Gawain and the Godgames

Abstract

Gaines and abound in Sir Gawain and Green Knight, and by such amusements Gawain-poet investigates ways they reveal knight's understanding of his individual identity as a Christian. Through intersecting dynamics of Arthur's chivalric court of and Green Knight's gaming challenge to it, Green Knight brings a crisis of self-definition to Gawain: this forces Gawain to confront his personal limitations and to gain a better understanding of his place within a Christian world. The ample scholarship on poem covers this territory extensively. (1) This study expands on previous scholarship by providing a structural analysis of game's many levels, by locating romance within tradition of godgame, by analyzing critical juncture between and crucial to godgame, and by examining overlap between godgames of Green Knight and of Christianity. Thus, my goal is to reexamine Gawain and through a novel theoretical framework; from this perspective we see ways in which Christianity is figured merely as romance's default world view but as an active player in this fascinating game. The Green Knight's godgame of chivalry ultimately merges with Christianity's godgame of spirituality, forcing Gawain to confront his limitations in these two key aspects of his identity. Games, at their simplest, must involve a goal, rules, and participants willing to attempt to achieve goal while adhering to rules. Bernard Suits theorizes that all games incorporate objectives, rules, and attitudes into their structure: To a is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs (prelusory goal), using only means permitted by (lusory means), where prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means (constitutive rules), and where are accepted just because they make possible such activity (lusory attitude) (41). The players accept and requirements of game, for whatever reason they have decided to enter into it. Robert Rawdon Wilson suggests that lusory attitude is incorporation of into players' mindset, the internalization of rules (Rules/Conventions 23). In addition to a goal and rules, most games also have stakes; although these stakes may be minimal (the joy of winning) or large (money, prestige, glory), their presence in a indicates that matters to players, that typically bears some personal significance to them. In many analyses of and play, two terms are treated interchangeably, as if game and were synonyms. A quick distinction between and play, however, is that most games have a structure of rules, goals, and stakes, but need have none of these. Johan Huizinga provides a concise (and oft-quoted) definition of play: Summing up formal characteristics of play[,] we might call a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being not serious, but at same time absorbing player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed and in an orderly manner. It promotes formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from common world by disguise or other means. (13) This definition, remarkable for its simplicity and apparent completeness, (2) underscores that incorporates a much looser structure than game, so much looser that may be more of an attitude than an activity. Brad Lowell Stone, for example, comments that play does indeed require a certain attitude to enter it (68). By distinguishing between as structure and as attitude, we see dynamics of Green Knight's much more clearly. …

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