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Thursday
Today being the Winter Solstice, I turn to my favorite story about paganism’s winter festival and Christianity’s Christmas coming to blows. Of course, I’m thinking of the 14th century Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. “Coming to blows,” I admit, gives a misleading impression since the blows are framed as a game, not a battle. Still, death is a possible outcome.
Here’s the message I carry away from the poem.
SGGK opens with a Christmas feast, which is to say, a celebration of the birth of a god who, at the darkest time of year, promises to bring an end to death. The display of extravagance we see in a time of austerity shows Arthur’s faith in that promise:
This king lay at Camelot at Christmastide;
Many good knights and gay his guests were there,
Arrayed of the Round Table rightful brothers,
With feasting and fellowship and carefree mirth.
There true men contended in tournaments many,
Joined there in jousting these gentle knights,
Then came to the court for carol-dancing,
For the feast was in force full fifteen days,
With all the meat and the mirth that men could devise,
Such gaiety and glee, glorious to hear,
Brave din by day, dancing by night.
High were their hearts in halls and chambers,
These lords and these ladies, for life was sweet.
In peerless pleasures passed they their days,
The most noble knights known under Christ,
And the loveliest ladies that lived on earth ever,
And he the comeliest king, that that court holds,
For all this fair folk in their first age
were still.
It’s doubtful that Christ was actually born in late December. If his birth did in fact coincide with an in-person Roman taxation decree, then surely it would have come at a warmer time of the year. I suspect that, by putting Christ’s mass on December 25, the Church unconsciously was tapping into the energies of paganism’s Winter Solstice, which acknowledges the death of the sun while at the same time celebrating its rebirth (the days begin to get longer). Perhaps enterprising Christianity missionaries re-dated Christmas in order to co-opt pagan opposition, just as Spanish missionaries in Peru turned the celebration of the 12 Incan emperors into a celebration of 12 Christian saints.
But in celebrating Christmas in late December, King Arthur’s court all but conjures up a pagan Green Man figure. While not altogether hostile to Christian feasting, the Green Knight is affronted by—or at least intrigued by—these parvenues’ claims of life after death. As one plugged into nature’s cycle, the Green Knight knows there is life after death. After all, he sees it every year in the spring growth that follows the winter die-off. But here are people claiming that their god will end death forever, not just seasonally, and the Green Kngith is skeptical.
So he proposes a beheading game. If you really are not afraid of death, he tells Arthur’s court, then you will engage in a contest where first you cut off my head and then I cut off yours. He himself has no fear: after all, he knows that vegetation grows back.
So challenged, Gawain too claims not to fear death and agrees to the game. The rest of the poem unfolds, then, with the Green Knight—sometimes disguised as Lord Bertilak—testing Gawain to find out if he is as unconcerned as he claims to be. And what Bertilak/Green Knight discovers—and forces Gawain to acknowledge—is that Christians aren’t as indifferent as many believe. Though Gawain believes in eternal life, he’s also deeply invested in life here on earth. He wants to continue living for a whole.
There are multiple ways in the poem that Christianity believes it has triumphed over paganism, and not only by turning Winter Solstice celebrations into a Christian feast. For instance, it has taken the pagan pentangle and reinterpreted it in a Christian-friendly way. (Although that being said, the pagan star is often associated with Satanism.) Modern day Christians, meanwhile, have replaced the Green Knight’s holly bob with the Christmas tree and paganism’s Green Man with Santa Claus—or in Dickens’s case, with the Ghost of Christmas Present:
It was clothed in one simple deep green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark-brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. [my italics]
In addition to the beheading game, Green Knight tests Gawain in other ways. As I read the temptation scenes in the castle, Bertilak is the Lord of Death while his consort is the Lady of Life. In the three days before Gawain thinks he’s going to die, he witnesses both the lure of life (a beautiful lady offering him sex) and the grim, matter-of-fact reality of death (the animal carcasses). Here’s an instance of the latter:
And duly dressed the deer, as the deed requires.
Some were assigned the assay of the fat:
Two fingers’-width fully they found on the leanest.
Then they slit the slot open and searched out the paunch,
Trimmed it with trencher-knives and tied it up tight.
They flayed the fair hide from the legs and trunk,
Then broke open the belly and laid bare the bowels,
Deftly detaching and drawing them forth.
And next at the neck they neatly parted
The weasand from the windpipe, and cast away the guts.
Still think you don’t care about your life, Gawain? Still think you’re not afraid of dying?
In one final test, the Green Knight feints an axe blow when Gawain’s head is on the block and watches the knight shrink. Some deep part of the Camelot knight still wants to live, which is what GK has wanted him to acknowledge all along.
So what can we carry away from the joining of Christmas with paganism’s Winter Solstice? That, in the end, reconciliation is possible, even though the Christian Church officially doesn’t think so. God puts us on earth to love life, and God shows us that love is more powerful than death. If we can’t hold both of those ideas in our head at once—and admittedly it’s difficult—then we need poems and stories like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to remind us.