LOTR: Gawain and the Green Knight

This week I’m learning about how tales about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are woven through Lord of the Rings. In particular, I’ve read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien studied this 14th century poem, translating a copy and delivering a lecture upon it at the University of Glasgow in 1953 (published later in “The Monster and the Critics and Other Essays).

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has many plot and descriptive elements typical of a chivalric romance, including the quest, courtly feasts and celebrations, temptations, battles, traditional characters of Arthurian legends and traditional scenes, such as the arming of a knight before an adventure. It is, however, a rather late representative of this genre, and the poet has skillfully and purposely reworked almost every convention.” The Keys of Middle Earth, p. 236

In this tale, King Arthur’s nephew Sir Gawain (note the important sister-son connection common in Germanic stories) accepts a challenge from the Green Knight to deliver an ax blow and behead him during a New Year’s Day feast. Instead of dying, the Green Knight picks up his own head and rides away on his green horse — but not before reminding Sir Gawain of the agreement he made. Sir Gawain must find his Green Chapel by the next New Year, and suffer one blow to the neck. Sir Gawain leaves on his quest on All Saints Day, and journeys through the mountains on Wales as he searches for the Green Chapel. During this time, he battles a myriad of monsters, wolves and giants against the cold and icy background of winter. The poet emphasises Gawain’s loneliness in the harsh and desolate landscape, as well as the constant presence of danger. This same scene shows up in the Lord of the Rings as Frodo, Sam and Gollum journey through the Dead Marshes and Mordor. Again, a section of Beowulf can also be linked to these descriptions, as well. When Beowulf ventures to the water to slay Grendel’s mother, he encounters a landscape that is craggy, with dark mists and an evil that keeps away other animals. Of particular interest to me is that in Beowulf, there is “fire on the water”; in the Dead Marshes of LOTR, there are “tricksy lights” and “candles for corpses” on the water that lure unwary travelers to their doom.

“The description works on three levels then. First, it emphasizes the horror that Beowulf will have to face. It plays on the ideas of desolation, wintry landscapes and the supernatural. Second — and this is true also of Tolkien’s writing — the natural descriptions are realistic, thus reinforcing the plausibility of the tale. The audience will have seen lakes like this, or will imagine they have. Yet at the same time — and this is true of Tokien’s work as well — the mere retains an element of fantasy. It is in a fen as well as beingin a craggy headland, and is inhabited by supernatural evil instinctively feared by animals. Similar ambiguity and sense of unease are used by Tolkien in his descriptions of the Mordor landscape east of the Anduin.” The Keys of Middle Earth, p. 238