It’s difficult to build on David Ehrlich’s near-perfect review in IndieWire, so I’ve gone for something slightly different, because I believe The Green Knight touches the question of what stories and art are for, how we are supposed to behold them and wield them, and how they can help us in exploring the sacramental.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a chivalric romance written in Middle English by an anonymous author. It reaches us via one surviving copy. It is a wild mix of folk motifs, old Welsh, Irish and English stories as well as some later French chivalric tradition that gets in via our Norman invaders.
It tells the tale of a beheading game, in which Gawain, a knight of Camelot, is challenged to levy a blow against the Green Knight, a mysterious quasi-giant who lives in a forest, with the promise that the same blow will be returned to him one year hence.
Sandwiched between these two swings of an axe are the tale of Gawain’s journey to the knight’s Green Chapel and another game he is forced to play along the way – an ‘exchange of winnings’ with a local lord.
Gawain is a premodern story, and much of it is strange to us. Its ambiguity and profound unresolvedness are largely what has made it so captivating for almost a thousand years, but it is its blending of pagan and Christian images and themes that might surprise a modern, protestant Christian reader or viewer the most.
Saint-Cyran once made the thought-provoking remark that ‘faith consists of a series of contradictions held together by grace,’ (writes Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry in America). The whole business of orthodoxy is in holding these contradictions together, instead of overemphasizing one side at the expense of the other, or reconciling their paradoxical nature with a dismissive ‘it’s kind of both, isn’t it?’
Is Christ God, or is He a man? Yes, says orthodoxy. Is salvation found by sheer grace through faith, or through works? Yes. Is there One God, or is there God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit? Yes. Is this simply mundane, everyday food, or is it the very flesh and blood of the Divine? Yes.
David Lowery’s ‘filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance by anonymous’ (to quote the title cards) is riveting primarily because of its employment of this ‘Orthodox Yes’.
Is this a Christian story about the quest for salvation, or it a fatalistic pagan tale about the fall of man? The Green Knight says yes. Is chivalry a good thing that protects us from the worst of ourselves, or is the concept of a knight’s honour a vanity, and ultimately futile? Is it civilisation that is evil, or is the natural world corrupted and fallen? The Green Knight says yes.
The Green Knight says yes not only through its themes and its narrative, but perhaps most powerfully through its imagery. Is that the Mum from Robert Eggers’ profoundly horrible The VVitch? It sure is. And yet Kate Dickie as Queen Guinevere is bedecked in almost Byzantine splendour, decorated with thousands of tiny Christian symbols.
The outside of Gawain’s shield is blazened with a pentacle, the inside with an icon of the Theotokos. The first words spoken by a character in this film are ‘Christ is born!’ and they are spoken in a brothel. Is this work sacred, or is it profane? Well … yes.
This kind of paradox was perhaps less confusing for our forebears than it is for us moderns. Many of the great pagan stories reach us only thanks to the Christian writers who saw fit to preserve them. Gawain, Beowulf, The Mabinogion – all of these retain a distinctly pre-Christian spiritus rector.
Yet, before the advent of the printing press, when it was immensely costly to do so, people of deep and devout faith spent hours writing and re-writing these stories - often reframing them within a Christian lens. Beowulf, heathen of heathens, becomes a devout man of God. Arthur, the archetypal Christian king, relies heavily on the counsel of a druid.
Why record these stories when these monks could have more valuably spent their time writing down Scripture, the infallible Word of God; the Greatest Story of All Time™, instead of some pagan, witchy nonsense?
Simply, because these stories contain something of beauty, goodness and truth. Because they connect us to a people, a place and a history that isn’t invalidated by their Christening. And because to do so is itself distinctively Christian.
Writing in his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton (via a mytholigised King Alfred) says to the Danes;
Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.
Yes, the Old Stories foreshadow something of greater, all-surpassing beauty. But that Great Story, the Divine Eucatastophe, was never supposed to abrogate fairytales but to hallow them.
Those aren’t my words, but Professor Tolkien’s, in the conclusion to On Fairy Stories (J.R.R. is also responsible for the best-known modern translation of Gawain).
Earlier in that essay, Tolkien compares storytelling with the cooking of an enormous cauldron of soup, which draws on a variety of ingredients for its stock. The Lord of the Rings is a perfect example of Tolkien’s vision of a complex and well-seasoned soup, drawing from Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology, his Catholic faith, his marriage, his experience of the horrors of the Great War and the beauty of the English landscape - among many other influences.
Tolkien himself admits how much fun it can be to rummage around in that cauldron, to pull out the bones and work out where everything came from. But the primary concern is that the soup tastes good, that people enjoy it and that it is shared generously.
I’d argue the monks of yore wrote down these stories because they were good and tasty soup. And as much fun as it is to pull the bones from Tolkien et al, we’d all be much better off if we poured more of our time into cooking and sharing hearty, well-seasoned soup. By this I don’t mean just copying out the gospels again.
The Old Stories remind us of the beauty that is vital to the communication of goodness and truth. Particularly within the evangelical Protestant tradition, beauty seems increasingly shorn of its two siblings.
The soup Lowery and co. have concocted is rich and deep in its sources and its scope. It’s also far more troubling, equivocal and contradictory. You know, in the way that real life is.