When Grendel, the enemy of the culture and “a cultural Other for whom conformity to social dictates is an impossibility” (26), comes a knock-knock-knocking, he represents the very force the Mead Hall is trying to keep out. He is a lover of “long pig” and consumes Hondscio, one of Beowulf’s men. Cohen suggests something more is happening in this act—that by consuming this man, “the traumatized subject will be ingested, absorbed into that big Other seemingly beyond (but actually wholly within, because wholly created by) the symbolic order that it menaces” (8). The wild man is thus hypnotic and desirable. He is the means of destruction, an escapist’s end necessary to those who feel abused by the current regime. In the epic of Beowulf, the giant is the ultimate evil, set to bring down an established kingdom—he is there simply to prove what an amazing king Beowulf is. By contrast, the later “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is a good example of the need to unhinge a bad order. Anglo-Celts were a conquered people during the time this story was written. The giant becomes a means to destroy a corrupt monarchy system. He no longer is the enemy of the peoples, but a hero; he symbolizes all that was lost. This representation implies a growing paradox: “The giant builds the home, [...] but the giant destroys the home, too” (10). How can the giant destroy as well create?
Grendel, the Monster Jesus
Grendel is a creature who inhabits the dark regions of our minds. He slips along the edges, almost ephemeral like Bigfoot—alive in our collective imaginations. We picture him as we encounter deep caves hidden in shadow, empty alleyways in the middle of the night, or even under the bed as we sleep—“a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark” (line 86, page 9). I remember when I first encountered the story of Grendel in my elementary library. There was a ghastly picture of him covered in blood, sneaking into devour people as they slept. It captured my imagination—this dark monster with yellow eyes who haunts the fens and marshes—a pariah, an inhuman force. Grendel is a walking metaphor for the horror of nature, in all of its capricious, formidable inscrutableness; and like the woods he inhabits, his origins are never made clear. All we are told is that, “he had dwelt for a time in misery among the banished monsters, Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed and condemned as outcasts” (lines 104-107, page 9). Grendel, like his ancestor, is a banished soul. He is forever condemned to live in the forsaken haunts of the wilderness. He can never experience the laughter, the joy, or the cheer of the mead hall, and for this, he is jealous. He lashes out. It is believed by many scholars that Grendel’s origins are a later Christian interpolation. What then are his true origins? Where does he appear in the Nordic mythology? We are, perhaps, given a clue, when the writer continues, saying that from Cain, also sprung, “ogres and elves and evil phantoms and the giants too who strove with God time and again until He gave them their reward” (line 112-114, page 9). Is Grendel related to the giants of Jotun? They were said to represent nature’s forces of Chaos, unlike the Gods “who constantly tr[ied] to keep the world at status quo” (Halvorsen). It is also revealing how the passage describes the giants’ destiny, saying that they would eventually receive a reward. Is this in reference to Ragnorak where the fire giants massacre the gods and send the Earth into darkness?
There is an underlying tension here: how did the Anglo-Saxons deal with their cultural heritage of “ogres and evils and evil phantoms and the giants too”? The Norse myths of the Jotun was one of the more easily reconcilable tales. It intermixed well with the biblical giants, the nephilim, born of man and woman—Goliath and King Og. When Beowulf finds a sword in Grendel’s mother lair which was, “an ancient heirloom from the day of giants” (line 1559 page 107), it becomes difficult to distinguish whether the weapon refers to the Biblical or Norse tradition. Northern giants were renowned for their welding abilities, and there is a flood in both mythologies—Ymer’s blood destroying the clan of giants, and Noah’s flood killing off the nephilim. Hrothgar describes how the engraving on the sword “showed how war first came into the world and the flood destroyed the tribe of giants. They suffered a terrible severance from the Lord; the Almighty made the waters rise, drowned them in the deluge for retribution” (Heaney lines 1689-93, page 117). Because the text leaves this ambiguous, the reader must ponder whether Grendel and his mother’s history are later interpolations. At any rate, “Beowulf celebrates the death of the giant” (Cohen 28). By killing those who encroached on society’s rules, Beowulf kept back the Otherness which threatened the Mead Hall.
The Norse referred to the giants as Jotun. They inhabited the middle world known as Jotunheim and were “gluttons” and “man-eaters” (“Jötunn”)—from the Old Norse jötunn, related to eat (The Free Dictionary)—and personified chaos and destruction. Roald Dahl was not far off when he labeled his giants, “Fleshlumpeater”, “Bone cruncher”, and “Child chewer”. The Norse believed the world would end when Loki (the child of two giants) lead the forces of hell and a league of giants to Valhalla where they would defeat the gods in battle. The Hebrews and Christians carried a similar tradition. In theirs, giants were the offspring of fallen angels breeding with human women. The Bible tells us, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (Genesis 6:4). This passage seems to suggest that Greek heroes, such as Hercules and Theseus might be the descendants of the fallen. According the apocrypha, “The Book of Enoch”, these giants, “turned themselves against men, in order to devour them” (Enoch 7:13). God, disgusted by what his angels had besotted, destroyed the world by water and only allowed Noah and his kin to survive. Legends persist of the giants continued existence underneath the ground in such works as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Coming Race”—this could correspond with the separate world of Jotunheim to the Norse. At any rate, the mythological flow between the two was fluid.
However, later interpolations describe the beginnings of Grendel's clan with Cain who was “... branded an outlaw, [...] he moved into the wilds, shunned company and joy. And from Cain there sprang misbegotten spirits” (line 1263-1266, page 89). Grendel struggles to find his identity because he inhabits no culture save his own. It is against the Anglo-Saxon creed and echoes yet another biblical tale: Grendel could be seen as an antithesis to Jesus of the New Testament. Like Christ, he is a being born of no mortal father. He is also one of protest, descending upon a hall (Hesod’s temple for Christ, but also the symbol of a culture) and tears it apart. They are both left unkilled initially, but mortally wounded. However, Grendel and the King of Kings are also opposites—Grendel is a coward, running from his own death as Jesus approached his. Grendel is impervious to weapons, while Jesus dies by stakes. Jesus dies for mans’ sins upon a “tree” as in the “Dream of the Rood”, whereas Grendel only suffers in solitude. And also, unlike Jesus, Grendel’s corpse is discovered later, his soul un-resurrected. Grendel is the monster’s Christ. Like the others ghosts and spirits and monsters, he dies a lonesome death, discovering his fate by himself. He is nothing—a lone beast in his mother’s cave.
His mother, then, is the opposing Virgin Mary—the apocryphal Lilith, Adam's first wife, who causes young boys to have wet dreams. She is lecherous and violent, while Mary is chaste and humble. She is revenge-seeking and terrifying, while Mary is accepting and beautiful. Mary is often depicted cradling her dead son in her arms, but Grendel’s mother, brooding “on her wrongs” (line 1259, page 89), seeks to avenge her son. She murders Aeschere, Hrothgar’s favorite man, and lures Beowulf back to her “lake”. The battle which ensues is highly sexual in nature. She tries to use her talons to rip his mail off, Beowulf swings his phallic sword with little success, and she retaliates and grapples “him tightly in her grim embrace” (line 152, page 107). Even the “hellish turn-hole” is an ersatz vagina. Beowulf only overcomes her by chopping off her head with a sword he finds in her armory, dripping in blood (another reference to the lewd nature of the battle). Beowulf, in his own manner, also represents Christ. He has 12 thanes just as Jesus had 12 apostles. He comes to the save the children of Denmark, and later sacrifices his life for his own. What we have here is two “Christs” waging war on each other—Grendel, the giant-monster Christ, and his perverted mockery of the Virgin Mary mother, and the Christ of the Geats, Beowulf. By the end of these two battles, we find which one is preferred by the Anglo-Saxons: the good, gregarious king who is heroic, generous, and chaste—the opposite of what Grendel and his mother portray. It also allows a new context to the fornication/fight—the breeding of Beowulf and a giantess fits well into the Biblical Genesis story. Some traditions hold that Cain was not a child of Adam, but instead, a son of Lilith.
Grendel is a fallen monster, one searching for his identity, just as Jesus is a risen man with full knowledge of his. Grendel slams the door open on Heorot with terrifying shrieks escaping from his lips. Jesus walks through the streets with a crown of thorns decorating his head, approaching death with honor. Grendel has come upon his fate unknowingly while the Christ went forward in full cognizance of his inevitable destiny. If Jesus’ death represents the forgiveness of man for his sins in all his wretchedness and beauty, Grendel’s death represents just the opposite: the continued fall of Cain’s clan. There is no one to mourn Grendel but his mother. He has no disciples, friends, or thanes to stand by him. He is nothing, and he dies a coward, very different to how Christ’s death is portrayed in the “Dream of the Rood.” The Anglo-Saxon poem describes Jesus’ heroism as he approaches his demise as such, “There I saw the Lord of mankind hasten with great zeal [...] Then the hale young hero ungirded himself—that was God almighty—hale and great-hearted” (trans. Morgan). Jesus is preparing for battle while Grendel’s last retreat is, “regretted by no-one who witnessed his trail, the ignominious marks of his flight where he’d skulked away” (Heany line 840-842, page 57). Grendel dives into lake and drowns himself and “hell claimed him there” (line 851, page 57)—he descends into the abyss like Christ, but he does not come back.
In this way, the Anglo-Saxons found a way to reconcile their pagan past. A doomed monster is now rendered even more horrid because of his ancestry—no good can come from a clan such as Cain—and because of his relationship with the Lamb of God. They interpolated their mythic history to represent Christian ideals and imagery. The dreadful dragon that nests in Geatland can now become analogous to the red dragon in Revelation. The sea monsters Beowulf fights in the flashback can now easily be represented by the biblical Leviathan. And Beowulf—a representation of Christ himself—kills them all. The dragon, in particular, is fascinating. In Revelation, the great dragon is “cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (Revelation 12:9). Beowulf is not only destroying the dragon, he is also killing Satan. Beowulf also corrects Jonah’s mistake in the most glorious way, he destroys the mighty sea monsters and rids the world of them—the Book of Jonah is an anathema to the Anglo-Saxon world view.
Beowulf is filled with allusions to the Bible, almost as if the Anglo-Saxons were showcasing how they believed Christianity should be. Beowulf, the good Anglo-Saxon Jesus, does not turn his cheek when he is confronted by danger; he takes it on with full bravado. He is violent and hard-headed. He fights the great fish in Jonah’s tale and comes out the victor. He tears asunder the anti-Beowulf with his bare hands. He slices off the head of the wicked version of the Virgin Mary. And finally he destroys Satan, with the help of a loyal thane. These are all first-class Christian interpolations of a Pagan tale. In many ways, Beowulf would remind its listeners of earlier times—times before the onset of monotheism. It would allow their culture to flourish even when this new religious regime took hold. Tales like Beowulf are perhaps one of the reasons why the inhabitants of the islands were never fully converted to Norman culture. Still, the interplay between mono- and pan-theism renders a whole new layer to a pagan story. One with biblical call-backs, pagan values, Christian morals—it is amazing it is not a morass of intelligible gibberish. The monsters in Beowulf will always haunt our cultures, and in many respects, they are the reason why an over 1000 year tale is still read today. These beasts hold baggage of centuries of history, culture, and myth, and they will continue to for centuries to come. There “is something distinctly Anglo-Saxon,” claims Cohen, “about this fascination with giants conjoined to the formation of alienated, human identities” (18), and Grendel fits perfectly in this picture.
The Green Knight and Dionsysus, the God of Wine
The Green Man is a ubiquitous figure in many cultures. He represents the spirit of nature—the shooting of buds, the twirling of vines, the blooming of flowers, and that feeling we get as we dip our feet into a stream as a canopy of trees covers our heads in dappled shade. He is peace and seclusion from the wretched world of sin. A man completely made of leaves, shrubbery, and branches. To the different cultures that ended up inhabiting the British Isles, he represented many things. To the Celts, he was iconoclastic, a pillar to be held up in the face of growing Norman control. He represented everything that had been lost with the arrival of the French: the beauty of nature, their own vast mythology, the freedom from feudalism and patriarchal suppression. To the Anglo-Saxons, he was masculine and heroic, everything the Normans were not. To the Normans, he was a representation of life and death, echoing their allegiance with Christianity. In fact, the Green Man held characteristics similar to both Satan and Jesus. He is of the earth and “the air” (Ephesians 2:2), polluted and corrupt like the world in which we are forced to live. He is chaotic, morphing into many forms like in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”—turning from a green giant to a red-bearded king (also similar to Dionysus, the god of masks, which I will cover in more detail later). How are his demonic qualities reconciled with his Christian ones? Is there any way he can be fully appropriated into a Christian, Norman culture?
For the Celts and many early cultures, trees were sacred. They saw gods and goddesses inhabiting the forests, living their eternal lives amongst the hawthorn, holly, and yew. The Green Man is another one of these immortals; personifying spring and summer, he disappears year after year, time after time, like the seasons he represents. His foliate face is often depicted as a bush of greenery with fruits and vegetables blooming along its crevices, his visage being popular on churches during the Middle-Ages. Because of his universal appeal as a vegetation god, the Green Man appears independently throughout many lands and peoples: Tammuz to the Sumerians, Osiris to the Egyptians, and Dionysus and Bacchus to the Greco-Romans. In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, translated by Burton Raffel, the Green Man is described as “ghastly”. He is a truly massive creature, with a thick neck, burly legs, and so tall that he seems “half an ogre, a giant” (Fit 1, Line 140); however, his most striking character is not his size, but his color. He is green, and not just on a single part of him, but all of him: his armor and shirt, are “green, all green” (Fit 1, Line 152), the bands on his belt, the jewels in his clothes, his saddle which his horse wears, his feet, his stallion, his face, his hands, and even his beard are green. He is a spirit from the Otherworld, and forbiddingly, he carries with him a big ax and a branch of holly. Holly is a sacred tree to the Celts. Its fruit flourishes in winter, symbolizing death and rebirth. Much like Jesus, the Green Man dies and resurrects. His path follows the seasons—he is born in the spring and dies in the winter, only to be revived each year. This is cyclical and made a great deal of sense to the Celts. The sun rises every day and then sets. Flowers bloom then pass away. Maidens become mothers. Mothers become crones. We return to the image of the never ending line, a very popular theme in Celtic art.
The “dying-and-rising” myths are symbolic of the cycles of life. The ancients would see the seasons change--winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall, and fall back to winter--just as they would see a young boy transform to a man, to a geriatric and then die. His birth is just as the sun rises in the East, no different than that of spring blossom, and his later years, his twilight, winter, and death. Dying-and-rising gods are simply a vessel for this. They resurrect, just like the world after winter, and the day after night. Jesus is entangled with them. He is born close to the winter solstice like many other dying gods (correction: Horus, Attis, Dionysus, Mithra, claims the movie Zietgiest, were all born around this date, though I have found this information unverifiable). And he dies and is born again. Oddly though, there is something which separates Jesus from these other myths: Jesus’ affiliation with nature, sex, intoxication, masks, and vegetation. Gyrus, in his essay, “Dionysus Risen”, says, “When we look at the traditional associations of Satan with carnality, death and the Earth, we can see a pattern emerging. Simply put: Christianity has taken the dying-and-rising godform and split it in two” (Gyrus). Jesus is a dying god, a never-ending line, but essentially, he has lost his balls; instead, Satan picks them up and wears them, displaying the characteristics of a hedonistic dying god—he represents “wizards, darkness, the flesh, women, beasts, indulgence, sensuality and death!” (Gyrus). In Dionysus (the Greek Green Man), a syncretic reconciliation takes place. Gyrus claims that John M. Allegro “traced the etymology of Jesus and Dionysus—words still sharing the same final three letters—back to a shared root-word in Sumerian." Both entities share an association with vines—Jesus as the “true vine” (John 15:1), Dionysus being “credited with the introduction of vine cultivation” (Gyrus). Jesus turned water to wine, something for which Dionysus is also famous. The god carried with him a thyris which he would strike into the ground. Roger Lancelyn Green describes the transformation as such, “at once it took root, sent out leaves, and grew great clusters of grapes. ‘The vine is my best beloved!’ [Dionysus] exclaimed in triumph” (Green 84).
I do not mean to belittle Christians in this essay. However, I do want to get at wider truths. Question or you will be deceived and led to your doom. No, do not believe everything your Government tells you. Do not believe everything your Church tells. Believe nothing until you have thought it through completely. That is why God gave you freewill. When Arthur goes to Avalon to mend his wounds, it was prophesied that he would return in Britain's hour of need. Likewise, Jesus is said to return at the end of world. Many foresee this as an imminent event happening on 2012, a fast approaching date--through a vector we move. It is imperative to understand, then, what is going on. The paganist, Satanist, Luciferian Elites believe there god Osiris/Apollo/Nimrod is returning, the Christians their Christ, the new agers the Maitreya, the Hebrews their messiah, the Raelians the creator aliens, and some Esoteric researchers believe Planet X is fast approaching. What do all these things have in common? They are returning super-creations who left and returned--just like the the dying-and-rising God motif. I want to cover this in more detail in future posts; but at any rate, I do not wish to offend, but to fully understand this universe we must explore it from all angles.
Terri Windling, in her book, Tales of the Mythic Forest, describes Dionysus as the forerunner to Green Man motif. His face was also often depicted as a mass of vines and ivy leaves, and “this compelling but dangerous deity was the lord of the wilderness; he was the god of wine [...], ecstasy, and sexual abandon” (Windling). He was worshipped by women known as maenads, who would be induced into hysteria. This activity is described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the king of Thebes is torn apart (sparagmos) in a bacchic frenzy by a group of women which included his own mother. These maenads would roam “ecstatically through the forest, wearing the skins of deer and fox, suckling wolf cubs from their own breasts” (Windling), but would tear apart any older animal that dared to flee, feasting on their raw flesh (omaphagia). Dionysus was also associated with satyrs—arcane beings inhabiting the wilds, and specifically the Arcadian Pan. Many scholars believe that Satan’s appearance was influenced by this lord of the Satyrs and his horns. Dionysus was born “horned, and crowned with serpents” (Gyrus).
Dionysus, like both the Green Man and Jesus, is a dying god. When his mother, Semele, is killed after witnessing Zeus’ visage while Dionysus is still inside of her, the great god places the unborn child on his thigh, where he later is granted a “second birth”. Later in life, Dionysus is again killed, but this time by Perseus. He descends to Hades and saves his mother and rises from the dead yet again. Because of these incidents and several others, Dionysus is associated with resurrection. Many similarities have been found between the Greek god and the Celtic horned god, Cernunnos. Cernunnos was the “lord of the forest in Britain and Gaul”, according to Windling. Both are associated with the consumption of mushrooms. In Robert Graves’ essay, “Mushrooms and Religion”, Graves delves deeper in mushroom’s relation with the dying-and-rising gods. Dionysus’ festival, Ambrosia, took place during October, the mushroom season. Amanita muscaria, the red mushroom speckled with little white dots famous for being associated with modern garden gnomes, would be eaten, driving the revelers “mad” with its hallucinogenic properties. Amanita muscaria occurs throughout the European continent—including England. Gyrus, in “Dionysus Risen”, makes the claim that “the whole Christ story is a fungal allegory”. Before the invention of microscopes, spores were a mystery to humans, and mushrooms would “simply appear”, miraculously—“a virgin birth indeed” (Gyrus). He continues, saying, “there was a widespread belief amongst the ancients regarding mushroom genesis: that they were born of lightning” (Gyrus). The mushroom was a “perfect symbol” for the “miraculous regeneration of the biosphere after the cold death of winter” (Gyrus).
Dionysus was also the god of masks and the theater—essential to a god that at his foundation is a symbol for insanity. His morphing appearances—“a girl, a man, a woman, a lion, a bull, and a panther” (Gyrus)—plays into his psychedelic aspect and also his wholeness of being. All of us are wearing personalities, as believed by Judith Butler, and delving even deeper, we are all manifestations of nature; however, we are slowly losing knowledge of this. Before man was cut off from the natural world around him, “the divine and the mundane were one and the same, embodied in nature” (Gyrus). Like many ancient cities, Rome itself was “born in the forest, according to its mythic origin tales” (Windling). Romulus and Remus were abandoned in the forest where they were suckled by a wolf and raised by a brigand. When Romulus emerged from the trees, he cleared a hill and founded Rome. However, as the great empire expanded, slowly the forests were destroyed. Windling quotes Robert Pogue Harrison’s book, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization, and says, “‘the forests were literally everywhere: Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the ancient Mediterranean basin as a whole’” (Windling). Modern lament of forest clearing is nothing new. Plato “wrote with grief [...] of the barren hills surrounding Athens as grove after grove fell before the plough of the ship-builder's axe” (Windling). Here we see the tension between the ordered and the structured universe described by Nietzsche as “Apollonian” and “Dionysian”. Apollonian is described as thinking, self-controlled, rational, and logical, human order and culture—essentially, it represents civilization. Dionysian, on the other hand, represents feeling, passion, intoxication, wholeness of existence, and chaos. The closer you get to nature, the closer you are to Dionysus, the Green Man, and Satan. The culture of the Celts is intimately linked to nature and Dionysus, while the Normans and Romans were approaching the culture of Apollo. As mankind’s civilization encroaches on the spirits, the faeries, and the dryads, it transforms the unordered to structure. Just like Wallace Stevens’ jar takes “dominion everywhere”, so do imperial highways, aqueducts, and bridges divide up the forest. To the Celts, the Apollonian system of the Normans was against the order of the universe, and we see this tension playing itself out in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.
When we first see Camelot, it is a place entirely cut off from nature, engaged in a game of charades. There is nothing real here, only man-children who “jousted gallant and well, then galloped to court, and sang and danced” (Fit 1, Lines 42-43), and women who would ebulliently giggle and kiss men. These are all mockeries of what the Green Man and Dionysus represent. Like Dionysus’ bacchic revelers tearing a man limb from limb, the Green Man’s Celts accepted death and hedonism as a part of life. The Celts would not play in a facsimile version of sex or death like these Normans participated in—they instead took this ersatz mimicry as an insult. Thus enters The Green Man as described above. He challenges these “beardless infants” to cut off his head. The man who was brave enough to step forward would receive his mighty ax. But there was a catch, in a year and a day’s time, the Green Knight would get his one clean swipe at the neck of the challenger. The crowd went into a hush. No one was brave enough to step forward save only Arthur, but Sir Gawain intervened, taking his place. After delivering a fateful blow, the Green Man’s head is severed, but the great green man still stood. Lifting his decapitated cranium, mounting his horse, he told Gawain, “be ready to ride as you promised” (Fit 1, Line 448). The next we see of The Green Man, he has switched forms and identities—similar to Dionysus, the lord of masks, theater, and illusion—for he and Morgan Le Fay play one hell of a trick on Sir Gawain, robbing him of every he stands for. The Green Man is thus directly linked to the Celtic mother goddess. Gyrus says, “Dionysus himself was extremely effeminate. [...] He was the god most favoured by woman, who formed the greater part of his cultic following. And his rites [...] were closely associated with the veneration of the mother” (Gyrus). He continues, saying that Demeter (the goddess of the harvest) or her daughter, Persephone, were sometimes said to be Dionysus’ mother. The conquered people of “the isles of the mighty”, thus made their comment on Norman culture. Christianity sees “women, sex, matter, and, of course, the Earth” as evil, and “intimately linked with Satan” (Gyrus). Gawain gets tricked by two women, teaching him a very Celtic lesson: do not underestimate the power of women—be it maiden, mother, or crone. They are closer to nature and matter than man—even the word ‘matter’ eventually derives to mater, or mother (Gyrus). This is paralleled by Gawain wearing Mary on his shield.
Finally, Gawain meets The Green Man for a final time in his “green chapel”. Instead of a church, it is a mound—specific to the Celts who believed hills are gateways to the Otherworld. Gawain comments that it is “a good place for a green knight, he could serve the devil properly, here. By Christ, it’s Satan who struck me with this meeting” (Fit 4, Lines 2191-3). Again, the Norman ties between Satan and nature are reiterated. After the Green Man reveals the horrible trick which has been played upon him, Gawain says, “in women winning men to sin, for Adam our father was deceived" (Fit 4, Lines 2415-6). He then lists through Solomon, Samson, and David as being ruined by fairer sex. Both women and the wild are now described in contempt, because the Celtic system has won—their god has humiliated the Norman’s God; women have defeated men; real men with gnarly beards have destroyed clean-shaven boys; nature has overcome civilization. In many ways, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is pointing out the conflictions in Norman society. They decorate their churches with leafy, pagan gods. They betray their own faith by participating in courtly love. They deny Jesus his vegetation elements. They even deny themselves the Earth’s cycles, shutting themselves off from the world. Dale Pendell, in his essay Green Flames: Thoughts on Burning Man, writes, “The Greeks were wise enough to recognize that although Dionysus meant trouble, the suppression of Dionysus was even worse—that trying to suppress Dionysian spirit entirely, to end all licentiousness, all blasphemy, all risk, led to false madness, and the sacrifice of children” (Pendell 5). Pendell relates this to the modern Burning Man festival held in northern Nevada desert every year. The universe is a duality. William Blake, in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” wrote in his Proverbs of Hell, “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”. By denying the oceans of lust, needs, and hunger inside, these desires will only manifest later as corrupt sickness. There is insanity inside society, a Dionysus, a Green Man, and by denying him, we “breed pestilence”. The Celts saw the Normans as a mockery, unable to understand the basic principles of being a man or woman. They were lost to internal strife, not knowing how to properly deal with it. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” ends sadly, with only Gawain learning this lesson, the rest of Camelot remaining willfully ignorant. They will remain separated from nature, from their own bodies. But by seeing the confliction play out in their god, Jesus, we have a little microcosm of the struggle inside the society as a whole. As Gyrus says in the opening sentence of his essay, “A split exists in us all, and we nurse it” (Gyrus).
The Foundational Giant I
Cohen claims William the Conqueror used giants to solidify his rule in Anglo-Saxon Britain: “the newly installed aristocracy found themselves in the difficult position of having no usable past” to legitimize their authority (xviii). Geoffrey of Monmouth invented a whole history in his Historia Regum Britanniae, therefore solving a pending ‘crisis’. His record detailed a made-up “Trojan settlement of the land under Brutus that culminates in the glorious reign of Arthur” (xviii). The English giants were said to be descendants of the daughters of the Greek king Diocletian, according to the Prose Brut. In this Norman-manufactured mythic custom, his 33 daughters refused to become docile housewives after Diocletian married them off. Albina, the leader of the sisters, decided it was in their best interest to cut their husbands’ throats as they slept. They were banished for their rebellion on the open sea, and eventually landed on England (named Albion after Albina) and there, bred with demons and created a race of giants. When Brutus arrived in Britain 800 years later, the islands were populated entirely by their exogamic offspring. Brutus was the great-grandson of Æneas and would come to be the eponymous founder of Britain. He destroyed the peoples of the land and took control, so he could install law and order, like King William. To the Normans, the Celts and Anglo-Saxons were lawless barbarians who needed to be brought into the advanced society of France (at a much diminished serf level, of course).
The mixture of matter-women and dark spirit is a tradition passed on to the Anglo-Normans. It was a tale told by the Hebrews, and it gives credence to the story of Albina and her sisters founding a new country. The Greek woman says, “‘because my name is Albina, this land shall be called Albion; by this our eternal memory shall live in this country’” (Cohen 58). Cohen claims that the essence of this manufactured history is male versus female. The feminine kingdom leads to demons, giants, and incest—a lecherous backwater that can only be solved by male ‘civilization’ and ‘language’. The giant in this tale is tied to the lawless female body which only leads to corruption and demoralization. When Brutus, his best man Cornieus, and the rest of the Trojans arrive, they track down all the giants and kill them save for one: Gogmagog. His name “is lifted either from the Hebrew Bible, where it has no connection to giants, indicating a leader and his people; or, more likely, from the Book of Revelation” (35). The giant wrestles Cornieus (also often depicted as being quite large) and is thrown off a cliff onto the sea stones below—“the place of his death now called Gogmagog’s Leap” (35). Again, the giant is excluded from society for being different, but his name is used as a foundational element for a structured language. The tale of Gogmagog is similar to the fall of Lucifer (who also suffered from the sin of pride as in many giant stories). The creation of a “new heaven and earth” echoed the new kingdom Brutus was founding—a land of paradise and plenty. Brutus “orders, divides, and peoples it, until nature is rebuffed by human architecture and its superabundance tamed into tidy fields” (34). He depopulates the giants, representing chaos, and Albina’s kingdom is left in ruins. Like Brutus, when the Normans landed on the British Isles, they found them populated by peoples with equal female rights. They took these away, returning Albina’s people to their rightful, preordained place. Denying their master husbands was not in the vein of a good Norman wife. The Normans established a new set of rules, laws, and regulations, just like eponymous Brutus. And they legitimized their rule by using the culture of the people they dominated.
There were no better tools for a monarch than monsters—figures already installed deeply in the culture. Cohen says that the father of enjoyment “is he for whom enjoyment was once possible, the one prior to, or outside of, this foundational Law, celebrant of the flesh and the enemy of the divine” and “conveniently, that figure is the giant in both traditions, and so this monster was a natural point at which to being the translation of early northern myth into the exegetical lingua Christianitatis” (Cohen 15)—the father of prohibition, of course, being the Christian Church and William. The giant is the union of three distinct cultures: the Classical, the Biblical, and the northern pagan. There was no better figure to utilize because, whenever a problem of origins came up in medieval England, “the giant lurks nearby” (16). Biblical history indicates that giants were monstrosities against God—an aberration created by fallen angels who decided to mix men with beasts. They were the result of pride and sin against God’s creatures. In the Greek and Norse mythologies, giants are always attempting to retake the home of the gods. In all three traditions, they are engaged in hubris against a higher power. The giant must be destroyed from within.
Ysbaddaden, The Celtic Giant
The Celts, another of the conquered peoples, also had a tradition of giants. The most famous of these big Celtic men was Ysbaddaden who appears in the Mabinogion as the primary antagonist in the story of “How Culhwch Won Olwen”. Culhwch, the hero, has a curse put on him at an early age by his evil stepmother. She ordains that he can only marry the daughter of the giant Ysbaddaden, Olwen. Ysbaddaden is renowned across the land for killing and terrorizing the populace, especially his brother, Custennin. His eyes are so large that forks must be placed under his lids in order for him to see. As Culhwch and Arthur’s men try to gain the giant king’s trust, they are repeatedly harassed. Ysbaddaden throws three spears at them, only to have them deflected back. The first pierces his knee, the second, his chest, and the last, his eye. Finally, the king agrees that Culhwch may marry his daughter if he completes a number of difficult tasks (much like Hercules’ twelve trials under Eurystheus). After the tasks are completed, Ysbaddaden’s head is removed and placed on a spike, freeing Olwen to marry Culhwch. This myth is in the Celtic tradition and plays a role in the character of the Green Knight in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. He is not only an Anglo-Saxon creation, but a Celtic one. This explains some of his idiosyncrasies; however, some are left ambiguous. The Green Knight still betrays the romantic tradition of the dismembered giant. Ysbaddaden, like the Green Knight, is well spoken. He is generally smart and cunning, but he is also distinctly of the Celtic Otherworld. This defines a whole new tradition of giants that interacts with the Anglo-Saxon, Hebrew, and Classical tradition. Gawain, like Culhwch, represents the order of Arthur’s court. They both confront monsters, but for entirely different reasons: Culhwch honors himself by winning his love, while Gawain humiliates himself.
The Green Knight, The Hero of the People
Across land and sea, giants are depicted as the worst of the worst, terrible monsters who roam across the earth, abusing it. They are the ultimate evil when from the pen of a writer inside the established system. However, the giant can also be used as a catalyst for change. He is the necessary force to take out a leader who is against the people, and like violence itself, he can be used for good or ill. As mentioned earlier, in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” he is depicted as somewhat of a hero. Striding into Camelot “grimly serious” and “full of rebuke toward its lightheartedness” (Cohen 144), the green giant demands that a brave knight come forward and chop off his head, on one condition: a year and a day from now, that same man must come to his “green chapel” and let the giant have a swing at the brave knight’s neck. The giant represents everything the culture lost in the transition to Norman rule. He is “huge, taller than men stand, so square and thick from head to knee” and his “thighs so broad around, legs so long, he seemed half an ogre, a giant” (Raffel, Fit 1, Lines 137-40). He is big, burly, and manly, and in the form of Bercilak de Hautdesert, he has a curly beaver-colored beard “as thick as a bramble bush” that fell to his elbows. He loves to hunt for deer, fox, and boar, spending “the days with his hounds” (Fit 2, Line 1102), and is described as tall and in the “prime of life” (Fit 2, Lines 844-7). Daunting and deeply frightening, Gawain is the only of Arthur’s knights brave enough to step forward. He grabs the giant’s ax and slashes off his head. It rolls along the ground, spilling blood across the floor as the knights laugh and kick it around; but the Green Man’s body is not done with it. He grabs his detached cranium and turns to Gawain: “be ready to ride as you promised [...] or be called a coward forever” (Fit 1, Line 448, 456) and rides off on his horse.
The description of the Green Man is opposed to the one of King Arthur’s court seen at the beginning of the story. As portrayed in the translation by Burton Raffel, it is an infantile place, entirely cut off from nature, engaged in a game of charades. There is nothing real here, only man-children who “jousted gallant and well, then galloped to court, and sang and danced” (Fit 1, Lines 42-43), and women who would ebulliently giggle and kiss men. The Green Man plays for higher stakes in his games. He will kill the loser, or at least humiliate him until he wants to kill himself. He hunts real animals, fights real fights, and does not shy away from blood. When Gawain shows up at his court, the Green Knight dresses him in flowery gowns—“lovely and long-skirted”—and he is rendered more and more feminine. He stays behind as the king and his men do manly things like hunting dangerous boars. Gawain, on the other hand, is pursued by the king’s wife, who woos him as if he were a Courtly Mistress. He is even forced to kiss Bercilak, an exchange that “becomes as erotic as ceremonial”. Wearing a “luxuriant robe” and “standing with women”, Gawain wears the “habiliments of another gender” (Cohen 149). In this tale, we see a man robbed of his manhood, reducing the Norman culture to a joke. Gawain is a boy amongst real kings who hunt and have castles meant for real war, “with rows of battlements, and turrets, and beautiful towers for sentries” (Fit 2, Lines 790-1) covered in “bowman’s notches and watchmen’s places [...] so [the castle] seemed knitted out of paper” (Fit 2, Lines 800-2). Bercilak, on the other hand, is portrayed as a good king—a real king—not afraid to get his fingers dirty. He was a hero to the lower class Anglo-Celts who wrote the poem, exemplifying their ideals. Therefore, the force, the angel in the whirlwind, of the giant’s strength can be used for good. He is a paragon of revolution, class struggle, and longing for a lost world, and, according to Cohen, distinctly Anglo-Saxon.
The story of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” goes against tradition in other giant tales, highlighting its uniqueness. At the end of battles with behemoths in medieval England literature, the monster would be dismembered and paraded back to the hall in various pieces. In Beowulf, they celebrate the disembodied arm of Grendel by displaying his limb proudly “under the steep eaves” of the Mead Hall, and in the story of the giant on Mont Saint Michel, Arthur brings back the head, so that it can be gaped at by all. However, when Gawain lifts his ax and the Green Man’s head falls on the floor, it is not lifted on to a mantle and hailed as a glorious deed. The giant knight instead picks the head up off the floor, lifts it into the air with his hand, and rides off with it. Because the giant does not leave behind a body part, Arthur puts his ax on the wall, proclaiming, “a tapestry, a trophy for everyone to stare at” (Fit 1, Line 479). Cohen says the severed head “is supposed to become part of a powerful message about the proper extension of embodied masculinity” (Cohen 145). The fetish of displaying dismembered flesh is a reaction to the giant’s unordered entropic being, showing that this wild man can be taken apart and reordered. He is not beyond the measuring tape, the scale, or the Seeing Eye class—he is fallible and can be controlled. In Beowulf, the fractured body of the giant represents the triumph of authority over nature, the return to peace in the Mead Hall. In the tale of Mont Saint Michel, Arthur is showing his countrymen that continental Europe is not beyond their grasp, and that their culture does deserve to rule. Beowulf and Arthur acted as nationalistic leaders. They demonstrated traits of the ideal Anglo-Saxon and Norman. They fed the citizens who supported the ruling establishment a legend which supported their view of the world: necessarily that they lived in the greatest kingdom and held the most admirable values. “Sir Gawain” is not one of these tales. It shows the giant defying the ruling order, humiliating it, taking it down a notch. The foundational monster of Anglo-Saxon culture is destroying the new, so it can return to the old. Again, the giant functions as an agent of ataxia. He wants to upend the regimen and minute regulation—the great seething Other that wants to assimilate like the Borg, but instead of creating a hive-mind, turn everything into bedlam. Astrophysics tells us the universe is slowly turning to entropic energy. Someday long after days, this great muddle that is everything will be just that, a muddle. The giant is an agent of this: he wages war on harmony, beautiful forms, and equations—he wants only ugliness. By dismantling his body, the Anglo-Saxons and Normans were showing that their system would not collapse. They could harness the wilderness inside and outside. The need to annihilate, consume, crush, damage, and deface is not only an external impulse. By dismembering the flesh and presenting it as arranged (just like society and language), they are also conquering inner demons which want to burst forth.
In the case of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the giant is there to reinforce maleness. He tells Gawain that the Courtly Love system in which he participates is just a sham—“a kissing game”. Real relationships mean more than chasing a virginal maid; they require love, respect, and sex. The Norman form of love is deeply troubling. It makes men into yearning, foolish man-children, never knowing the hunt or nature. It makes women into objects who can never live up to the ideal. Of course, no real person is good enough to follow such a system, and both sexes break under the pressure of Courtly Love—besides that, it is deeply hypocritical of the state religion, Christianity—“thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”. It also falls back to the story of Albina and her offspring. Their Albion was a world without masculine rules, where women were equal to men. It is odd that the giant, so closely linked with female empowerment, represents unrestrained masculinity; but to put the Christian view of women in context with the giant, that women are flesh gone mad and the devil incarnate, perhaps it is not so hard to see why. Giants are uncontrollable storms, earthquakes, lightning, and the end of world, the place where the forces of chaos defeat the forces of order. They are the destruction of the old world order—Nimrod, Frost Giants, Titans, and dangerous Aztec building makers. They are also deeply installed in a medieval tradition of unorganized flesh, the horror of the body, and the outside wilderness.
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