In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain is described as being a man of five major virtues:  franchise, fellowship, cleanness, courtesy, and pity (Boroff 76).  Of these, his fellowship (or fidelity) is called into question in the scene in which he receives the green girdle from the lady of the castle and then promises to conceal it from the lord (who later turns out to be Bertilak de Hautdesert, the Green Knight).  Because of this, one may come to interpret that Gawain has shirked his knightly duty by committing the sin of infidelity (he had promised the lord to give him at the end of the day all that he had received that day, and by withholding the girdle he breaks this accord).  This would indeed warrant his frenzied confession at the Green Chapel (he even goes so far as to accuse himself of the sin of covetousness), but it is made clear that neither the Green Knight nor (at the end of the tale) Arthur and his court consider this supposed breach of knightly virtue as serious as Gawain seems to.  It is clear, then, that the poet means to present Gawain’s slight divergence from “fellowship” as a simple human error, and not a gross breach of knightly or Christian virtue.  Furthermore, while the poet did set out to teach a lesson with this poem, it does not have the heavy underlying religious message that it may first seem to.

G. L. Kittredge writes, “As the Temptation appears in the English poem, it is a trial of Gawain’s fidelity to his host and of his loyalty to the chivalric ideal of ‘truth’ (Kittredge 76).”  And indeed, in the first two days in which the lady of the castle appears in Gawain’s chamber to tempt him, he graciously resists her, allowing himself only a small number of kisses (which he accordingly gives the lord at the end of each night) and therefore preserving his knightly and Christian ideals.  However, on the third day, the lady offers him two gifts: first, a ring, which Gawain steadfastly refuses, and then a green girdle, the lady’s description of which helps to sway Gawain’s original stance of not accepting any gifts: “‘For the man that possesses this piece of silk, / If he bore it on his body, belted about, / There is no hand under heaven that could hew him down, / For he could not be killed by any craft on earth (Boroff 58).’”  Gawain, upon hearing this information, quickly acquiesces to the lady’s request: “Then the man began to muse, and mainly he thought / It was a pearl for his plight, the peril to come / When he gains the Green Chapel to get his reward: / Could he escape unscathed, the scheme were noble (Boroff 58)!”  It is clear from these lines that Gawain is not necessarily succumbing to the womanly wiles of the lady of the castle, but rather taking his own life into consideration.  The lady’s assurance that the secret will be kept is only more motivation for Gawain to hide the girdle from his host.  This is evidenced by Ad Putter, who writes, “Gawain is under an obligation to return the gift to his host, but what if the host does not know?  His ignorance enables Gawain to hang on to what he believes is a life-saver.   …the Lady of the Castle’s assurance of secrecy means that Gawain can save his life without his honour being implicated (Putter 181).”

Regardless of how Gawain originally views his transgression, the events at the Green Chapel seem to open his eyes to how serious it actually was (at least, in relation to his own ideology).  After the Green Knight nicks him on the neck and gives him his rebuke, Gawain goes on to lament, “Accursed be a cowardly and covetous heart! / …Your cut taught me cowardice, care for my life, / And coveting came after, contrary both / To largesse and loyalty belonging to knights (Boroff 71).”  The “coveting” that Gawain is referring to is, as described by David Farley Hills, “… a state of inordinate love for oneself, and it is just such a disposition that Gawain has shown in accepting the girdle to save his life.”  He goes on to say, “In not [handing over the green girdle to Bertilak] because he loved his life too much he was placing his love for himself above his love for truth and therefore God—a classical example of [covetousness] in this ‘general’ sense (Hills 129).”  But, as it turns out, the Green Knight is quick to forgive him and absolve him of all wrongdoing, and when Gawain returns to King Arthur’s court and tells them the tale of his misdeed, the monarch and the other lords and ladies present have a good laugh and then commission that each of them have made a green girdle to wear not as a reminder of Gawain’s error but rather as a sort of testament to him and his knightly heroism.  This is the clearest evidence that the poet does not intend for Gawain’s error to be viewed as a serious breach of etiquette; the good knight does, however, learn a lesson: “…that however daunting the path of honesty may seem, one must stick to it, even if one can cut corners without being seen (Putter 183).”  This indicates that the poet meant to teach more of a broad moral lesson than one of strict Christian, or even knightly, virtue; this lesson can easily be assimilated by anyone, knight or no.

Gerald Morgan has written this about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: “We need not doubt that the virtue of fidelity is specifically present, and not by way of mere implication… it is a central part of the deep significance that the poet attaches to [fellowship] (Morgan 5).”  Nevertheless, while the poem’s anonymous author does put much emphasis on this (and other virtues), he (or she) did not intend for the poem to be an unrelenting theological assault upon its medieval readers.  Rather, it is presented as more of a fable, with a far-reaching moral lesson that can be learned by all.

Works Cited

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / Patience / Pearl: Verse Translations.  Translated by Marie Boroff.  New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001.

Putter, Ad.  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Kittredge, George Lyman.  Study of Gawain and the Green Knight.  Gloucester, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Morgan, Gerald.  “The Validity of Gawain’s Confession in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.’”  The Review of English Studies.  Vol. 36, No. 141 (Feb. 1985): pp. 1-18.

Hills, David Farley.  “Gawain’s Fault in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”  The Review of English Studies.  Vol. 14, No. 54 (May 1963): pp. 124-131.

Burrow, John.  “The Two Confession Scenes in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.’”  Modern Philology.  Vol. 57, No. 2 (Nov. 1959): pp. 73-79.