Last year I assigned my college composition class to read the medieval Romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (“GGK”). I had spent time studying it over the past year, and, with the help of the book Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I couched the reading of it within the idea of commencement and the heroic journey (each of the professors teaching this class were tied thematically to the idea of “commencement” although how we taught that was largely up to us). What I appreciated about this approach was the opportunity for the students themselves, not just the teachers, to have the opportunity to ask “What does it mean to have a college education? What is valuable about it? What is success?”
We began by exploring what commencement is–literally finishing college–but also the idea generally, that it’s to begin something. We found how it connected to a certain kind of social rite of passage, such as high school, but because it’s not required the way high school is, it’s a different kind of rite of passage, an initiation into a new part of life that simultaneously IS life and yet is somehow separate—an in-between state. These rites of passage are cyclical because there’s an inevitable return home having changed from the beginning which offers a new beginning. Our cultural obsession with “And they lived happily ever after” fails to convey the reality of beginnings at the end, new struggles, how this learning of perseverance readies us for the next set of challenges. These cycles play out in the heroic journey, so we explored Campbell’s description as it applies to being a college student.
Before dropping my students into the medieval world of Sir Gawain, we listened to a Dr. Sam Biagetti’s podcast Historiansplaining about the history of the university , which largely began in the high middle ages. We explored what life was like in the Middle Ages, particularly as it pertained to students attending university, how it’s similar, how it has changed. This allowed me to open them up to stories being told at that time, although GGK would not have been a story studied by medieval students who were there largely to learn law and theology, or to become teachers themselves—basically, studying the Trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and the Quadrivium of math, geometry, music, and astronomy. This exploration was for medieval context compared to their own context, all amidst a heroic journey.
Enter The Green Knight who crashed into our classroom wielding axe and holly bob to interrupt our tidy study of rhetoric and to challenge the contemporary uncritically evaluated narrative that attending college leads to a successful life because success (that’s circular, I know).
(This Green Knight image is from Michael Smith’s translation of the poem which contains his own linocut prints.)
We read GGK to explore Gawain’s quest adventure—what did his story mean in its context, and what does it mean to us now? How does Gawain change by the end of the story and his quest, from accepting the challenge to returning to Arthur with an admission of his failure? We read the poem. Then we watched David Lowery’s 2021 movie “The Green Knight” and compared the medieval plot with the modern adaptation, where we examined how Gawain’s choices show a different kind of change in each of them.
I won’t go into all the details of the differences between the poem and the movie, but will jump to my main point that my students and I found by the end of our comparison. And to warn you, the following contains spoilers:
In the poem, Gawain faces the Green Knight to be beheaded, to complete the challenge of the Christmas Game. The Green Knight swings at him three times, the third being the mostly harmful but only nicking his neck. The Green Knight reveals himself to be the Lord Bertilak who knew all along that Gawain was hiding the green belt the lord’s wife gave to Gawain, thus revealing Gawain’s failure: he kept a secret. Gawain returns to King Arthur with tail tucked between legs and admits to failure in complete shame. King Arthur and the knights laugh it off though: Gawain has returned! With his head still attached to his body! How is this failure? We readers are left not really knowing if Gawain has failed or succeeded.
In the movie, Gawain’s given the green belt at the beginning of his journey by his mother. He loses it to some bandits but then is given it again by the Lady Bertilak. Gawain heads off to meet the Green Knight, wearing the magic belt, still nevertheless a secret to the Lord Bertilak. When he reaches the Green Knight, Gawain has a vision of what will happen if he wears the green belt that will protect him from certain death: he returns to Camelot, becomes king, marries, has a child, and Camelot crumbles. He’s miserable. He sits alone on his ruined throne, and only then removes the belt. Once it’s off, his head falls off, suggesting the magic belt was the only thing keeping him alive. Then we flash back to present Gawain facing the Green Knight, where we realize this was only a vision, not something that actually happened to him. Gawain decides based on this vision he doesn’t want to live that life, takes off the belt, and faces the Green Knight unprotected. End of movie. We’re left basically only wondering if Gawain will die now, at the hand of the Green Knight, or later—either way we know Gawain will die.
My students and I moved through this comparison, and I posed to them the following questions: How does change come about in these two narratives? And more importantly, as our class was grounded in the idea of “commencement” and college education putting us on the path of a successful life, how do the two endings define “success”? The poem suggests success comes through failure and even leaves the definition of what success is ambiguous. In the movie, however, success is clearly defined as being something learned from a distance, we don’t need to fail to succeed, we can just imagine what it might be like, so we go on living without really facing the consequences of our actions. We really don’t learn what success is, other than not failing. Success according to the film adaptation is not failing. Whereas the poem allows for the mess of life to teach us we are so very much human in our failings, even when we have magic to help us along. (I am indebted to Dr. Sam Biagetti’s two hour comparative analysis in “Film: The Green Knight” for many of these thoughts.)
I love the movie and have watched it several times (The costumes! The music! The Magic! A King Arthur story! It has one of the few soundtracks I listen to on its own on a regular basis.). But I am ultimately so much more moved by the poem’s recognition of real humanity, and how much of a mess we are at our cores, in all our ambiguity and failings and yearnings. The poem Sir Gawain teaches us it’s okay to fail, that it’s okay for heroes to fail. Our heroes can be found in the mundane, in the daily struggle of just trying to make it. We found success in the action of failing, and beginning again.