What is the significance of the Green Knight’s color?  Once the answer to that question was assumed to be easy:  the Green Knight was green because he represented a pagan Celtic vegetation god.  This interpretation (Speirs) was “a projection of that wider cult of ‘nature’ and neo-paganism common in English literary circles in the earlier part of the twentieth century, as seen in D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Kenneth Graham (in the chapter on ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ in The Wind in the Willows), A. E. Waite, and many others.  It was often combined with a taste for the occult, for discovering ancient myths and mysteries driven underground by the oppressive rationality of medieval Christianity, as in Jessie Weston, for whom all surviving Arthurian story was but the pathetic detritus of much greater pagan works now lost.” (Brewer 181-182).  


    A variation on this thesis is the idea that the Green Knight is a “green man,” a common architectural feature on medieval buildings that portrays a man’s face spewing leafy tendrils from his mouth (Basford).  Neither of these explanations is now believed to be correct.  For one thing, the Celtic pagan myths cannot be known with any great certainty, and seems clear that the 14th century audience of Sir Gawain would have known even less about Celtic paganism than we do.  For another, the Green Knight bears no resemblance to the “green man” beyond his color.


    The Green Knight is the only character in medieval literature to have a green complexion.  Since there are no precedents or conventions on which to base an interpretation, we have to consider what symbolic meanings the color green could have had to a medieval reader.  We know that colors could have symbolic meanings in certain contexts.  Some scholars have even argued that color is always symbolic of something in the Middle Ages (Huizinga, Pastoureau).  However, there is no consistency to its use, either in life or in literature.  Heraldry (the elaborate system that explained coats of arms) had a code for colors.  Several late medieval writers moralized heraldry--provided moral commentaries on heraldic images and colors--and in these writers green can represent a range of things, including spring.  Green is one of the colors that medieval knights wore in their surcoats.  In other contexts, green could represent sourness, jealousy, immaturity, greed, inconstancy in love.  It is often associated with spring, and hunters wear green as camouflage.  Medieval color symbolism was so fluid and changeable that perhaps we cannot know what the Gawain-poet was thinking when he made the Green Knight green (see Gage).  Nowhere do we find it associated with the supernatural except when the Devil wears green in order to deceive people into thinking that he is an ordinary hunter (Robertson), and in Scottish ballads where it is the color of faeries’ clothing (Brewer 185).  Perhaps the Green Knight’s color is simply another aspect of his challenge Gawain, Arthur’s court, and the reader.


    But in Sir Gawain itself, green is subtly associated with magic and the faery world:  “Arthur’s courtiers take the Green Knight to be ‘phantom and faery’ (240), in which “faery” can mean generally “magic” or specifically “something from the fairy-realm,” the latter being more likely in view of the court’s fear of what the “elvish man” (681) will do to Gawain.  The Green Knight’s disappearances in 11. 460-61 and 2477-78 – “To quat kyth he becom knwe non þere, / Neuer more þen þey wyste queþen he watz wonnen” (“No one there knew to what place he went / Any more than they knew whence he had come”); “And be kny3t in þe enker grene / Whiderwarde-soeuer he wolde” (“And the knight in the bright green / [Went] /p. 95/ whichever way he wished”) – may be another indication of an enchantment” (Twomey 1996 at p. 94).  Another clue is that when Gawain first spies Bertilak’s castle, it is on “grounds fair and green” (768).  And finally, the supposedly magical girdle that the Lady gets Gawain to accept as a talisman is green.

Citations

Katherine Basford, The Green Man (Ipswich 1978).

Derek Brewer, “The Colour Green,” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge 1997), pp. 181-90.

J. Gage, Colour and Culture:  Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London 1993).

Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman, 2nd ed. (London 1955).

M. Pastoureau, Couleurs, images symboles:  études d’histoire et d’anthropologie (Paris 1990).

D. W. Robertson, “Why the Devil Wears Green,” Modern Language Notes 69 (1954): 363-66.

John Speirs, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Scrutiny 16 (1949): 274-300; rpt. in his Medieval English Poetry:  The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (London 1957), pp. 215-51.

Michael W. Twomey, “Morgain la fée in Sir Gawain And The Green Knight:  From Troy To Camelot,” in Text and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literature, ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York, 1996), pp. 91-115.