A Chivalric Test

Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part Eight)

Recap: After the game with the Green Knight, Gawain has set out to the Wild Chapel to honour the arrangement. He goes through a harrowing in the wilderness before coming across a wondrous castle. The castle is presided over by a man called Bertilak and his wife Lady Hautdesert. Gawain is struck almost dumb by her allure, and is filled with emotional conflict. Bertilak suggests they play a game; everyday he hunts and gives Gawain what he finds, Gawain returns to Bertilak whatever he gained during the day, recuperating at the castle.

Next morning Gawain wakes to hounds, horns and gutsy hurrah as Bertilak sets off into the dawn-bright forest. Our man drifts on in dream until he hears his door quietly open, and becomes aware there is a figure sitting at the end of his bed. Without even opening his eyes, he knows it's the Lady Hautdesert. His star-woman. A beautiful and terrible event all in one go. All he longs for and all he's trying to keep at bay.

Hit was the ladi, loflyest to beholde,

That drow the dor after hij ful dernly and stylle

She speaks, that voice that alone turns him to rubble.

I know you are awake dear one. It appears that it’s not only my husband doing the hunting. I seem to have you in my power also. Let us hope you are not too keen to leave your prison.

Gawain gingerly opens one eye and beholds the terrible beauty at the end of his bed, sitting so still. Back in the shadows of the room is an old woman who often accompanies her, pale as moon, maybe blind. Incredibly still, like a stuffed bird. Gawain keeps it light, as he is trained to do:

Though it’s a delight to see you madam, it’s unusual to have the honour of such chat before I have risen for breakfast. Is there anything in particular on your mind?

She’s not having light. She locks eyes.

I hold doubt that you are really Gawain. Any woman in the country would be delighted to have him in her power, but I’m not convinced you are him. You never speak of love, or lovemaking or worst of all have not once tried to take a kiss from me. It’s hurtful.

Gawain affirms gently that it’s really him, and of course would be delighted to give her a kiss. He lays the most chaste of kisses on her cheek and she leaves the chamber, the old woman sliding from the shadows with her. Despite his longing for her, Gawain is relieved when he's alone. His head is a-buzz with conflict.

At dusk Bertilak returns from the trees with a handsome stag that he has laid at Gawain’s feet.

This fellow will provide you with many nights feasting. And what would you have for me?

Gawain gives Bertilak’s bearded cheek the mildest kiss. The big man roars with laughter.

Where did you obtain that?

Gawain smiles back.

That wasn’t part of the game my lord, the revealing of location. Only that I should give you what I gained today.

Bertilak seems content, and guides his guest to the fire for meat and beer. Long into the night they exchange stories and call merrily up to the gallery for their favourite tunes. It’s a tipsy Gawain that crawls into bed, only to be assailed by strange dreams; of both the Green Knight and the Lady Hautdesert. Danger and ecstasy, so very close to each other. Gawain slogs it out till he's woken again by the horns and cheery bellows of the hunt. He is not at all surprised when he hears the door of his chamber open. Not at all.

Lady Hautdesert is closer today. Halfway up the bed, large eyes roaming his face for a hint of intimacy. Again she protests that he couldn’t be the Gawain of legend, that he seems in no way able to live up to his reputation as a champion of the feminine. Within all the etiquette she’s having a good prod. She breaks her gaze and looks out of the window at the wintery forest, eyes shiny with tears.

Today Gawain gives her two kisses. Either cheek. She and the old lady of the shadows file quietly out. Later from the tree line roars Bertilak, just as night is dark-falling and ground hard-frosty. He lays a huge boar before his admiring guest.

Many a chop will fill your plate from this! You will have much to bring home to Camelot should you survive the Green Chapel! Now, what do you have for me my friend?

Two kisses on that bristly red beard. Bertilak laughs again.

I have learnt not to enquire on the location of such an event! Come, the fire awaits, my bones they creak.

Again the men talk late, Gawain delaying his sleep for the now dreaded nightmares of the Lady closer to him than I may mention, then the terrible sharpening of the Green Knight’s axe, a sound getting progressively louder. As he strolls the grounds sometimes thinks he can hear it in the daylight, coming from everywhere and nowhere.  

Third morning: hounds, trumpets, laughter. Immediately the door opens to his chamber and the Lady enters, the old woman sliding into the gloom behind her. Today the woman is clad only in a luxurious fox fur cloak, the fulsome chapel of her pale body pronounced under the furs. Gawain’s head is swimming and he fears he’s for drowning. The Lady Hautdesert speaks:

Tomorrow is New Year’s Day and you will leave us for the Green Chapel. My grief is I will never see you again, that this has all been a beautiful Christmas dream. Would you consider leaving me a glove as token? As proof this wasn’t just my silly imagining?

Gawain counters.

Madam, a glove is hardly a gift fit to articulate the depth of this encounter with you. Nothing could do it justice. I will leave your side a changed man.

 She nods, as if expecting that response.

 Well, let me give you something. A ring?

He shudders.

A ring your husband has likely bought you is not something I would wish glinting on my hand by the fire with Lord Bertilak this evening.

Again, she doesn’t seem surprised.

I have something deeper to offer. Something you would do well to accept. I have a green sash around my hips, woven with all sorts of protective charms that if you wore would ensure your survival at the Green Chapel. It would help you sidestep your arrangement, outwit it if you will, fox your way out.

Ah, she gets to the heart of the matter. Survival. She leans in, more Reynard than woman now:

No one needs to know. No one. Don’t mention it in my husband’s game. Keep it our little secret.

Then and there something breaks in Gawain. An out. He is being offered an out. He doesn’t speculate, doesn’t even speak, just nods. From deep within her furs Lady Hautdesert produces the sash, still warm from her waist. Gawain hides the sash immediately under his nightgown. He kisses the Lady three times, and she and the old woman leave the chamber. He lays on the gratitude:

I am derely to yow biholde

Because of your sembelaunt,

And ever in hot and colde

To be your true servaunt

Gawain has never kept a secret before, it leaves him feeling a little queasy.

At dusk, Bertilak lobs a scrawny fox at Gawain’s boots. Gawain delivers the three kisses. In the gloom-light Bertilak looks deeply at Gawain.

Is that it?

 It is.

So be it.

For the first time the talk is strained between the two men, and they leave the fire early for their rest. Gawain is packed and ready for morning, already with the sash around his hips. He strokes it absently as he drifts in rest, trying to locate an element of the Lady Hautdesert within it, some remnant of her energy, her scent.

*** And Gawain thought he was leaving the tests back in the forest.

Despite appearances, Lady Hautdesert isn’t simply enamoured with Gawain, but rather testing his ground, his mettle, the values he claims to be embodying (remember his shield?). We can proclaim all sorts of piety in public, but in the bedchamber it’s a far trickier proposition. The Troubadours (French poets of the era slightly before the Gawain poet) were notorious for celebrating adultery, something often baffling to a modern reader. The reasoning behind it is this: in the medieval age most married not for love but for societal or family advantage. So adultery to a Troubadour mind was to honour true love over protocol, a trope we see everywhere in modern life, so much we don’t even think about it.

But it’s stories like Tristan & Isolde and Romeo & Juliet that seeded Romanic love as a noble pursuit in the West. I’m not suggesting that no one had ever fallen in love before that moment, simply that the experience is raised up, made even sacred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For many of us, the terrifying fall into love (even with someone quite inappropriate for us) is the closest we get to a mythological experience. Rationality be blown, the divine sickness has arrived. Of course this is very different to random bed-hopping or the wildly overstimulated eroticism we are assailed by today. That’s Eros not Amor. Amor is site specific.

Lady Hautdesert is clearly more than she seems. Rather than the counter-cultural accomplishment of some romantic ideal, if Gawain so much as lays a finger on her (not including his chaste pecks), he and his status will go up in smoke. In this way the story can’t be regarded as a Courtly School tale as it’s crucial that Gawain cleaves to protocol. This is a test not a gateway to liberation. He has to deepen through limit. B.J. Whiting states:

Gawain’s reputation, well-known and fixed, would not permit him to take part in an illicit affair; courtly love presupposed extra-marital relations; the current craze was for courtly love, and therefore Gawain must be supplanted by a new hero.

(For a new hero we could think Lancelot.)

We will come to the Lady’s companion, the old lady, in our final Fitt.

Lady Hautdesert's clarity is very much in rhythm with a lesser-known group of Troubadour poets – the Troubaritz. This is a name given to a collection of women (they didn't know each other personally) that composed love poems in the late twelfth and thirteenth century. These were noble women, some of whom would have been the subject of florid verse in their own courts and they wanted to turn the tables. Their poems are noted for being far more to the point than the wider male tradition, earthier. A few lines here from the Countess of Dia may give you a sense:

*

Would that I might hold my knight

Till morning naked in my arms,

Intoxicated by my charms

He’d think himself in paradise;

For more pleased with him am I

Than Floris was with Blancheflor:

I grant him my heart, my amour,

My eyes, my mind, and my life.

Sweet friend, so good so gracious

When shall I have you in my power,

And lie with you at midnight hour,

And grant you kisses amorous?

Know, great desire I nurture too

To have you in my husband’s place,

As soon as you grant me, with grace,

To do all that I’d have you do.

*

“When shall I have you in my power?”

There is nothing wan or overly metaphorical here, but a charged ground of desire and protocol, conjuring a venerated romantic or even spiritual suffering. Joseph Campbell would say it's ROMA becoming AMOR (i.e. turning from a world of societal obligation towards the personal passions of the heart). Literally ROMA as a word is turned on itself.

In his failure to resist saving his own neck, Gawain falls from the high perch reserved for Grail-worthy knights of the Round Table (Galahad, Parzival) and proves himself not immaculate but human – not a noble stag but a wily fox (using the hunting scenario as metaphor). The longer he allows the bedroom visits to continue the more the animals are diminished in status that Bertilak brings back from the hunt. I’m not sure Gawain realises he’s being mirrored exactly in the hunt. Gawain doesn’t understand the initiatory ground he’s walking upon. We rarely can when we’re in the centre of the action.

Both Lord and Lady Hautdesert are hunting Gawain, and reveal through outright interrogation and symbolic allegory the limits of what he’s spiritually capable of at that age. He’s celebrated as a gallant lad but can he be a trustworthy man? Will he honour his word? The number one qualities of a knight were prowess and loyalty. Gawain clearly possesses prowess (think of his Otherworld battles), but will he show fidelity to his pledge? Will his grace remain under pressure? What began as a highly mythological tale is becoming more and more intimate, more relatable. E. Talbot Donaldson X-rays the scene:

The poet, for all his epic enhancement and overt praise for the hero, actually tells a tale of his increasing helplessness…when the pressures increase, St. Mary’s knight, no longer able to rely on himself, relies not on St. Mary but on a belt of supposed magical powers, which he must accept from the lady with ignominy and hide from her lord with dishonesty.

No true chivalric code would endorse concealment and outright subterfuge to save one’s life. He is grasping a magical totem rather than peaceful religious acceptance of his fate. But this desperate move from Gawain is the source of the story’s genius and its long life. We have moved from Epic to Lyric, from grand to confessional. We all understand such an act of survival. This is when we – as humans rarely saints – enter the story. And it sets the scene (we’re not quite there yet) for the quality not of perfection but forgiveness, something far more needed in most of our lives. Of messing up, confessing, and starting afresh. A Liturgy of the Wild would have such forgiveness at its centre.

But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

John 8:7

***

Recently released, a lively second half of the Shaw-Pageau conversation concerning the Grail, Islamic Cosmology, Bob Dylan and “good art being a care package for leaving Eden”:

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The Female Troubadours by Meg Bogin.

A SHORT FOOTNOTE ON THE HUNT & THE FOREST

With Bertilak’s journeys in and out of the woods, I wanted to leave a few words here on the hunt and the forest in olde Britain.

The Saxon King Edgar, who reigned from 959 to 975, used to receive a yearly payment in wolf skins from Welsh hunters, from the “walds” themselves—woods that harboured wolves and foxes. The term forest was originally a juridical phrase, indicating a designated area outside the castle walls, most likely meaning “outside,” from the Latin foris. This also clarified the difference between walled but spacious royal gardens that were, on occasion, referred to as silva, meaning “wood.” To a working-class Englishman, the forests were off limits on pain of all sorts of nastiness.

These noble glades teemed with coney, pheasant, partridge, grouse, hind, hart, buck, doe, and fox. They were in a state of both preservation and pursuit: the peasants were kept out, so woodland creatures enjoyed primacy until the nobles took the saddle and went mad for roving the copses. It was a kind of early conservation act, Robert Pogue Harrison arguing that these very enclosures could have prolonged the life of extended woodland in an ever more industrial Europe. In this light, William the Conqueror is a kind of rough ecologist. In this way not every wood was a forest—it needed this royal designation—but almost every forest had woods within it. The writer John Manwood , who in the Elizabethan era was a gamekeeper of Waltham Forest, gathered and laid out this system of wilderness preservation in what he called the “Forest Law.” It was no secret that Manwood hankered after an earlier era, when the law was kept firm with a dread fist for poachers. By his time, the great royal forests were erupting into hiding places and leafy refuge for all variants of wolfshead and bandit. In Manwood’s Arcadian reverie, we are back in the time of the saltus sacrosanctus, the “sacrosanct wood.” Any den of ne’er-do-wells would be viciously plucked from the byres and lonely wains of the deep green. To become an outlaw—a “wolf ’s-head” (the price of your head was equivalent to that of a wolf )—was to be civiliter mortuus, or civilly dead.

It was a banishment that could be undone only by suing for pardon from whoever condemned you in the first place. This would prove difficult if your only hope of survival was staying uncaught and out of sight. And the best place for that was the greenwood.

What critics of the royal hunting privilege refused to accept, is that an essential part of the king’s personhood belonged to the forest. The wilderness beyond the walls of his court belonged every bit to his nature as the civilised world within those same walls. . . . The hunt ritualises and reaffirms the king’s ancient nature as civiliser and conqueror of the land. . . . As sovereign of the land, the king overcomes the wilderness because he is the wildest of all by nature.

So Harrison implies that the king must be aligned to and leader of all wildness, and so these royal swathes of greenwood were ritual quadrants of the ancient, magical hunt. The hunt was a nod back to an era before refined manners, four-poster beds, and foreign policy; it was to fill the king’s head with hot blood, to remind him that he was a darkling king of the animals.

Without this leafy machismo the worry would be that the king was an effete man entirely of court, and that the land underneath his feet was actually out of his control. So these vigorous charges into the green were a remnant of a pagan cosmology. And this is not to presume that it was just an empty gesture to archaic concerns; a poem from the Peterborough Chronicle reports that William the Conqueror “loved the stags as much / as if he were their father.” William certainly kept such paternal instincts entirely within the forests, slaughtering, decimating, and terrifying the English inhabitants of his new country for decades to come. It is an irony that the very forests he established became rugged homes for on-the-run nobles who became furious guerrilla bandits and would set the scene for the likes of real-life outlaws Fulk Fitzwarin and Eustace the Monk, as well as for the move over several centuries into the folk mind of the Robin Hood ballads. The association between woods and a certain rebel English spirit was established for good.