Sir Gawain and the Shivering Birds

For the many readers -- -- OK, for the ONE reader -- who requested something on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I offer the following snippet, part of an essay in a forthcoming edited collection on Nature in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately I've had so much trouble with the thorns, eths and yoghs that I had to strip out the Old and Middle English. The excerpt seems especially apt, given that is currently 19 degrees in Washington -- freakishly cold, by our standards (What do you make of this inconvenient little truth, Al Gore? Let those glacierless polar bears move here.)

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Not every animal is a human in a beast's body, even when it is being deployed as a meditation on the burdens of human identity.

In the Old English poem "The Wanderer," the forlorn narrator voices his isolation through the bodies of birds. In their obliviousness to his plight, these marine fowl demonstrate how the world has quite literally become cold to him. Ice and snow engulf a seascape where gulls perform their animal rituals, oblivious to the friendless exile in their midst. Later in the poem frigidity deepens into animus as the encroaching dark hurls tempests against humankind ("night-shadow darkens, from the north sends bitter hailstorms, with enmity against men" 104-5).

Similar moments occur in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Of the surviving Middle English poems, this is the work most obsessed with interweaving nature into its human narratives, not just in the famous hunt scenes, but throughout the unfolding action and in the smallest details. Even the Green Knight is decorated with holly. Every action undertaken by Gawain, every emotion experienced by this knight, has some counterpart in the animal-rich landscapes across which the poem unfolds. Gawain's departure from the Arthurian court culminates a kaleidoscopic change of seasons, a sinuous movement from bright spring to cheerful summer to grey winter. Sir Gawain moves through a world saturated with desire. Bright summer's advent finds the world ardent for life, and vegetation stirs with yearning: "When the dew at dawn drops from the leaves, / To get a gracious glance from the golden sun" (519-20). The faded austerity of winter follows, as "wroth winds in the welkin wrestle with the sun" and the green grass grows grey (525-27), a universe of change and motion.

Gawain, winter cold within his soul, gloomily sets forth from Camelot to discover the habitation of the Green Knight. The nadir of his journey finds him wandering a Welsh wasteland, miserably alone. We know the knight's psychic turmoil not because he voices it like the Wanderer, but because his emotions are the landscape. His gloom is an arboreal tangle, his despondency an animal lament:

By a mountain next morning he makes his way
Into a forest fastness, fearsome and wild;
High hills on either hand, with hoar woods below,
Oaks old and huge by the hundred together,
The hazel and the hawthorn were all intertwined
With rough raveled moss, that raggedly hung,
With many birds unblithe upon bare twigs
That peeped most piteously for pain of the cold. (740-47)

His mind as crowded with foreboding thoughts as an ancient forest, Gawain wanders a terrain that at once seems too full (trees by the hundreds) and too bare (winter has stripped everything, invading the whole of the world with its chill). The knight from Camelot knows that time to accomplish his quest is trickling away while he remains "mon al hym one" ("a man all alone" 749). His misery is embodied in those "mony bryddez vnblythe ...that pitosly piped for pyne of the colde." In a wordless avian complaint, Gawain's pangs at his solitude find their most lyrical expression

... [skip to a longish section on animals as bodies resistant to historicist readings] ...

Derrida's l'animot, Lingis's oceanic humanity, Haraway's companion species: all function as an invitation to explore a spacious corporeality beyond the specious boundaries of the human, to invent through alliances with possible bodies a monstrous kind of becoming that carries history within but which is not reducible to historical allegory, cannot in the end be sorted for its use value. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight features a protagonist's movement across similarly animated geographies. In that somber errantry we can see not just an instance of the pathetic fallacy, where anthropocentrism leads a human author to glean nothing but human meanings from a non-human landscape, but what the philosopher Gail Weiss has called "embodiment as intercorporeality," can see the ways in which our very identities are dispersed across the relations we form. Even better, this vegetal and animal dispersedness could be termed an interspecies alliance, the mode by which a knight of the Arthurian Court can share his sorrow at the world's chill with birds who huddle in winter misery. These animals give voice to their sadness in a language that, while not human, is also not so very difficult to understand:

The hazel and the hawthorn were all intertwined
With rough raveled moss, that raggedly hung,
With many bords unblithe upon bare twigs
That peeped most piteously for pain of the cold.
The good knight on Gringolet glides thereunder
Through many a marsh, a man all alone.(744-49)

We know already that this last line must be untrue. Despite what at first glance appears to be his somber solitariness, Gawain's subjectivity is entangled in hazel and hawthorn, his embodiment completed by shivering birds, his knightly identity inseparable from his good steed Gringolet.

Sir Gawain glides through a world alive with flora and fauna, a world where he can never be "a man all alone."

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UPDATE: I realize in retrospect that I posted a bit of this essay already, here. My excuse is that the frost benumbed my synapses. Besides, since I started this post by invoking the inconvenient Al Gore, why not take his ecopassion to heart and recycle? I'm sure that I am somehow reducing the planetary carbon emission total in doing so.