstasy through the woods, massacring blameless animals. The lord ‘laykes’, plays; Gawain ‘lurkes’; he lies resting, he dozes.
Straight away, just from looking at this short transitional passage, we can start to detect some significant contrasts between the two strands of the narrative. For now, let’s consider three of those contrasts. Firstly, and most obviously, the lord is outside; Gawain is inside.
Secondly, the lord is active, Gawain is inactive. Now it must be emphasised here that Gawain is only doing what his host told him to do: the lord says, you stay in bed while I go hunting, you rest. That’s part of their agreement, and it would be kind of rude for Gawain to go against his host’s wishes. So he’s not doing anything morally wrong by lounging around in bed all morning, but nonetheless Gawain, at this point, through no fault of his own, is not at his most impressive. There’s a big contrast between the Gawain of Fitt 2 who travelled the wilderness in full armour, killing unspeakable monsters, enduring terrible hardship; and the Gawain of Fitt 3 who snoozes in a comfortable bed. That contrast between the two versions of Gawain is already quite striking; but by linking the scene in the bedroom with the lord out hunting in the forest, the poem reinforces this effect, it makes Gawain’s inactivity, his passivity, really stand out very strongly.
Thirdly, and I think most interestingly, there is a strong contrast between the emotional states of the lord and Gawain. The lord is ‘for blysseabloy’, abloy means dazzled, transported, ecstatic. And this is very characteristic for this man, Gawain’s host: he is an amazingly happy, positive person.When Gawain arrived at his castle, during the Christmas celebrations, when he comes up with the exchange game, when he’s out hunting, when he’s receiving the kisses; he just can’t shut up about how brilliant this all is, what a good time he’s having; and overall, if you wanted to sum this man up in a single phrase, I think you could say that he loves his life. He seems to relish everything about life, he’s brimming over with enthusiasm for all the delights that life has to offer: games, parties, friends, hunting, kissing.
Gawain, at this point in the story, is a different kettle of fish. Notice in this passage the emphasis on the gay bed, the beautiful sunlight gleaming on the walls, the ‘fulclere’, very beautiful, sheets on the bed, the bed is cortayned about. Gawain is surrounded by luxury, and you see this again and again during his stay at the castle, he is practically smothered by every variety of beautiful thing imaginable. And yet, it is the bed that is gay, not Gawain; what does Gawain do? Gawain ‘lurkes’; Burrow glosses this as ‘lies comfortably, dozes’, and in this context that is what the word means; but in Middle English this word could also have more negative connotations; to lurk can mean to lie in wait, to cower, to move stealthily, to crawl. And as you read through Fitt 3, you see how appropriate this word is for Gawain. Later on, he does indeed behave quite stealthily and sneakily when he knows the lady has entered the room, as you may remember from the passage you translated this week; but more generally, throughout this part of the poem, Gawain is in a sense lying in wait in that bed; lurking there, waiting for something terrible to happen. He’s not lying there relaxing, daydreaming about his future – because as far as he knows, he doesn’t have a future. He’s counting down the days to his death. The narrator tells us this quite explicitly:I don’t have time to discuss these passages now, unfortunately, but just want to draw your attention to them, especially the second one here – a really chilling moment. Gawain is dreaming about decapitation, he’s feeling the ‘buffet’ of the Green Knight’s axe in his sleep – and then he has to wake up and do more luf-talkyng with his host’s wife.
Now, to be clear, it’s not that Gawain is sullen and sulky during his stay at this castle. He joins in with the festivities, he laughs and plays, as courtesy demands; but the narrator keeps reminding us that behind all that polite joviality, Gawain is contemplating his death.
So even thinking about this in a fairly generalised way, it’s clear that there is a lot of mileage in exploring the effect of juxtaposing and intertwining the hunting and temptation scenes. But now let’s consider more specifically what actually happens in these two strands of the narrative. The lord is out hunting animals on his estate; his wife is back at home, trying to persuade Gawain to make love to her. And again, I’m going to suggest three ways of thinking about the relationship between these two actions, but this time we’re dealing with three connections, three similarities, rather than three contrasts.
Firstly, just as the lord is hunting animals on his estate, so the lady is hunting Gawain back at home. That’s a fairly obvious connection to make. Secondly, building on that idea, we can think of the lord as demonstrating his mastery and control over his estate, and over the natural world more generally, by hunting on it; in a similar way, we might say that the lady demonstrates her mastery over Gawain, and over the more domestic space of the home, and especially the bedroom. Notice how the lady invades the space of the bedroom, she doesn’t ask to be let in, she takes control of this space, just as the lord finds these animals where they live, where they hide in the forest, and hunts them down.Thirdly, we might even look for correspondences between the animals hunted on each of the three days and the behaviour of Gawain on each of the three days; especially between the wily, terrified fox that gets hunted to death on the third day, and the Gawain we see on that day, who arguably behaves in quite a sneaky, underhand way, and who is motivated, like the fox, by a fear of death. I’ll say more about that later on.
On that last point, I’m not sure there is a thoroughly convincing way of drawing direct parallels between the specific hunted animals and Gawain. Yes, Gawain is kind of like the fox on the third day, but is he really like a deer, or a boar, on the other two days? You might have a think about that for yourselves.I do think it’s useful to consider how the temptation scenes are like the hunting scenes; and to think about the association between Gawain and the different animals being hunted… But drawing a very direct correspondence between these things might be misguided.Here’s my suggestion about how we could move from these three connections to some kind of overall sense of the relationship between the hunts and the temptations.
Across the three days, the lord hunts three different types of prey. He hunts all of them with consummate expertise: he is a perfect hunter, an exemplary hunter if you like. These descriptions could serve as a useful textbook for young aristocrats who want to improve their hunting skills: this is how you hunt deer, this is how you hunt a wild boar, this is how you hunt a fox.
And the same is true of the temptation scenes. The lady, too, is a brilliant hunter: or a brilliant tempter; she is an exemplary persuader, or rhetorician. This is how you tempt someone, how you seduce them. She is very clever and sophisticated and witty in the way that she tries to manoeuvre Gawain into doing what she wants. Just as the lord uses different methods to hunt different animals on each day, so the lady uses different – often quite subtly different – methods to try and seduce Gawain on each day, she has a variety of different arguments, different rhetorical strategies, that she tries out on him. I don’t have time to go through them in detail here, but it’s well worth isolating those three temptation scenes and trying to trace the progression of the debate in each episode: what does the lady say; how does Gawain respond; how does the lady respond to that response; and so on. We’re supposed to feel a tension in these passages quite similar to the tension we feel during the hunting scenes, because there’s a lot at stake and Gawain, like the hunted animals, is in grave danger; the narrator tells us this several times.But I do think we’re also supposed to feel an admiration for the lady’s skill as she tries to trap Gawain, in the same way that we admire the skill of her husband when he’s out hunting. And just as we can see that the three hunts get progressively more difficult: it is harder to kill the boar than the deer, and harder to catch the fox than the boar; so also we can see how the lady is having to work harder to try and catch Gawain, and Gawain is having to work harder to defend himself.
So just to underline my point here: one effect of interlacing the hunting and temptation scenes is to suggest an association between the lady’s talents and those of her husband; although they’re working in different contexts, we feel that they have something in common here.
And I think it would also be fair to say that we admire Gawain’s conduct in these passages, that he too is a kind of exemplary figure here; perhaps we feel that, just as the boar and the fox put up a good fight, and present a substantial challenge to the people hunting them, so Gawain is also skilful and clever enough to make it harder for the lady to trap him. I’ll come back to that issue in a while, but the point is that throughout Fitt 3 we are in the company of exemplary people and exemplary behaviour: each of these three characters is brilliant at what they are doing. And I just want you to sort of hold that idea in your heads for a minute. This is a story about superlatively excellent people.
Not only are the characters themselves excellent, and not only are their skills, their abilities, associated with each other and related to each other by the intertwining narrative this poem uses – but in addition to that, we can say that the poet himself is being pretty exemplary as well. When you were reading Fitt 3, you probably felt quite frustrated by some of the hunting scenes, because they are swarming with technical vocabulary. The poet describes the process of hunting these animals so vividly, in such detail, that it’s hard for a modern reader to get a handle on these descriptions; almost every word has to be looked up in the glossary. But put yourselves in the place of the aristocratic medieval audience for whom this poem was probably intended, an audience who would have had no problem with the dialect, of course; and who would also have known all about these hunting practices that are being described. By going into so much detail here, the poet is demonstrating his knowledge, his expertise, on this subject. This perfect hunter, the lord, can hunt any type of game, and hunt them really well; and the poet describing him therefore shares in that expertise. Each hunt is described in loving detail by the poet, who knows all the technical terms associated with hunting deer, dissecting deer, which part of the boar you have to eviscerate in order to murder it, how precisely you go about hunting a fox and how the fox behaves – and indeed how the fox feels – when it’s being hunted.