So it's nearly a week later and I'm still puzzling over why the last page of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight echoes the first. The anonymous author references Brutus, "founding father" (SGGK l 21), at the beginning and end of a tale that otherwise makes no obvious reference to Britain or its [supposed] Trojan roots. I think that someone may have mentioned at the end of class last week (and sorry I can't remember who) that perhaps it was the SGGK author's way of claiming King Arthur for the English; surely Lynne Arner's theories and historical research in "The Ends of Enchantment" would support this. Although I'm not convinced that SGGK is entirely anti-Welsh, I do believe that the English were taking Arthur for themselves along with the battle-riddled history of Wales.
While reading the first few books of Malory's Le Morte Darthur, also an English text like SGGK, I noticed that occasionally the concepts of "English" and "British" -- "Inglonde" and "Bretayne" -- are seemingly interchangeable. In the course of the battle with Lucius, Emperor of Rome, a soldier decries, "thes Englyshe Bretouns be braggars of kynde " (Malory 126) suggesting the English are British (and that they're really boastful about their winnings). It's as though the English, by residing on the land settled by Brutus, have adopted the British nationality. In fact, even today the nation that encapsulates England and Wales (Scotland and N. Ireland) is commonly known as the British Isles. The name has remained but the settlers and rulers (according to Monmouth's history) have changed.
I find it ironic that although the English defeated the Welsh (the "original" settlers) they opted to reserve Britain for the name of the island. This is not unlike Parzival's manoeuvre when he slays the Red Knight and assumes his armor and role in society; or, like Gawayne when he selfishly "borrows" Pelleas's armor in order to have his way with Ettarde in "Gawain, Ywain, and Marhalt." Is it a Medieval ritual of prowess to don some element of a powerful thing defeated? Is it out of respect for the slain knight or conquered kingdom that some identifying element is worn by the conqueror? Or, perhaps more likely, is taking the name/history/identity of another a way of showing power (i.e., look what I killed)? Either way, it looks like Arthur and the history that goes along with him have become England's trophy for colonizing the Welsh.
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This really is an interesting question to pose about SGGK ... is the absorption of Britishness into the English identity a form of trophy? Maybe we can consider it that way, or we could consider it also a legacy of the Roman colonizers a millennia earlier. The Romans were the epitome of 'conquer and assimilate' (very Borgish, if you like Star Trek!). They conquered the Greeks and assimilated their cultural and artistic talents, and I've seen it argued in some sources that the only things the Romans originated were the law and military. Everything else, they assimilated from the 'barbarian' cultures they conquered and absorbed into the Roman empire. Perhaps this quality remained in the ruling elite in various areas of Europe after the fall of Rome, and manifested in the Norman kings of England ... thus their approach to the Welsh. By stripping the Welsh of their Arthur and assimilating the legends into Anglo-Norman heritage, the English rulers also stripped the Welsh of their cultural individuality and uniqueness, making it easier to assimilate them as just another part of the whole island.
ReplyDeleteArthur could be simultaneously a trophy of conquest, and one of the tools of that conquest ... as well as a marker of remaining shreds of Romanness in European rulers' tactics.
This issue of possession is fascinating to me as well. There is such a grasping element to all the Arthurian legends and the habits of their characters. It became viciously obvious in the case of Percival who had nothing and was gaining all via conquest- but as we delve into Malory is seems even more the case that all must be gained via this open, yet slightly creepy (due to the fact that one would gain not just possession but identity) robbery.
ReplyDeleteWe've talked before how Arthur is like the literary channel into which all stories seem to run into eventually and it seems like this is an important part of what makes them great. The ability to absorb and redefine according to the imagined identity you're set out to become- King Arthur & Camelot- makes Arthurian literature colonial!
To expand on these ideas a little, you still have to lok at the text as a whole. If you think about how Gawain is "humilliated" and forgiven or spared by the Green Knight and the idea of keeping the green band, it doesn't seem like a colonizing act by part of the English. That is, unless by embracing this symbol of some kind of triumph by part of the colonized and using that in their own court, the English are exercising some type of "benevolent" colonization over the Welsh. Or maybe by opening and closing the narration in the far past and the noble origins of the English, they are proving Gawain's errors as a minor mistake within the vast body of triumphs and power.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot to think about in response to the questions raised by this post and the previous comments. The seemingly circular structure of SGGK, where the end recapitulates the beginning (and both focus on the destruction of a mighty kingdom, the ancestor of Britain) might be a downbeat way of indicating the failure of Gawain's experience to change anything at Arthur's court: his seemingly transformative personal experience is treated as a trendy fashion accessory by the carefree courtiers, so what hope is there for the kind of interior awareness that might break a cycle of treachery and destruction?
ReplyDeleteIn terms of imperial appropriation of the culture of the conquered, that is indeed an ancient practice already acknowledged in the Aeneid (where Vergil writes that other nations may cultivate the arts, but the Roman genius will be to impose the rule of law and to beat down the prideful); I'm thinking also of how the Scipio who conquered in northern Africa became known as Scipio Africanus--not that he WAS African, but that his conquest of Africa earned him the title to it; cf. the adoption of Britain by the English (though the "Englysh Britouns" in Malory may also be a way of distinguishing the insular Britons from continental Bretons).