Looking Westward: Poetry, Landscape, and Politics in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (review)

In this richly textured, stimulating but rather exasperating book, Ordelle Hill claims that scholarship on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has looked in the wrong direction. In his view, "it is the west that has given the poet a cultural tradition, a journey, people and places, and a beheading game" and "the failure of critics to look westward is the very problem the Gawain-poet is addressing, a cultural bias that no good can come from the west" (22). This is unfair and tendentious. It is a point of rare scholarly consensus that the Gawain-poet hailed from the North West Midlands. Furthermore, there is little in SGGK, or in this book, to support the claim that the poet was concerned to address such a cultural bias.

Hill's real point is that critics have not looked far enough westward, and failed to acknowledge the relevance of Wales and the Welsh Marches. His concept of the "west," however, tends to elide the cultural distance between the West Midlands, the frontier marcher lordships, and Wales. The West Midlands were wholly English in culture and looked eastward. The orientation of the region gave its inhabitants, not least the alliterative poets, their self-consciousness as "westerners." Yet Hill tends to present the Gawain-poet as somehow Anglo-Welsh. He similarly identifies Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster, the other protagonist in his study, as a borderer. Though born near Abergavenny, Grosmont spent almost all his life in England and on the Continent and can scarcely be regarded as a "neighbor" of the Gawain-poet.

In Chapter 1, Hill offers aWelsh perspective on SGGK, beginning by reminding his readers that "the Arthurian legend developed in Wales." More interesting is his claim that Welsh influence can be found in the alliterative verse of the west midlands, most notably in the Gawain-poet's "bob and wheel." In the second section, Hill offers a generally rewarding discussion of similarities in "themes and images" between SGGK and the poetry of Iolo Goch and Dafydd ap Gwilym. Still, it is a little perverse for him to present a clear difference—the Welsh poets' direct references to people and events of the time—as demonstrating a "political awareness present also in the Gawain-poet" (40). The focus of the final section of a chapter on Welsh poetry is Grosmont's Le Livre des Seyntz Medicines. In another circular argument, Hill rehearses the intriguing correspondences between Le Livre and SGGK as if they support the idea that the texts are related products of a distinctive and hybrid borderland culture. A more natural conclusion is that the two writers drew on cultural resources, chivalric and Christian, which transcended locality.

In Chapter 2, Hill explores Gawain's journey to the Green Chapel. Though the poet presents him traveling through "Logres," that is, England, and doubtless imagined an English Camelot, Hill focuses on possible routes from Caerleon in South Wales and claims that the poem's audience "would have recognized the 'gate' [Gawain] traveled." Yet the only textual clue is Gawain's sudden appearance in North Wales and his riding eastward along the coast to the Wirral. Hill reads too much into this brief episode, with North Wales allegedly prompting reflection on the English conquest of Wales, appropriation of Welsh cultural heritage and the iron ring of Edward I's castles, the brief notice of Anglesey reviving memories of conflict and "historical reconciliations" (65), and the allusion to "wyldrenesse of Wyrale," calling to mind more prosaic issues of maladministration. The Gawain-poet certainly presents his hero's journey as a test of his physical and spiritual strength. Still, there is no textual evidence to support the view that his sojourn in Wales was especially educational or that he began to acquire there "a sensitivity to other cultures and people" (75).

In SGGK, according to Hill, "People and places begin to emerge from the mist of Arthurian...