The Beheading Game

The beheading challenge in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight presents the immediate and obvious problem that the Green Knight should not have survived Gawain's blow. It seems both cruel for Gawain to accept and silly not to - after a single strike he will have won. He will have secured his reputation as being up for any challenge, and he will have expelled that creepy green fellow from the court.

And yet there is a hovering what if. What if the Green Knight survives to strike a return blow in a year's time? Aside from common knowledge asserting that the Green Knight will die... what about his personage suggests that he won't survive? He's part giant, perhaps a bit elvish in appearance, and as such is massive. He comes shoeless, without armor and bearing a holly bough, asserting peace, but also carrying the axe for his own beheading. Even disregarding the fact that he's green, I don't think this stranger ought to be trusted and he certainly does not come across as the kind of idiot who would get himself killed. In fact, I should think that in all cases of beheading challenges, the challenged party would get a little suspicious that the knight offering up his own neck would have something up his sleeve.

Given this reasonable mistrust, I am not at all surprised that Gawain flinched while receiving his own blow. Why would this enchanted Green Knight magick his way out of his own beheading only to teach Gawain a lesson? So of course Gawain fully expected to die... And of course the poet needed him to flinch in order to further teach the lesson that he should have faced his own death bravely.

I have to wonder though, if the Green Knight (and his enchantress backer who will remain unnamed lest I spoil the end) has such magic that he can survive his own beheading, would he have been able to make Gawain survive a beheading as well? Would living through what he expected to be his death be a much more effective method of teaching bravery? Or would subjecting Gawain to such a supernatural experience take away from his (more or less) untainted perfection of chivalry?

Women and Guile in SGGK

I came across some lines in SGGK that reminded me of some current research I'm doing for my mentored scholarly essay on the presumed affinity between women and jinn in the medieval Islamic imagination; a lot of what I've read so far seems to position this affinity in women's presumed tendency towards "guile." It's such a funny word that the following SGGK lines really jumped out at me: "But no wonder if a fool should fall for a female / and be wiped of his wits by womanly guile - / it's the way of the world" (2414-16). The Middle English word used in the poem is "wyles" or wiles or trickery suggesting that women and trickery, or guile, go hand in hand.

The SGGK lines reminded me of the opening of The Arabian Nights where King Shahrayar, upset that his wife has been having an affair, leaves his kingdom with his brother. After he sets out, he comes upon an ifrit and a young woman; after the young woman tricks him and his brother into having intercourse with her, he swears off all womankind and claims that their "guile is great." This tendency towards guile, towards trickery, has become a conventional characterization of women in traditional Islamic literatures but it is, of course, a convention in traditional Western literatures as well with Eve functioning as the prototype.

It begs the following questions: What does it mean that this concept of "woman's guile" surfaces in a text like SGGK and Islamic literary texts, such as The Arabian Nights? What is it about women that makes them such easy targets for such characterizations?

One critic I have been reading for my mentored scholarly essay, Nawal El Saadawi, posits that, before patriarchal religions and systems took root, representations of strong female goddesses were common but that they steadily declined once patriarchal religions became more popular. You can see this a little bit with the clash between "Morgan the Goddess" and the Christian faith that Sir Gawain embodies. El Saadawi argues that, in order for patriarchal systems of thought to set itself against what came before, it had to discredit the competing ideologies and one way to do so was to rewrite representations of strong women as threatening or evil. We can certainly see this operating, to some extent, in SGGK and other texts whereby women are credited for introducing or maintaining evil in the world and, to be closer to God and Christ, is to also distance yourself away from women. It's one way to explain why such characterizations of women, as embodiments of guile and deception, were so popular.