Michael Cerisano

Medieval Travel Narrative - 4/7/10

Final Research Paper

Morgan le Fay and Christian Ethics in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

Sir Gawain is not a altruistically moral knight, nor are the men of
the round table. The chivalric code which resides inside Arthurian
romances, especially in *Sir Gawain and The Green Knight*, is based
upon a Christian framework of morality, selflessness and duty. David
Persall in his essay "*Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*: An Essay in
Enigma" argues that Gawain's actions do not echo this principle;
Gawains actions are driven solely by self-serving motives. In acting in
hypocritical and irreligious ways, by the end of the poem Gawain
deeply feels his failings as a Christian and does so as a representative
for the ethics of the entire court. The traditional sense in which Morgan
le Fay is interpreted is customarily as an adversary, a feminine force in
opposition to Mary which resides on Gawains shield. Jill Mann argues
that this shield and the knightly attire are a symbol of the perfection of
the court, which I find to be unconvincing and unjustified. Mary is just
about forgotten once the Knight enters Bertilk's (The Green Knight's)
castle; the ethical drive of Gawain is run by consequentialism rather
than the deontological natural law duties that he should be bound to if
the Virgin mother was such an influence. The rules of the court have

been corrupted and are a far reach from Christian ethics; Morgan le Fay
(as part of a now outdated superstition by this time) is there to remind
the court of this fact. The story is not meant to be a satire of the
chivalric ethics but our narrator, according to Robert Pierle in "*Sir
Gawain and The Green Knight*: A Study in Moral Complexity" has "a
rather darkly ascetic Christian attitude[that is in] irreconcilable
conflict with various elements of the chivalric romance". The court is
not as noble as it may seem and the role of Morgan Le Fay is much
more than just a trope of the Arthurian tradition, she and her Green
Knight are the foils to the unchristian courtly ethics of Arthur and his
Knights.
First thing to put into perspective is the notion of Christian ethics.
Thirteenth century Christian philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas is
quoted as saying, according the Vatican, "An evil action cannot be
justified by reference to a good intention"
(http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a4.ht
m). He is the foundation upon which the church has built much of its
moral landscape. The quote in its essence means that intent does
matter, and that regardless of outcome or perceived intent by public,
the internalization of the doer is just as important as anything else.
This is certainly in stark contrast with the society of Arthurian tales,
which are obsessed with perceptions of the majority. According to
Robert Kindrick, Gawain and the court exist inside "what modern

anthropologists call shame-honor societiesthe ethics of a given

society are determined by what the majority of the people
believe."(Kindrick 7) Aquinas's natural law relies on the idea that
morality is universal, it comes from God and thus it is eternal. It is
already apparent that this court is running outside of the Christian
ethical ideals.
With that in mind Sir Gawain's actions should be examined under
a new light. Derek Persall's essay Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An
Essay in Enigma does this in a slightly different manner. Looking at
Gawain thought the course of the poem, Persall finds his actions to be
motivated and explicable though egocentric motivations. When Arthur
does not immediately accept the Green Knights challenge Sir Gawain
accepts. Though this acceptance, Gawain is acting as if he is making
an extremely brave move though what danger is he really in as there
would be no Green Knight to cut off his head next year if he did his job
properly.* (Pearsall 252) This action is taken with the promise of a
reward of renown, without any possibly of damage to himself. This is
the shame-honor type society that Kindrick speaks of at play being
masked as chivalric honor. To look at the rest of the actions of Sir
Gawain though this interpretation is to find him lacking thought the
poem. When he leaves Camelot for the Green Chapel and the people
lament the loss of such a man, he has no choice but to leave; staying
would be to loose the honor he had gained though his actions a year

prior. His refusal of Lady Bertilaks advances makes it plain that rather
than just doing the honorable thing, he is protecting himself. If he did
breech the trust of the Sir Bertilak, he would be putting himself in
harms way as he is at the mercy of those in the castle. Even Gawain's
refusal to give in to the most basic desires at the very end though his
submission to being beheaded is a selfish move. Mark Miller and his
essay "The Ends of Excitement in *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*"
would likely disagree with Persall and absolutely myself as he says
"What makes Gawain an icon of knightly *trawthe* is that he refuses to
be compelled by the most compelling forces at work in himselfpreservation."(Miller 216) But this is exactly what he does. By taking
Lady Bertilak's green girdle he is protecting himself from The Green
Knight's magic; once again Gawain has made a choice that, everything
else equal to what he has seen so far, should have no consequence
except for his own recognition.
These egoist type actions are not only present in Sir Gawain,
Arthur is at fault also. After demanding excitement before dinner and
being easly goaded by the Green Knight, Arthur "grimly swings it [the
axe] about" (Fitt 1 231), our childish King needs someone to take his
place. He allows Sir Gawain to step in, and once the Green Knight has
fooled Gawain, Arthur abandons him because doing so might put
Arthur back in line for the gallows; in doing so Arthur condemns Sir
Gawain to die for a cowardly King. What is the worth of this ethical

system of chivalry if the leader of the court cannot even uphold the
code; if the chivalric court cannot uphold its integrity it is no moral
code, but just arbitrary guidelines.
The form that Arthur's court takes is highly overblown in
comparison to the earthy aesthetic of Green Chapel introduced later.
"the festival lasted the whole fifteen days with all the merry-making
that could be devised"(Fitt 1, 45). The knights lined room, over-eating,
over-drinking and full of cheer and camaraderie. This court could not
feel less Christian; the image provided is a feast of absolute excess in
wanton disregard of Christ's teachings. According to Robert C. Pierle,
regardless of the romantic elements that are being employed
"somehow the impression one receives is not one of splendor, but of
decadence."(Pierle 208) Arthurs court had all the trapping of beauty,
but this is not the beauty that the Virgin Mary of Gawain's shield could
endorse. Futher, Chivalry allowed aristocratic brutality to assume
ratified forms (Martin 311) which channeled the horrors of war away
and turned it into a game. When The Green Knight looses his head
many courtiers kicked at it as it rolled past(Fitt I, 228), as if it was
some kind of ball of play. No one screamed or seemly very surprised
that The Green Knight was still standing. The court treated violence so
lightly that again the court was falling outside of Christian morality.
Chivalry was whatever its enthusiasts wanted it to beno matter how
objectless, imprudent or predatory.(Martin 323)

Jill Man would argue otherwise. She puts forth that this showing
at court during Christmas is special qualities this ruling class is
privileged to have. The distraction of the party, the beautiful wall
covering and all the decorative dress of these men and women are not
there to cover anything but to manifest "an underlying reality" of
superiority. (Mann 244) This stance asks us literally take the poem at
surface value rather than treating the people inside the court as
individuals. She goes as far as to state that Gawain is "not motivated
or supported by any external considerations" (Mann 249). As already
discussed, Sir Gawain is motived by his desire for glory and recognition
from his peers, so when she says The only reason he has for keeping
his promise is the promise itself, this is obviously not the case.(Mann
249). Each promise that he keeps he is forced to in order to maintain
his name, and "a question of his name or reputation was a genuine
threat to his social standing and his identity."(Kindrick 20) If Morgan le
Fay's Green Knight is there to challenge the identity of the court, and
make it prove its inner worth in contrast to its appearance (as the
outer/materialist worth is established in the opening) than the Green
Knight in his feral appearance in comparison to the lavish armament of
Gawain is a good metaphor for this evaluation. The Green Knight
eventually proves himself to be honorable and good (by proxy le Fay
does too), though the Gawain gives away his conscience with Lady
Bertilak.

Gawain suffers only one nick on his neck at the hands of the
Green Knight, because he "fell short a little, sir and lacked fidelity"(Fitt
4, 2365), but the guilt that our hero feels is much greater than it
should seem it to be. He reacts first verbally violently lamenting how
his "good name is marred", then he leaves upset and returns home.
(Fitt 4, 2386) The thing to notice here is that Bertilak and Morgan le Fay
has convicted Sir Gawain of a thought crime. "While the hero
maintains the technical chastity of body, he forfeits (by desire for her_
the more important purity of mind."(Pierle) and this is a traditional
Christian trope. In the Bible, Matthew 5:27-28 reads: You have heard
that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I tell you that
anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery
with her in his heart." That is what Sir Gawain is being punished for.
The court's ethical standards are not up the worth of their religious
texts. By succumbing to the Wife's advances as he does, though he
does not physically give in, he has still sinned.
Ironically it is Morgan le Fay who is performing the test, not
Yahweh himself. To be fair it is sometimes difficult to make a distinct
split between Pagan and Christian traditions. The birthday of Jesus
Christ that Arthur is celebrating was never something that was
biblically established, and there are multiple hypotheses of just where
the practice of Christmas celebration came about. The overwhelmingly
prevailing argument is that the Christian tradition, in becoming so

large soaked up many different pagan traditions in to their canon, "the

Christmas tree, for example, has been linked with late medieval druidic
practices. (http://www.bib-arch.org/e-features/christmas.asp) The date
of Christmas lines up with the Roman Saturnalia festival, and other
similar Pagan festivals existed in Northern and Western Europe.
There is another quite obvious Pagan symbol being melded with
Christianity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the pentangle. The
poem makes the symbol to be expressing the five virtues of Gawain
and Christian ethics: generosity, fellowship, courtesy, compassion and
purity. The poem uses multiple dubious biblical examples such as
Christs five wounds and Solomon designing the symbol to link the
Pentangle to the Christian tradition, but the pentangle is a strongly
pagan symbol and it retains its magical associations with a goddess
figure in modern folklore and pagan religions(Tracy 36). The symbol is
on our Knights shield, along with, as it has already been stated, the
Virgin Mary. This again is the mixing of traditions and an absolutely
different meaning comes out of this. To put the two together means to
link each, Mary to Paganism and the Pentangle to Mary; so when
Gawain is pleading to Mary to help him find shelter, he is also then
evoking pagan sprits such as Morgan le Fay. Jill Mann finds the symbol
to be representative of courtly ethics, to be like Gawain, and to have
been emptied of debasing elements (Mann 248) and also endorses
the idea that the loss of one [of the virtues] is the loss of all[of the five

virtues](Mann 248). Mann again has to be taken issue with here as

Gawains mental purity has been already been discussed and shown to
have been breached in his acceptance of the green girdle. Mann is not
the only one who is reliant on the Pentangle staying as one, but our
narrator is also relies on this as the poem reads: Each one linked to
the others in an endless design,/Based upon five points that was never
unfinished(Fitt 2, 657-658). Mark Miller agrees as as he says he is
then understood to live up to or desire to live up to that ethos
[pentangle of virtues], and to the extent that he does not, he is
understoodto be guilty of an ethical failure. (Miller 219) Neither
Mann or the poem can justify the use of the pentangle though Christian
terms; this failure leaves the symbol to be left to its original owners,
instead of the Christian interlopers.
It being the case that pagan symbolism is observably present,
and the court corrupt, it seems quite possible that the pagan figure of
Morgan le Fay being employed in Gawain is being used to support
Christian ethics, when the so called Christians of Arthur's court stray
from the path. This is made much easier to accept when it is apparent
that The Green Knight is congratulating Sir Gawain for surviving, even
though The Green Knight had failed in his mission to humiliate Arthur.
Gawain had passed and the Green Knight is glad, and Morgan le Fay's
"discomfiture is neither dramatized nor even made explicit." (Friedman
260) The ending of the poem comes fairly abruptly which Miller goes as

far as calling it an anticlimax; After all that anticipation, focusing

himself on the final momentturns out that all the Green Knight was
going to do was give him a nick on the neck.(Miller 233) This ending is
not what Sir Gawain expects, even if he expects to survive by the
magic of the girdle, he could not possible have assumed a exit from
the Green Chapel without a fight. By stripping us and Gawain of our
expectations of the logical conclusion of an Arthurian romance, the
poet is throwing the traditions out and judging them. This is a rejection
of stories of chivalric honor and violence where the outwardly noble are
rewarded. This is why Morgan comes into the story at the moment,
seemingly out of left field.
Further if Morgan exists in a world, at the time to be known as
have been created by the Christian God, then she was created by such
a god and in that sense is part of a God filled world. She is "the moving
cause... of the entire plot"(Friedman 206), and God is the unmoving
mover.
The poem of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight presents it self as
a fairly straightforward Arthurian romance, but the much more
interesting questions comes from the mixing of the genre with realism
and religious symbolism that the poem projects with disturbance of
the moral and chivalric assumptions(Persall 250). The intertwined
Pagan and Christian symbols make it difficult to make one out from
another, almost bringing the two together to work in conjunction.

Gawain and his selfish acts continually work towards recognition, the
court attempts to revel in excess to do the same, which sets the poem
upon a treacherous slope. In the end though, nothing is learned by
anyone but Sir Gawain. Gawain returns home and is embraced; the
men and the king show him pity and decide to all wear green girdles as
a showing of solidarity. He feels the shame that he is duly afforded, and
moves from the shame-honor ethical mode to what Kindrick calls, the
guilt-innocence system [which] is moved by an internalized sense of
ethics.(Kindrick 8) This is the form of ethics that is associated with the
Church at the time, and by the end of the story at the very least
Gawain has changed. The beginning and end of this poem are
classically framed, giving it part of its realistic feeling, and maybe it
also has another point. It only took Felix Brutis to change the land that
would become Britain, it is just as likely that Gawain could change the
ethical system of the court now that he knows it is flawed. I do not
believe that Morgans plan failed, if she expected Gawain to be the one
that would accept the challenge, she certainly should have known the
rest of the fate she had set into motion. Gawains code of chivalry was
faulty, Morgan le Fay, working together with Christian symbols and
ethics, though the green knight corrected it or the course of the poem.

Bibliography
Kindrick, Robert L. "Gawain's Ethics: Shame and Guilt in Sir Gawain and
The Green Knight." Annuale Mediaevale 20 (1981): 5-32. Print.
Mann, Jill. "Courtly Aesthetics and Courtly Ethics in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight." Web.
Besserman, Lawrence. "The Idea of the Green Knight." ELH 53.2
(1986): 219-39. Print.
Mills, David. "An Analysis of the Temptation Scenes in "Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight"" The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 67.4
(1968): 612-30. Print.
Martin, Carl G. "The Cipher of Chivalry: Violence as Courtly Play in the
World of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." The Chaucer Review 43.3
(2009): 311-29. Print.

Pearsall, Derek. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Essay in

Enigma." The Chaucer Review 46.1 (2011): 248-58. Print.
Tracy, Larissa. "A Knight of God or the Goddess?: Rethinking Religious
Syncretism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Arthuriana 17.3
(2007): 31-55. Print.
Pierle, Robert C. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Study in Moral
Complexity." The Southern Quarterly 6.2 (1968): 203-11. Print.
Miller, Mark. "The Ends of Excitement in Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight: Teleology, Ethics, and the Death Drive." Print.
Going to find out where this is from exactly.
New International Version. [Colorado Springs]: Biblica, 2011.
BibleGateway.com. Web. 3 Mar. 2011.