Sir Gawain And The Green Knight

by Mallory Ortberg · June 3, 2015

gawainGREEN KNIGHT: hi hi
come over
it’ll be fun
we can whack off each other’s heads with swords

GAWAIN: what

GREEN KNIGHT: you can make out with my wife

GAWAIN: sorry what

GREEN KNIGHT: you can make out with me

GAWAIN: what?

GREEN KNIGHT: come over
we’ll have dinner
with all our heads on and also clothes

***

GAWAIN: your clothes – your hair – your face – they’re all green

GREEN KNIGHT: that’s not all of me that’s green

GAWAIN: what is that supposed to mean

GREEN KNIGHT: let’s play a game
you hit me today and i’ll hit you a year from now

GAWAIN: it’s Christmas

GREEN KNIGHT: fine
hit me today and i’ll hit you a year and a day from now
happy?

GAWAIN: I don’t understand the rules of this game
or the prize
what is the end goal here

GREEN KNIGHT: are you going to try to cut my head off or what

[GAWAIN cuts the GREEN KNIGHT’s head off]

GREEN KNIGHT: great hit
see you in a year

[The GREEN KNIGHT picks his head up and rides away]

GAWAIN: oh my God

KING ARTHUR: honestly
my advice to you is not even worry about this

GUINEVERE: yeah do not take this seriously

GAWAIN: why would I do that
that’s a terrible idea
this man can’t die and I have to let him strike me in a year

KING ARTHUR: look i just said that was my advice

***

GREEN KNIGHT: welcome to my castle, we’ve definitely never cut off each other’s heads before, my name is Bertilak and I am a regular human color, how are you

GAWAIN: Hello
thank you for your hospitality, but I cannot stay long
I have an appointment with a man at the Green Chapel in a few days

GREEN KNIGHT: that is JUST down the road from here, probably
you should just stay here until it’s time for that, stay here with me and my wife

GAWAIN: very well
I accept

GREEN KNIGHT: oh but shoot I have to go on a hunt, like right now
so why don’t we just agree to play a game for as long as you’re staying here
where I bring you whatever I find during the day
and you bring me whatever you find during the day

GAWAIN: what an odd suggestion
why don’t I just come hunting with you instead?

GREEN KNIGHT: NO
YOU STAY HERE IN THE CASTLE AND YOU GIVE ME WHATEVER YOU FIND HERE

GAWAIN: but you already own everything in the castle, it’s your c –

GREEN KNIGHT: I WILL SEE YOU ON THE MORROW

***

GAWAIN2LADY BERTILAK: whatcha kissin’

GAWAIN: what?
nothing

LADY BERTILAK: let’s make out

GAWAIN: I don’t feel like we should do that

LADY BERTILAK: if you don’t kiss me at least once it would really hurt my feelings

GAWAIN: well
if it would hurt your feelings

LADY BERTILAK: great
now you can make out with my husband tonight

GREEN KNIGHT: GAWAIN
I have brought you a deer from today’s hunt
what do you have for me

GAWAIN: I uh
I guess I have some kissing for you to have

GREEN KNIGHT: sounds great [they kiss]
ok see you tomorrow

GAWAIN: oh I really don’t want to play this game again, this is making me sort of unco –

GREEN KNIGHT: see you tomorrow

***

LADY BERTILAK: let’s have sex

GAWAIN: Okay, no for two reasons
one is that you are my host’s wife and also it goes against every vow of knighthood ever
and the second half of the second reason is that then I would have to also have sex with your husband
according to your weird castle sex game

LADY BERTILAK: mm that sounds like a Gawain problem
not a Lady Bertilak problem

GAWAIN: I’m not having sex with you

LADY BERTILAK: fine
here’s my underwear though, you have to take it
otherwise it would be rude

GAWAIN: well I don’t want to be rude
excuse me, I have to go kiss your husband again

GREEN KNIGHT: Well, Gawain
it’s been a great time here at Castle Makeout
but you’d better go fight that Green Knight you keep talking about

GAWAIN: I will probably perish when it is his turn to deliver the blow
Farewell, friend

GREEN KNIGHT: Gawain
Gawain it was me the whole time

GAWAIN: what

GREEN KNIGHT: I’m the same guy
and I’m not gonna kill you
I’m just gonna fuck up your neck a little because you kept my wife’s underwear and didn’t tell me
but you’re all right, guy
you’re all right

GAWAIN: what the hell
what the hell was the point of any of this
why the hell did you set all this up for

GREEN KNIGHT: 🙂

GAWAIN: what the HELL

KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE: henceforth we shall all wear green sashes
to celebrate the valuable lesson we have learned this day

GAWAIN: WHAT LESSON
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED

KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE: 🙂

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124 Comments

  1. lilah80 +274

    This feels like an instruction manual for how NOT to treat the unicorn in your marital threesome.

    1. mlitiagrl +68

      ….When you put it that way, I feel great kinship with Gawain. I almost want to send this to that couple…

    2. liesandperfidy +49

      Wow, this really puts a whole new spin on the “Lot & Morgause’s kids hunt a unicorn” chapters in Once & Future King.

        1. Ninajulia +13

          For me the part with Morgause and the cat was worse (I now put animal cruelty warnings in all Goodreads reviews bc I’m one of those people who is totally fine with gory murder, as long as no animals are involved).

  2. BobOfSeals +93

    Wow the speed in which I sent this to my old English professor. Also how much I did not understand that story when she assigned it to us.

    1. TheAntiHumorEquation +67

      how much I did not understand that story when she assigned it to us

      Does that imply you understand it now? Would you mind explaining it?

      1. BobOfSeals +25

        Noooope let me be clear I still feel like Gawain himself. What the hell happened?!

      2. maryoftheassumptions +11

        You left out the most important part: Lady Bertilak is Morgan leFay. That actually explains everything, because she’ll just fuck with people.

    2. cincothechorizo +116

      Wait, do you understand it now? Can you explain it to me????

      edit: I mean is the moral something other than “Gawain’s friends enlist a magical being to try to get Gawain to come to terms with his sexuality?”

      1. ashley +128

        Yes! One moral is “humans are fallible so try not to be a shit about it” which is actually pretty great, and anther is “watch out Christians, the pagan world can and will still fuck you up,” which is ALSO pretty great. So.

    3. BookPerson +59

      With a side of “watch out for those who claim they’re virtuous,” because Gawain is pretty self-effacing and does all the deeds and heroism, while the other Round Table knights are very smugly pleased with themselves for wearing virtuous green sashes after doing fuck all.

  3. RuncibleSpoon +190

    and so, another classic piece of literature can be broken down to: we did it for the lulz

    1. Unreadaethel +24

      Especially not dudes being uncomfortable with the flexibility of human sexuality.

  5. dunaganagain +74

    Mallory, I pretty much love everything you write. How did I live before the Toast???!!

    1. dakimel +55

      I don’t have definitive evidence, but all signs point to the whole of us having sprung, Athena-ishly, from her brow.

      I guess Nicole’s the one who planted all those false memories of our pre-Toast lives (she really could have skipped inventing age 13, but whatever).

    3. Nodame +2

      The internet didn’t exist before Mallory.

      I love Jezebel (the Kardashian of “lady blogs”) throwing shade – they must be threatened – suck Mallory’s toes y’all!

      PS: Gawain was brilliant.

  6. threatqualitypress +227

    “WHAT LESSON
    WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED”

    the motto of Bretonic folklore

  7. meanchelled +110

    ALL ARTHURIAN LITERATURE: ok so
    there’s maybe two books in the entire world
    and the heretics of the future have not yet given us Moving Picture Entertainment
    and the rickety wagon of traveling performers isn’t due until the next crusade or plague cycle
    whichever comes first, POPES
    so what if we just do incredibly stupid things all the goddamn time
    YEAH?????
    ok first up FINDING THE MAGIC CUP

    —
    i love arthurian literature but i don’t understand the pearl poet please help

    1. floridagal1 +12

      pretty sure Pearl is supposed to be about his dead kid (baby?). That’s all I got…

      1. constancecg +74

        It is about his dead kid! Who in the afterlife becomes this super hot babe who’s married to Jesus, and then she explains to her dad that Jesus has a ton of wives but everyone is cool with that because “the more the merrier.” Which, fun fact, is the first use of the phrase “the more the merrier” in recorded English.

    2. silllarskitty +26

      But also the pearl could just be a pearl or the pearl could be his dead kid or the pearl could be a metaphor for everything and anything according to the lecture series at my uni.

      So yeah . . . I am not sure the pearl poet understood the pearl poet either – WELCOME TO DREAM VISIONS EVERYONE WHERE EVERYTHING IS SOMETHING TO DO WITH GOD BUT NO ONE IS QUITE SURE WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

      My major beef is with piers plowman – WHAT THE HELL WAS HAPPENING AND WHY WERE THERE SO MANY SHEEP?

    3. bookwormV +9

      When I started doing Middle English (my college’s way of teaching this and Old English was basically, “We will talk to you about the very basics; now, over the Christmas holidays please read all of these poems in the original and write an essay on them) I tried starting with the Pearl poet and could not get through it at all.

      1. L.I. +5

        Oh wow, your college did that too? I live in a Romance-language-speaking country and they used that exact same approach in our Romance philology class. “Here are the basics of how Latin turned into ancient French! Now figure out all these poems in langue d’oc and langue d’oil by yourselves!” We were lucky enough to be spared the essays, thank goodness, but that’s just because we only mostly had oral exams.

    4. Dave +10

      Pearl is basically Billy Joel’s “River of Dreams” but longer and in Middle English.

    5. nowandrome +30

      Pearl Pearl Pearl Pearl! Pearl is THE BEST. I have just been teaching it this semester.

      Okay, I got a bit excited and this comment became long but at the end there is a link to Chaucer/Pearl-poet slash so you can skip to the end if you like.

      It is structured around the distinction between human and divine perspectives/knowledge/feelings. So, as is classic in dream-vision literature, we have a deficient dreamer who lacks something, and a wise guide who wishes to impart knowledge: they encounter each other, but they remain within different spheres of knowledge, so they are always at cross purposes to some extent.

      In Pearl this separation/distinction is physically represented by the stream between the Dreamer and the Pearl-maiden, which the Dreamer can’t cross – when he tries to cross it, he is thrown back into his mortal body. But the separation between their two spheres of experience/understanding is also incredibly poignant, because the point is that the Dreamer is trapped in the mortal experience of grief and loss – he loves and misses his dead daughter – while the Pearl-maiden is now working on the divine level and sees his grief as evidence that he is attached to worldly, material things, and is unable to accept the will of God.

      BUT which of them is right? You can read it as a poem about the futility of religious consolation in the face of the screaming pain of grief, as the Dreamer asks tender, human questions about how his daughter is getting on in this world he can’t begin to understand, and the Pearl-maiden responds with terse moral rebukes and explications of Scripture. OR you can read it as a poem about the way the Dreamer’s “love” for his daughter *is* in fact purely possessive, worldly, materialistic, about his ownership of her as a valuable object (he calls her a pearl and himself a “jeweller”/merchant), and how he can’t accept that she has accessed a world far beyond his ken, where she is happy and complete without him, and in harmony with the will of God. IT WORKS EITHER WAY DO YOU SEE.

      Two really good papers on this: Aers 1993 ( http://www.jstor.org/stable/2863834 ) and Watts 1984 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/462033).

      For Chaucer/Pearl poet slash see http://houseoffame.blogspot.com.au/2006/03/ich-an…

  9. Eraser +20

    The first Yuletide I ever read was about Gawain and the Green Knight. Much like this, it was pretty darn glorious.

  10. daisicles +33

    Mallory, how did you know that this is basically how I summed up this story when I read it for class?

    I was writing some sweet fanfic about it too. (In my head.)

        1. meanchelled +16

          do i have some kind of GAWAIN BLINDNESS that i can’t even see the midriff bared before me??? oh god fuck u old english bullshit

          1. arlette +35

            It’s not even just midriff, it’s a sort of “fine I’ll cover my nipples but the bit in between is important so I’m putting on the Wiccan hockey pads but that’s IT” look. You just can’t tell because Connery’s skin is so leathery-tanned that it looks like he stole his entire dermis from a top-shelf saddlery.

    2. jenavira +52

      oh my god I cannot believe I recognized that screencap. I think I have made some poor choices with my life.

        1. Unreadaethel +11

          And daring, and noble of bearing, but his wig is still complete bullshit.

          2. Unreadaethel +5

            Yes, I know, but idk why anybody ever thought that Prince Valiant wig was a good idea.

          3. jessim03 +3

            Clearly, because it’s about his personal sword. “Sword of the Valiant.” He needs the wig to emphasize both the title and his inner bravery.

    4. pole2pole +14

      Sean Connery had the worst agents for the entirety of his career, I’m beginning to think. Zardoz could be seen as a fluke, but there are so many appalling errors of judgment besides that.

  12. constancecg +55

    Whoa now, OBVIOUSLY the point of the whole thing was that it would really creep out Guinevere. Sexy makeout games are just a fun by-product.

    1. miriamemma +17

      Exactly! And this is a great retelling, but where is Morgan le Fay, who designed the whole thing to make Guinevere look like a wuss?

  14. NovemberDecember +79

    “Okay, no for two reasons”

    I don’t know why but this part made me laugh the hardest.

  15. floridagal1 +18

    This is wonderful, thank you for writing it! I LOVE Sir Gawain and this is perfect.

  18. deleted7541601 +88

    “mm that sounds like a Gawain problem” OK, I lol’ed. Good work.

    2. silllarskitty +52

      Does Malory even need one? In the opening of the “quest of the white hart” tale Arthur literally ignores the abduction of a woman because she was making too much noise and ruining his party. Merlin has to step in and be like “dude that’s just not chill” and even then Arthur palms off the mission to his knights. Its “Dirtbag Arthur” all on its own!

      1. liesandperfidy +70

        honestly, with a little bit of contextual fiddling a lot of Round Table stories could be repurposed as episodes of Entourage

  21. beachlass +106

    Other people’s motives are inscrutable, bewildering, and sometimes the best you can hope for is to escape sleeping with them and also keep your head attached.

    Best. Story.

  23. damanoid +89

    Head games
    That’s all I get from you is
    Head games
    And I can’t take it anymore
    Head games
    Don’t wanna play the
    Head games

    (HARP SOLO)

  24. liesandperfidy +142

    It fucking blows my mind how many Arthurian adaptations don’t have a moment to spare for Gawain when he is far and away the most interesting Knight of the Round Table. Occasional dirtbag, vengeance-seeker, proto-feminist, awful decision-maker, genuinely decent human being without being a saintly weirdo.

    Thanks a lot, FRANCE.

    1. KappamakiFawkes +43

      Not to mention, he’s solar-powered! That’s environmentally friendly!

    2. Unreadaethel +10

      Also, the BBC has proven to us that he has the best hair of the group.

    3. floridagal1 +44

      YES! Sir Gawain was always my favourite…i don’t care if Galahad was supposed to be the “perfect knight”, in my head the Siege Perilous always belongs to Gawain, forever and ever amen, and Galahad is just a dumb wannabe Lancelot pretender. I mean, Galahad’s temptations were always lame. Gawain was the one who had actual temptations and real problems and still behaved chivalrously and feminist-ly.

      1. fakely_mctest +52

        The best ever description of Galahad that I read in an actual scholarly work is “the world’s most boring knight.” Having read The Vulgate Cycle I DO NOT DISAGREE.

    4. fakely_mctest +36

      I have a fondness for Gareth and Lynette, particularly Tennyson’s version because she insults him and he’s kind of mopey but good hearted and then Tennyson straight-up admits that the ending is fanfic.

      Gareth and Lynette 5ever though. Lyonors who.

      1. jessim03 +12

        I had a beautifully illustrated version version of their story when I was a kid. I absolutely adored sassypants Lynette. She was totally a proto-Beatrice, and I loved her for it!

    5. megalesias +45

      throwing my hat in for Gareth, the little brother who works a shitty service job, goes off on a requisite quest, gets knighted, and then settles down with the lady he helped and quietly peaces out from the rest of the court drama in favor of living happily ever after (… up until he becomes an unwitting casualty to the final split between lancelot and gawain ;_;)

      Gawain might be more interesting, but Gareth is the one I wanted to marry at age 13. Still would, tbh.

      1. liesandperfidy +8

        Gareth’s pretty cool, but a lot of tellings/adaptations tend way too much towards Impossible Saintliness. Like, “Oh, he’s the NICE Orkney brother, so all their good qualities are concentrated in him.” He doesn’t get enough flaws to be fun.

        1. megalesias +26

          That’s fair. He really only has the one storyline, so he doesn’t have enough time to develop flaws, but I always liked that he clearly had the right idea for Surviving an Arthurian Legend, as opposed to pretty much everyone else. I imagine him repeating it like a mantra- One quest and then done. Only fall for the one previously unattached maiden. Immediately retire to the countryside. And whatever you do, don’t get caught in the magical weirdness that hangs around Arthur and his court.

          (plus he spends all that time stoically enduring Sir Kay’s vaguely-sexual harassment, and I just wanted to give him a hug and a break from scrubbing dishes, and make practical plans for our future. um.)

    6. leocadialee +15

      Agreed. I had a huge crush on Gawain when I was a teenager. Also I am French, and spelling it Gauvain is vastly superior, so there!

    7. damanoid +48

      There’s nawain quite like Sir Gawain,
      Like nawain that I know!
      –Ethel Merman as Bertilak in Greenie Get Your Head

    8. LdyGray +5

      Check out the Gerald Morris series The Squire’s Tales – they’re YA books with Gawain and his page as the main characters and they are EXCELLENT.

  25. HateMachine +67

    I really want a version of this for all the times in Le Morte that Lancelot brought ruin to all of Europe by being bad at sex decisions. It’s been a while since I read it but I’m pretty sure this happened at least four times.

  26. heartstillatwar +64

    “yes everyone’s very impressed that you know to pronounce it GOW-an”

    Perfect tag is perfect. And yes, I’m talking you, pretentious guy in my Arthurian Lit class.

    1. liesandperfidy +54

      one-up him and insist on saying “Gwalcmai”

      (possible flaw with this strategy: how the hell do you pronounce “Gwalcmai”)

      1. leslieellenjones +55

        Well the “c” there is really a gutteral “ch” as in “loch,” so it’s GWAHL[horrible gutteral explosion in the back of your throat]-mye.

    2. bookwormV +6

      I’m sure my university taught me “GA-wain”.Have you been lying to me, Oxford?

  27. Household_Opera +70

    Way back when I was teaching undergrad English classes, I taught Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I now wish I could travel back in time and show my students this.

    GREEN KNIGHT: welcome to my castle, we’ve definitely never cut off each other’s heads before, my name is Bertilak and I am a regular human color, how are you

    DYING. DYING LAUGHING OVER HERE.

  28. miriamemma +47

    You missed the Intro:

    So, like this Trojan named Brutus came to Briton long ago. It’s named after him: Brute-ton. Well, kindof.
    We’re all descended from Trojans.
    You might wonder what this has to do with green knights.
    😉

  29. hergart +31

    I recommend, for your Arthurian retelling needs, the books by Gerald Morris. They were in the children’s section of my library (though someone had helpfully censored with a pencil the dialogue about bedwetting and whores) and The Squire, His Knight, and His Lady is the version of Gawain and the Green Knight in that series. They are a lovely, affectionate retelling of the tales – one of my favorite bits has a potential fight put off because they have to figure out the correct tense of “cleft” – “Is that really right? He’ll cleft me in twain?” “Maybe it should be cleaved? Or clove?” “He’ll clove me in twain? Sounds like cooking.”

    1. sulagna0 +13

      Those stories were amazing!!!! So funny and silly, I loved them. My favorite is the Ballad of Sir Dinadan, where he finds a goblet that spills on anyone who’s cheating, and it spills on an entire court because everyone there is cheating.

    2. Laura +2

      I also loved those books! “The Squire’s Tale” is the first one if anyone decides to look them up after this.

    3. jenavira +13

      YAAAAAS. Morris feels the way I do about the French influence, which is, in brief,

    4. LdyGray +2

      They are still some of my fave re-reads ( recommended them above without noticing that you’d already done so). SO GOOD!!

  31. Randi +20

    “LADY BERTILAK: mm that sounds like a Gawain problem
    not a Lady Bertilak problem”

    Crying.

  32. redheadedwolf +12

    100% ACCUATE. I’m thinking it’s time for you to do another book collection of these.

  34. LeastBittern +34

    In “the Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell”, Arthur gets involved in a head-chopping off contest too. Was this a thing? Which legend happened first? Who didn’t learn from their cousin’s mistake?

    I mean, if Arthur was first, it makes sense that no one in the court is taking Gawaine’s problem seriously. “Didn’t this happen to the king like two years ago? That worked out great for everyone!”

    If Gawaine was first, it explains why he was so helpful when Arthur messed up. “Oh bra, that happens. This is rough, but we’ll get through it together. Let’s go interview some shepherdesses.”

  35. leslieellenjones +23

    Mallory, you really need to read the Mabinogi. (I recommend Sioned Davies’ translation.) Partly because they need done to them exactly what you have done here; partly because in some places they’ve already done it to themselves:

    [Teyrnon slices off a Giant Claw that comes creeping into his barn every May Eve and stealing tasty newborn baby horsies; after the horrible screeching is over, he finds a baby boy in its place. He goes in to his bedroom.]
    TEYRNON: Wife, are you asleep?
    MRS. TEYRNON: I was, until you came in, but I’m not anymore.

  37. dancingcrowdesigns +2

    oof. No wonder I was COMPLETELY CLUELESS when I attempted to read it in fifth grade, and again in sixth.

  38. Tulletilsynet +4

    This is like the best of the good, which means very good.

    Also, intensedebate/WordPress.com remains so much more fucked up than the menage Bertilak.

  43. Scribblegoat

    I had an entire undergrad/graduate combination seminar in which my grade essentially boiled down to "Make the undergrads laugh at your summary of Troilus and Criseyde."

  44. Gillian Solivagi +4

    Nice! I remember doing Gawain & the Green Knight as a play by SCA for SCA. Love it as a puppet play. My next play is going to be a similar sort of treatment of Beowulf. Yay classics through puppetry!!!!

  45. Eleanor +11

    If I remember correctly, the point was that the dumb shit Greenie made Gawaine do was only like a half step more extreme than the dumb shit people were doing on the regular in Camelot. Gawaine was the “best knight” which actually meant that he was the best at that courtly love fuckery. And Greenie wanted the guys who ostensibly ran the country he lived in to stop walking around in mawkish befuddlement just barely not copulating with each others wives. So he was like, “Look at your life Gawaine, look at your choices, and recognize that the rest of us find watching your behavior as disturbing and uncomfortable as you found making out with a stranger for venison.”

  46. guckindieluft

    Actual Undergraduate Exam Answer for "What is the lesson of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:"

    "Gawain was like, dude, bros before hos."

    I do not quite remember but I think I awarded this full points??

  48. arlyndab +15

    There is another Gawain tale, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, in which the carle explicitly orders Gawain to sleep with his wife “in my sight.” Gawain is gung-ho and they get pretty far, until the carle says, literally, “Whoa, there. / That game I thee forbid” (lines 467-8). He tells Gawain to have sex with his daughter instead.

    So Gawain is apparently the most sought-after unicorn in Arthurian England. Man, Shakespeare is a PRUDE. I am totally switching my time frame to medievalist.
    http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sir-ga…

  49. Managed IT Services +1

    You missed the Intro: So, like this Trojan named Brutus came to Briton long ago. It’s named after him: Brute-ton. Well, kindof.
    We’re all descended from Trojans. You might wonder what this has to do with green knights. 😉

  50. DanielleHardin +3

    Back when we understood English was meant for alliteratin’! (With just a little rhyme to spice up the bob and wheel.