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3 Heady Diversions: Court and Province in Sir Gawain and the Green [(night THE PAST WE ENCOUNTER IN St. Erkenwald is, however inconclusively, already colonized. The ancient foundations have been breached, the pagan temples converted, and the old gods thrown out.1 But what would happen if it were one of these gods that the bishop unearthed in St. Paul's churchyard? Imagine a British aborigine, divorced from the classical traditions of secular justice that sanitize Erkenwald's virtuous pagan, a figure both native and uncanny, "an alvysh man" [an elvish man] perhaps, or "halfetayne in erde, I trow" [Half a giant on earth I hold him to be].2 This, of course, is the Green Knight from another poem of the late fourteenth century also written in the dialect of the North West Midlands and bound in the same manuscript as St. Erkenwald. In this chapter, I argue that, like St. Erkenwald, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight solicits the British past to challenge and prove contemporary ideologies. Like the Erkenwald-poet, the Gawain-poet carefully locates his poem at a historical moment that resonates with contemporary tensions. Here the conflict is played out between a royal court becoming increasingly alienated from traditional seigneurial modes ofchivalry and a conservative and insecure provincial gentry, whose status, livelihoods, and careers were increasingly coming to depend on careers at the royal court. The testing ofArthurian chivalry is catalyzed by a revenant from the past but one who also has a life in the present as a provincial outsider to Arthur's court. The Green Knight's double life links the strengths and powers of Britain's legendary history to those of its remote provinces. And unlike St. Erkenwald's pagan judge, the Green Knight never fully yields himself up for questioning. The plot in which he embroils Sir Gawain shifts deceptively and masks its own cruxes, the reciprocity his games promise is an illusion, and his very identity as an incarnation ofmythical authority is the result of a trick. As the poem spins out its gorgeous web of indirection, it explores the tensions between past and present, innovation and tradition, and royal court and provincial gentry , in a quest to define and socially locate true chivalry-and tests the claims of the royal court to embody it.3 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight The poem's characterizations of both royal and provincial courts undergo constant revision as the poem proceeds. For this reason, definition is strikingly difficult. The provincial characters in particular, the Knight/ Bertilak and the Lady/Morgan, are revealed to be doubles that perplex attributes ofpast and present, youth and age. The provincial landscape itself is riven with temporal disjunctions, fashionably modern courts twinned with ancient gaping barrows, forests oftangled oaks with beautifully tended hunting parks. To increase the confusion, the poem negotiates the relationships between these disparate temporal sites in incommensurate ways within the two embedded plot-lines of the poem. In the "outer" plot of the beheading game, the Green Knight gains the dramatic authority to test Arthur's court by assuming the patina of an wild and self-regenerating natural/chivalric sovereignty. But the poem reveals that he is just a contemporary nobleman in an ancient magical costume. In the "inner'' plot of the winnings-exchange, the beguiling Lady depends on her youthfulness and knowledge of the language of aristocratic fashion to entice Gawain to a self-knowledge that he both samples and resists. But by the poem's end her sexualjtextual magic yields to the less attractive machinations of Morgan le Fay, revealed not simply as Gawain's aunt and Arthur's halfsister , but towering abruptly over the narrative as "Morgan the Goddess.'' An unsightly old lady becomes an ancient deity, a suitable consort to the inimitable Green Knight in his first incarnation, even as she subsumes him (and everyone) beneath an absolutism all the more threatening for its intimacy to Arthur's court. Because of this chiasmic movement it is difficult to argue that the provinces can represent in any unconflicted way an older traditional chivalric authority that has the right to administer knightly accolades to anyone , let alone the reputed pinnacle of chivalry, Sir Gawain. This chapter argues instead that the poem makes the provinces a place where the past is at issue, always powerful, always dangerous, always immanent, highlighting the vivid inevitabilities of change, consequence, and death, and, fascinatingly, teaching delight in their uncertainties. This is opposed to the royal court which...

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