There’s a Christmas story that probably isn’t your rotation of classics: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
This Arthurinian tale by an unknown poet is imbued with a wild, pagan wonder that’s unique to Christmas stories from the British isles. It’s strange and brutal, as rich in its mythical undertones as its Christian overtones.
J.R.R. Tolkien noted in his introduction to his translation, “in their own time, the adjectives ‘dark’ and ‘hard’ would probably have been applied to these poems.”
While likely written by a contemporary of Chaucer, the alliterative verse of the Gawain Poet feels so much older. Opening with references to the fall of Troy, the poet appears to have applied ancientness like a patina on purpose.
I highly recommend it, particularly if, like a friend of mine recently confided in me, you “kind of dread Christmas.”
Imagine Christmastide in Camelot where a feast is afoot. King Arthur, his queen, and his knights are all gathered. Before the meal, however, Arthur insists someone must tell a tale or compete in combat. On cue, a giant green knight rides into the hall, holds his holly-hasped axe high, and hollers.
If some brave knight will meet him in combat and deal him a blow, the Green Knight will give the challenger his axe. But, the challenger will have to seek the Green Knight out in a year to receive the same blow.
No one speaks. Camelot teeters on the brink of transgression against the rules of chivalry and honor. Then, the young knight Gawain leaps up and declares he is bound by courtesy to accept the challenge. (Obligation, fairness, and trading are central themes.)
The Green Knight hands over the axe and bares his neck.
Gawain beheads him.
This is where it gets weird. The Green Knight picks up his head and merrily strides out, telling Gawain to seek him in a year at the Green Chapel.
The doors slam shut. Gawain reverberates with the realization that he is honor-bound to seek his own slayer in a year.
I have always wondered why Gawain didn’t just cut the Green Knight’s finger off. Surely that would have satisfied honor.
But I also relate to Gawain’s desire for perfection in courtesy and honor. His overzealous ambition reminds me that the novel I decided to draft this year is far from done. I’ve failed in many ways. Now, the year is dying. Christmas arrives too quickly.
Full of dread as Christmas approaches, Gawain sets off, and eventually arrives in a wood of “oak, hazel, and hawthorne trees”—magical trees. The Green Knight is associated with holly, like the Holly King whose conflict with the Oak King churns the changing seasons. He is often called “elven lord” or “fae lord.” With Gawain, a textbook example of the Christian knight with the Virgin Mary emblazoned on his shield, we cross over into the dark shadows of myth. In the solstice, pagan beliefs and Christianity collide. Will the laws of chivalry, or of justice, apply here?
The rules of hospitality hold true, at least. Gawain is welcomed, on Christmas Eve, into a castle.
“Stay for Christmastide,” the lord and lady urge, “the Green Chapel is nearby.”
Gawain, having learned no lessons, enters into a bargain with the lord to trade whatever he receives each day for whatever the lord kills while hunting. The lady then attempts to seduce Gawain.
There’s a Christmasy parallel here between Gawain and the Virgin Mary. The immaculate conception is the arrival of Holiness Itself through apparent impurity, the transgression of societal moral standards and taboos. Gawain, perhaps inspired by his shield, remains pure but risks transgressing courtesy by offending his hostess. Then the lady offers him a magical belt that will make him invincible. Gawain accepts this and doesn’t give the belt to his host, breaking his promise and underhandedly trying to avoid his impending death.
Gawain wants to be honorable, but he’s also desperate to live, to wriggle out from under justice’s blow.
On New Year’s day, Gawain sets out for the Green Chapel. There, he finds the Green Knight, who raises his axe and…merely grazes Gawain’s neck.
Bizarre grace.
You see, the Green Knight is the lord of the castle. This game is all because of Morgana Le Fay’s curse. He recognized the belt, and the minor wound he gives Gawain is in reproach of the knight’s cowardice and dishonesty.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight insists on being “dark” and “hard,” rather like the biblical Christmas story in John 1:5-11: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.”
Some versions translate “overcome” as “comprehend.” Another translation might be “consume.” In any case, John points out that the incarnation isn’t easy. It’s marvelous, staggering, and inherently unpalatable. It’s a defiant mystery, scrambling the world’s order. It’s swaddled in layers of contradiction—holiness coming in the guise of impurity, God somehow fitting in an infant body but defying comprehension by human minds.
Gawain has all the trimmings of a classic, moralistic fairytale. The predictable, sing-song pattern of the alliterative verse leads the reader to expect a neat lesson to drop bluntly at the end. But Gawain denies didacticism. We don’t get a satisfactory reason for the curse, the bargain, the temptation, or Arthur’s arbitrary rule about jousting before dinner. Every event feels necessary, but most of it is nonsense.
The Christmas story, maybe even the whole gospel, can strike us as similarly strange. Why curse humanity, necessitating a Savior? Of all deaths, why crucifixion? Why virgin birth? Why does it all have to be so odd, foreign, and darn difficult?
The story of Gawain is a Christmas story for people with questions. It’s for people who greet Christmas with anxiety and dread. It’s for those who resent the obligation to celebrate or feel dogged by their own failures. It’s a Christmas story for people who want to make Christmas perfect or make themselves perfect and can’t. It’s about the uneasy intrusion of the incarnation into the natural rhythms of the world. It’s for the people who have a hard time reconciling the tangle of pagan and sacred in their traditions and their hearts. Importantly, this story acknowledges the unsettled strangeness of Christmas.
And we don’t have to understand to celebrate. We don’t have to be honorable to live. It’s a gift—strange, but beautiful.
Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together. A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.
