Nature and Religion in The Green Knight

The Green Knight, Dir. David Lowery, 2021

     In The Green Knight, nature and the religion of medieval Europe are uneasy bedfellows. Christianity comes to signify all of civilization in a negative-conceptual sense- in the sense that human society is an organism that exists at variance with the earth, like something feebly transposed over the vastness of the world. This feeling is realized in Camelot, a loose confederation of squalid pastures and masonry, ruled by a monarch whose infirmity* reflects the ailing character and fallibility of his realm. Structures that conceal their own decrepitude, a host of ineffectual symbols, a world that has entered upon a long senescence. We are ushered in by an image of Gawain as saint, scepter and globe in hand, head flanked by the solar disc, consumed in fire. This is a twin image: Gawain will enter the flame and die to the world and live and be transformed, but under the auspices of a self-conscious iconoclasm. 

    Sir Gawain and The Green Knight (that is, the Old English work in alliterative verse) is the product of a devotional mind. That same tension between man and nature is a prevailing motif, but one explored by virtue of the long tradition of Chivalric romance and antique notions concerning human fallibility. Arthurian literature is, perhaps more so than any surviving literary tradition, invested in a tension between elements pagan and pious, having absorbed no less influence from the old Welsh and Celtic folklores than from any corpus of medieval Christian literature. This living duality is expressed richly in the conclusion of the Morte d'Arthur, where the mortally wounded Arthur is led away to Faeryland, while Lancelot enters a monastery and ends his life a saint. If the Arthurian tradition is characterized by this interplay of pagan and Christian elements, then perhaps Lowrey could be credited simply as elevating the former in much the same sense that medieval authors consecrated the latter. The original poem is certainly no less charged with the implications of earlier works, such as the Fled Bricrenn. Of course, The Green Knight never aspires to this level of specificity. It simply denies any suggestion of faith, and asserts that nature alone is the supreme mystery, and all the grandeur of life is concentrated only in its depiction. 

The Green Knight, Dir. David Lowery, 2021

   Perhaps this is the next link in the chain: where once the pagan works of antiquity were interpreted through the lens of medieval piety, now those devotional works will be delivered into the hands of a far-reaching secularism. But tokens of the more ancient faiths may still be invoked in seeming reverence, wherever they stand to evoke a greater sense of 'authenticity' by dint of their advanced age or kinship with the natural world. So Gawain's mother is free to call upon a great power by the inscription of the Elder Futhark (in modern film, a generic symbol of the pagan/occult that seems to defy setting), and The Green Knight is become The Green Man, a comparative image, an icon in the religious systems that cherished a greater intimacy with nature.

    No sooner has Gawain departed for his journey then the inefficacy of his faith is revealed. Waylaid by bandits, his shield that bore an image of the holy Virgin shattered, Gawain is released into the wilderness and forced into an intimate communion with nature. This journey to the castle of Lord Bertilak, absent in the original poem, is an expression of the enduring strangeness of the world. Sweeping plains and still lakes and rolling mists are encroached by giants receding into the horizon, spirits of martyrs calling out for appeasement; these images are charged with the dream-quality of myth, the insensible realm that is nowhere and everywhere.

The Green Knight, Dir. David Lowery, 2021

    On being welcomed into Lord Bertilak's home, the lady of the castle delivers very plainly the final statement on man and nature. The tone is of opposition, of verdant nature striking back at a heedless and destructive species. "This verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements and, try as you might, all you hold dear will succumb to it." This recalls an earlier scene, in which a young bandit, surveying a field of freshly readied corpses, observes that the earth will happily welcome all in the course of time. But here the planet is active in silence, seeking reprisal against the generations who slowly wither the world like the winds that polish desert stones.

    In so rigidly affirming the relation between man and the natural world as adversarial, this position convenes with the Christian view of nature- the seat of supremacy is merely inverted. Humankind not as master of the animals, but a wasting sickness, something to be excised to ensure a period of convalescence for the planet. But man does not exist outside of nature, even as post-industrial civilization obliterates itself in a prolonged, consumptive paroxysm. The delineation of the two is purely imaginary. Even Christians know themselves molded from the clay of the earth. Should the human subject cease to be a living emanation of nature by force of a merely physical alienation? Is the whole substance of the world not alive in every joint, every cell of the body? The image of the discarded corpse dissolved and slowly claimed by verdure is not evidence of nature's dominion over the forms that move over the earth- it is the final revelation that the two which seemed so distinct in time were always of the same indissoluble essence.

*As Lowery admits, Harris instills his portrayal of Arthur with a kind of human warmth that adds a vital expression of nuance relative to the original intention.