Gaming Gawain

We are happy to introduce our book, Gaming the Medieval English Text: “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and the Cotton Nero A X/2 Manuscript. This book combines medieval manuscript study with contemporary cultural game theory to show how the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) launches a multidimensional game with its late-fourteenth-century elite reader. The reading games in the romance extend to the layout of the poem as found in its one extant manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A X/2. In this study, we offer a more comprehensive examination of games and gaming in SGGK and the manuscript as a whole, including its four poems and its illustrations, than has been published to date. 

As we discuss in our introduction, SGGK is a story that has captivated medievalist and non-medievalists alike. For starters, it’s funny! And its compelling narrative—a Green Knight! a beheading! A seductive Lady! An angst-ridden Gawain!—coupled with its intricate verse form make it a very teachable poem. We have both taught SGGK in a variety of courses, from Middle English literature and manuscript courses to general literature courses that focus on game and cultural game theory. Our ludic approach to the poem would also serve well in a course on the historical and literary contexts of the fourteenth century, perhaps headlining a unit on courtly life. 

The poem is all about games and so it is important to acknowledge and understand how games form the marrow of this poem and offer the mechanism for reading it. SGGK is set at the peak of festivity in the medieval English world, Christmas and New Years, a time when courts especially were playing games, from jousting and dancing contests to interactive plays and kissing games. Into this hyper-festive Arthurian Christmas setting rides a giant green yet beautiful knight (on a green horse no less), who asks to play a Christmas game with the court. His request continues the game play of the court while it also initiates the entire plot, as his Exchange-of-Blows game ultimately leads Gawain to an Exchange-of-Winnings game, which in turn leads to hunting and courtly love games. Everything is a game! 

While the characters are playing and negotiating a series of games, the reader gets to join their play through the fluid layout of the manuscript. In modern printed editions of the work, the poem is presented in an orderly, linear fashion, with the long, unrhyming alliterative lines of each stanza (the strophe) followed by a centered short line (called a “bob”) and centered rhyming quatrain (a “wheel”). However, in the one extant manuscript copy, the poem appears in a much more fluid, playful manner. All the lines, except for the bob, are written flush left. But the bob is written as marginalia, that is, in the right margin, and positioned on varying lines. A varying symbol beside each bob links it to the line on which it sits so that a reader of the manuscript would naturally read it on that line.

For example, after the momentous morning of the third day of the bedroom interchange with his host’s wife, Gawain, with a priest’s absolution and a magic green girdle in his arsenal, is feeling quite “merry”: 

and syþen he mace hym as mery among þe fre ladyes
with comlych caroles and alle kynnes ioye      << with blys 
as neuer he did bot þat daye to þe derk ny3t
vche mon hade daynte þare
of hym and sayde iwysse
þus myry he watz neuer are
syn he com hider er þis

(1885-1892; fol. 116/120r)

[And then he makes himself as merry among the noble ladies
With beautiful carols and all kinds of joy      << with bliss
as he never did before that day until the dark night
each man had regard
of him and said certainly
thus merry he was never before
since he came thither before this]

“With blys” not only makes better grammatical sense in its manuscript position, alongside the penultimate line of the strophe, but it also enhances Gawain’s rush of relieved happiness: “And then (i.e. after his confession to a priest), he makes himself as merry among the noble ladies / With comely carols and all kinds of joy  with bliss.” The bob repeats the line’s opening “with,” linking to the carols and joy that make up this conclusive, iambically stressed “bliss.” This bob makes less sense, grammatically and thematically, if read as it is presented in editions, directly after the last line of the strophe that points ominously toward what looms for Gawain: “the derk nyght.” The dark night looms over Gawain and over the wheel’s shift to the court’s perspective, where everyone is extravagantly exclaiming how Gawain was at his utter merriest that evening. With the semantic redundancy (are, syn, er), the narrator nicely exposes Gawain’s inordinate merriness, perched precariously against the coming dark night and subsequent New Year’s Day of reckoning. 

The point of introducing this kind of contextualized reading is to invite others to form their own reading of the bobs, a gaming that allows for a bob’s manuscript position and the fluidity it offers. This is one of many of our readings of the bobs in their manuscript position that did not make the book. We wish we could have included them all! 

Recognizing the gaming aspects of both the poem and of reading the poem allows for fuller and more nuanced readings that a linear edition does not account for; such a ludic reading practice points the modern reader back to the kind of elite milieu in which such a poem would be presented as entertainment. 

One of the most exciting things we discovered in our research was how the sense of game extends to the four manuscript illustrations of the poem. In particular, when we were staring at the last image—of Gawain’s return to Arthur’s court, we were suddenly struck by the location and centrality of the belt, that is the belt Gawain keeps as a token of his “fault” in withholding the purported magic “love-lace” from Lord Bertilak in the Exchange-of-Winnings game. In the reunion image, the green belt is not visible on Gawain or Arthur, even though the poem states that all the men wore one in solidarity with and to honor Gawain. Rather, the only one wearing a green belt is the Queen! Guenevere, in fact, has her fingers wrapped around it, overtly drawing even more attention to it, and she and her belt form the center of the image. Here, we argue that this image reinforces Gawain’s rant against women as the cause of men’s downfall; while Gawain does not seem to give up his sense of shame in the poem, the image, like the Arthurian courtiers, firmly shifts any blame, from the hero to women. The woman wears the belt, the sign of sin. This discovery led to other discoveries in the images that seem to offer counternarratives, taking positions on the poem that open up (more) debate on its meaning. Such discrepancies within and outside of the text invite the reader to play the game of meaning the poem so spectacularly offers. 

While medieval England was shaped by a hierarchical medieval Christian world view, what this poem shows us is that people then as now enjoyed being entertained, enjoyed playing games, and drew meaning from game-playing relevant even to their spiritual lives. Games were fun and marked your class, but they also, as everything else, could serve to remind you of God and the importance of, as the poem Cleanness, found in the Gawain manuscript, reiterates, keeping your soul clean. In this book, we conclude that the textual and visual games of SGGK and the Cotton Nero manuscript allow a fourteenth-century English Christian aristocracy to align courtly gaming with heavenly goals, thereby justifying elite amusements.