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  • Mary, Unmindful of Her Knight: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Traditions of Sexual Hospitality
  • Lawrence Warner

On the third morning of his visit to Bertilak’s castle, Gawain is subjected to one final attempt at seduction by his host’s wife, followed by her more successful offer of the green lace. Nestled between these episodes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are a few lines that have generated what T. A. Shippey calls “perhaps the most subtle and influential theory of the poem’s intentions, that it is designed to lead the knight up to a moral crux, a clash of values, in which he is obliged to abandon either his social courtesy or his individual honour—choosing the former.”1 The lady has urged Gawain so insistently, “depresed hym so þikke,” that he must either accept her advances or discourteously refuse (1766–72):

Þay lanced wordes gode, Much wele þen watz þerinne; Gret perile bitwene hem stod, Nif Maré of hir knyʒt mynne. [End Page 263] For þat prynces of pris depresed hym so þikke, Nurned hym so neʒe þe þred, þat nede hym bihoved Oþer lach þer hir luf, oþer lodly refuse.2

But if the point here is to underscore Gawain’s moral crux, it is difficult to account for the Virgin Mary’s intervention to save him from great peril. For one thing, it suggests that the action that matters is not Gawain’s at all, but hers; for another, such an intervention, even if it merely supports her knight in his choice, shows that he faces no decision whatever: rather, he “must avoid her advances,” full stop.3 Such problems have produced a competing theory of the poem’s intentions, one that if anything strikes me as much more influential than the one mentioned above, given that, whatever line 1772 might say, no one really believes that Gawain seriously considers accepting the lady’s love. This theory, that the Virgin’s knight must reject the lady at all costs, finds support in any number of additional indicators, both within the poem (the Green Knight’s revelation that “fautlest” Gawain has passed the test manifest in the lady’s advances [2363]) and external to it: “Courtly romances underwrite a law of hospitality which anthropologists have observed to be as universal as the prohibition of incest: any usurpation of the host’s role by the guest is taboo,”4 and “medieval moral theology recognized that it would be an offence against God to infringe a husband’s rights over his wife’s body.”5 [End Page 264]

This battle of theories—Gawain faces a decision in which everything is at stake/he faces no decision at all—is the product of the presentation of the lines as above: all editors since at least 1864 construe MS mare (1769) as Mary, usually presented as Maré,6 and all but one since 1922 emend MS prynce in the next line to prynces.7 I will argue here that both textual decisions are wrong, and that as a result, we have fundamentally misunderstood the hero’s dilemma. My proposal is that the text—both as the author intended and as medieval readers, including those of British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, would have understood it—in fact says something much closer to the manuscript’s rendering:

Gret perile bitwene hem stod, Nif mare of hir knyʒt [he] mynne.

For þat prynce of pris depresed hym so þikke, Nurned hym so neʒe þe þred, þat nede hym bihoved Oþer lach þer hir luf, [or] lodly refuse.

[Great peril would have stood between them, if he were not thinking more of her knight: for that prince of price subjugated his spirit so insistently. . . .]

In sum, readers need to decide which account of the scribe’s work is more likely: that he misspelled two very important, stressed nouns, mare and prynce, which determine the meaning of the whole passage and much of the poem more broadly, or that he omitted a small word in an unstressed position in 1769, most likely he, necessary for the straightforward meter of the wheels...

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