English 1022E Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Killing Machine, Endless Knot, Satan
12 Jan 2017
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English 1022: Week 7 Lectures
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Symbol: many implications
ONE MEANING:
• EMBLEM
o Object or person or event that has a one for one connection to an extraction of some
kind
• ALLEGORY
• PERSONIFICATION
• His colour: he is totally emerald green, everything about him is green
o This may argue that he is associated with nature
o Some critics see him as a vegetation
o We still have the residue of that way of thinking: bringing in greenery into the house,
reminds ourselves that although most of nature has died, it will revive itself in the spring
o Green in the medieval time
▪ Associated with death
• Bodies turn green after death
▪ Also associated with the supernatural
▪ Associated with the devil: big green tail
o So green suggests life and vitality on one hand but also death and evil
o He seems to trigger all of these responses
o Clearly what is required is some sort of clarification
▪ We learn that he wears no armor: he has not come to fight or in a war like spirit
▪ He carries a holly branch – an emblematic object
• Emblem = something that has a 1 for 1 equivalence with something else
• Emblem of peace not of malice → but the other thing that he carries is
the pagon axe: something that is non Christian, described as the mother
of all axes (enormous)
o An emblem of death and destruction
o A killing machine
o Apparently we are to interpret him as coming in piece but
carrying with him an image of death
o Green knight represents: what a Christian knight should ideally not feel
▪ If you are a freely believing Christian knight, you believe that death is a gateway
to an internal future
▪ All aspects of the Christian code are called into trial by the sudden appearance
of this image of death
▪ The knights and Arthur have to face up to this image of death with: FAITH and
COURAGE
• Fortitude and confidence rather than fear
• Do they?
• Other colour: gold
o Colour of sunlight and vitality
• Line 309-310:
o He accuses them of all of the things they should not be demonstrating
o Cowardness, fear and trembling in the presence of death
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