Gawain and the Gift

Abstract

terly (1988), Review of English Studies (1988), PMLA (1987), and Style (1986). IKE MANY OF HIS subjects, Henry IV of England apparently found Christianity and chivalry equally persuasive. On the one hand, he supported the death penalty for heretics. On the other, when John de Werchin, the famous seneschal of Hainault, challenged the Knights of the Garter to single combat one by one, Henry, citing Artur nostre predecesseur, responded by arranging for jousts at Smithfield in 1408, where the visitor lost to the earl of Somerset (Beltz liv, 403-07). Readers are not surprised, therefore, that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight seems to be both Christian and aristocratic. They seldom agree, however, on the precise sense in which it is either. Does the poem capture Christianity as an aristocratic idea? Or is the idea of aristocracy subordinated to a Christian and ultimately nonaristocratic purpose?' No other English poem, perhaps, puts the ancient question more complexly: What does a hero like Ingeld have to do with Christ? (Alcuin 183). I want to suggest first that an aristocratic-Christian conflict, though present in the poem, is superficial. After trying to filter out cheualry and the kny3tyly from nobelay and the nobele, I argue that nobility is inscribed both as the dominant aristocratic value in Gawain and as a dangerous possibility within Christianity itself.2 The poet uses the economy of the gift both to realize this dangerous possibility and to subsume and cancel it.

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