Sir Gawain and the Green Knight[1] is a Middle English romance following in the great tradition of Arthurian romances. It was written later than these, approximately in the 1390’s, by an author whose name is unknown but certainly came from the West Midlands of England. Sir Gawain maintains a few common tropes from medieval literature of France, Ireland, and Wales—namely, the Beheading Game and the Exchange of Winnings Game. The poem opens on King Arthur’s court at Christmastide, and a strange knight dressed all in green, with a green horse even, arrives at the court. Gawain agrees to the Beheading Game and promptly axes off the Green Knight’s head. In a year’s time, Gawain travels north in search of the Green Knight’s Green Chapel to meet again and hold up his end of the bargain (that is, his own beheading). While on this journey, Gawain reaches a castle and is invited to join in the festivities. Thus Gawain is entertained for Christmas, much in the same way as the festivities are described at King Arthur’s court. However, the lord of the castle (Lord Bertilak de Hautdesert)[2] invites Gawain to participate in an Exchange of Winnings Game, where Gawain will exchange with him all of those things that he has “won” over the next three days, respectively. The poem ends with Gawain surviving his end of the Beheading Game (if just barely), the Green Knight revealing he is Lord Bertilak himself (turning himself and his horse green through the aid of magic), and Gawain must return to King Arthur’s court greatly humbled by his experience. He shares with his fellow knights his shame and offers a warning for the others to learn from his mistakes at Lord Bertilak’s castle.
From here we turn to the question of music. Sir Gawain provides a way to grasp music as it was a part of medieval life. There are no particular songs mentioned, but music forms part of the scenery in many parts of the poem. Moreover, it has been argued that the poem offers a unique insight into fourteenth century life where the poem shows “the movements of the English mind in the fourteenth century, which Gawain represents”[3] and it presents a “credible, living person, and all that he thinks, says, or does, is to be seriously considered.”[4] The poem was also arguably written for an educated audience, for the educated persons of the fourteenth century. It was thus read or attended for a purpose “for what [those persons] could get out of [it] of sentence, as they said, of instruction for themselves and their times.”[5] The morality of the poem, then, speaks at every turn—through the choices that Gawain makes, and in the actions of others. Sometimes the music in the poem is the backdrop for these actions; the music is at other times a diversion that Gawain or others are engaged in. However, it is also a fundamental element of prominent activities in the poem (for example, for its role in the mass and its role in the hunting scenes). Music drapes across the four parts of the poem and unassumingly infiltrates different elements of the narrative if only to offer context and a sense of the real.
In the following, we will briefly outline the three musical elements that appear in Sir Gawain: carols, sacred music (as part of religious service), and the “music” of the hunt.
SACRED MUSIC AND CAROLS
We start at the beginning of the poem:
It was Christmas at Camelot—King Arthur’s court,
where the great and the good of the land had gathered,
the right noble lords of the ranks of the Round Table
all roundly carousing and reveling in pleasure.
Time after time, in tournaments of joust,
they had lunged at each other with leveled lances
then returned to the castle to carry on their caroling[6]
This opening scene from the poem shows the knights enjoying themselves in the context of the Christmas festivities. The fact that the poem celebrates Christmas twice—once at the outset and again when Gawain is on his adventure to find the Green Knight—the reader learns a little about what the Christmas festivities looked like in royal and aristocratic households of the time.
The medieval carols referred to here, “caroling” in the passage quoted above, were most likely “‘moral’ or convivial” carols not used as part of the mass and “probably sung at banquets in royal and aristocratic households”[7] or similar songs that could also involve dance. The Trinity Carol Roll from the early fifteenth century contains one carol which is familiar to audiences nowadays: Ther is no rose of swych vertu.[8] The carols of the Trinity Carol Roll, however, were most likely written later than Sir Gawain by anonymous composer(s), but it is useful to see the kinds of carols that were sung at the time. Despite these variances, musicologists have used Sir Gawain to defend the presence of carols that could be danced to and show that carols served as court entertainment in the late fourteenth century.[9]
In the poem, the lightness of the caroling and dancing is set against a powerful backdrop—namely, the religious practices in the lives of the characters. The carols are in this way contrasted with traditional sacred music held in the household chapels of King Arthur and Lord Bertilak, respectively. The division between life in the household chapel and life in the feasting hall can be grasped early in the poem, thirty lines after our initial introduction to Christmas at Camelot. Before Gawain is even named specifically, we find the description when King Arthur and the knights arrive at the hall:
And as the king and company were coming to the hall
the choir in the chapel fell suddenly quiet,
then a chorus erupted from the courtiers and clerks:
“Noel,” they cheered, then “Noel, Noel,”
“New Year gifts!” the knights cried next
as they pressed forward to offer their presents,
teasing with frivolous favors and forfeits[10]
There is a modern feel to this giving of gifts, which can be noted not only in the exchange of sacred music for the cheers of “Noel,” but also in the shift from the sounds of the choir in the chapel to the noisy merrymaking of the knights’ gifting ritual. The Gawain-poet does not dilute the religious meaning behind the Christmas feasting,[11] but the poet nevertheless sets this apart upon the characters’ entrance into the hall.
The sacred music, or the suggestion of it, sometimes serves a greater rhetorical purpose—for example, the choir that has gone silent signals the end of the mass and thus the transition to more profane activities; and later there is a description of church bells that mark the hour of evensong: “Chaplains went off to the castle’s chapels / to sound the bells hard, to signal the hour / of evensong, summoning each and every soul.”[12] In the case of the latter, the church bells impose a rule and call the characters of the poem away from the games they are involved in and serve as a reminder of more serious matters.
Caroling and dancing come to the forefront during the feasts, as these are the activities the characters are involved in when they are not eating. The details are sometimes no more than “guests were to go in the grayness of dawn, / so they laughed and dined as the dusk darkened, / swaying and swirling to music and song”[13] or the mention of trumpets and drums that support the carols for dancing,[14] but offer little to determine a particular carol. The characters actively engage in the carols and the music for dancing, which sets this type of music apart from the sacred music of the poem. Sacred music of the mass appears to be appreciated passively by the characters, evidence of the fact that English sacred music of the Middle Ages could fade into the background of the mass and the lives of the participants. The plainsong chant of the English medieval mass is merely part of the scenery. The relevance of this point is that these shadows of sacred music in the poem allude to the anonymity of English music before 1400.[15] Especially on Feast Days, the “choir” that falls quiet here most likely would have sung plainchant and polyphonic motets for the occasion, composed for the use specifically in King Arthur’s chapel. Following in the tradition of household chapels of the late Middle Ages, a musician may be hired for ecclesiastical services (serving also as “Instructor of Choristers, or as director of polyphonic music, or as a full-time singer) and composed “an unceasing round, a constant web of worship and praise” for every day of the year, and for the several hours of each day.[16] The music for these religious services then perhaps sounded functional and were aesthetically pleasing for the occasion alone but were not particularly memorable.
There were also improvisational aspects and settings composed specifically for single use in the mass. This single use purpose then gave a characteristic aspect to English sacred music around the year 1400, “there were no classics, no established repertory pieces… as a creative artist contributing to the worship of God—like flowers on Christmas Eve—a genuine contribution to the overall effect, pretty while it lasts, not destined for more than immediate use, only of limited value and esteem.”[17] Therefore, much like decoration, the sacred musical elements in Sir Gawain signal a mood rather than express a weightier significance that would result from recalling a specific composer or naming a particular chant or motet. (In part, this aspect of omission may help the poem: by not naming precise pieces or composers, the fantasy of Camelot is intact while maintaining a parallel illusion of a fourteenth-century reality.) The “immediate” use of medieval sacred music in England speaks also of the way it may have been perceived by the Gawain-poet as a gateway, as carrying with it a specific kind of sound and purpose but not worthy on its own for lengthy study or consideration in the context of the poem’s narrative.[18]
THE HUNT
The other musical element we will discuss in Sir Gawain occurs in the context of the extensive hunting scenes of section III. This section of the poem allows us to peer into the lives of Lord Bertilak and Gawain, respectively, as they first attend mass and then go hunting (in the case of Lord Bertilak) or first fend off the Lady of the house and then go to mass (in the case of Gawain). The three hunting scenes contain the most clamor in comparison to the rest of the poem, and the noises vary depending on the animal being chased. On the first day, Lord Bertilak hunts hinds; on the second day, he hunts a wild boar; on the third day, he hunts a fox.
The Gawain-poet describes the sound of the first day of the hunt:
After mass [Lord Bertilak] wolfed down a meal, then made
for the hills in a hurry with his hunting horn.
So as morning was lifting its lamp to the land
his lordship and his huntsmen were on high on horseback,
and the canny kennel men had coupled the hounds
and opened the cages and called them out.
On the bugles they blew three long, bare notes
to a din of baying and barking, and the dogs
which wandered at will were whipped back into line
by a hundred hunters, so I heard tell,
at least.
The handlers hold their hounds,
the huntsmen’s hounds run free.
Each bugle blast rebounds
between the trunks of trees.[19]
This passage presents us with several different musical or animal sounds: the hunting horn, the bugle, and the barking dogs. The horn resounds through the forest, which serves as a kind of hall to observe this music. The musical elements also appear here in such a way that they instill order into the animality of the hunt; the confused brutality of the dogs becomes organized and directed toward a specific goal.
The British Museum has an example of a medieval hunting horn, which can help a modern reader imagine the hunting horn used by Lord Bertilak.
Savernake Horn, Museum number 1975,0401.1.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Savernake Horn.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Savernake Horn.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
The horn pictured above was altered over time: the horn itself is from the twelfth century; the silver parts at the bell of the horn are from 1325-1350, and the silver mouthpiece dates from the early eighteenth century. The horn originated from Italy, but the silver parts at the bell and the mouthpiece are English and contain hunting scenes. The fourteenth century silver elements especially show how the horn was not exactly a musical instrument, but a necessary tool that had a specific context and purpose.
Further, the primary use of the medieval hunting horn was as “a signaling instrument.”[20] It had the ability to communicate warnings, as the “first sight of the quarry, the loss of the scent… the stag at bay, the stag killed, and many other important steps in the process of hunting.”[21] The Gawain-poet exemplifies these moments in the hunt over the three days. The poet, however, takes this functional instrument with a specific purpose, and turns it—along with the hunt itself—into something aesthetic. Our appreciation of the hunting aesthetic comes through the careful but rushed movements of the hunters, the skilled cutting up or “breaking” of the deer, the cleaving of flesh, not to mention the blood, gore and the “bursting [of] the wild boar’s heart.”[22] These elements fall into the larger aesthetic apparatus of the hunt signaled through the hunting horn and the accompanying sounds of the baying dogs and the ruckus of the other hunters.
On the second day of the hunt, in the middle of the conflict with a wild boar, words are added to the noisy adventure. These call to mind an improvised libretto, where only certain sounds should be made by the singers:
The other huntsmen bawled ‘hi’ and ‘hay, hay,’
blasted on their bugles, blew to regroup,
so the dogs and the men made a merry din,
tracking him noisily, testing him time and time
again.
The boar would stand at bay
and aim to maul and maim
the thronging dogs, and they
would yelp and yowl in pain.[23]
The Gawain-poet’s description may be a far cry from the Baroque music that incorporates hunting calls into fanfares and other works.[24] The horn that is blown, imagining the example at the British Museum, is also far removed from the transformed instruments of the Baroque era that took the hunting horn and made it into a more adaptable instrument. What we might call the original music of the medieval hunt (as the Gawain-poet chronicles) is therefore this messy ensemble of dogs, horns, and men yelling beside the cries of the animals and the colors of gore.
On the third day of the hunt, the musical aesthetic of the hunt changes slightly:
And the other huntsmen hurried with their horns
to catch sight of the slaughter and celebrate the kill.
And when the courtly company had come together
the buglers blew with one mighty blast,
and the others hallooed with open throats.
It was the merriest music ever heard by men,
that rapturous roar which for Reynard’s soul
was raised.[25]
The fox is named Reynard, which is a historical character of medieval literature from Continental Europe.[26] What is of interest for our current study is the stark contrast between the “merriest music” [myriest mute] and the death of Reynard. The translation may betray (or enhance) the sense of “music”[27] we are after because the Middle English word mute refers to a pack of hunting dogs, and also the baying of such a pack.[28] The translation forces the conclusion that the baying of the hunting dogs and the horns may in fact be a kind of music, without being strictly organized in the sense that a modern reader may understand as music.
The fox’s death is glorified through the blowing of horns. Somehow it seems that the fox, by being called by name, is transformed; his death looks more dignified than the graphic descriptions of the death of the deer and the death of the boar on the previous days. Reynard is also further suggested to be representative of Gawain and his behavior on this third day within the Exchange of Winnings Game.[29] The music, without the sophistication and learnedness of the plainsong of the mass, helps to illustrate a primal conflict of human against animal, of the Good against the beast, where Gawain is represented as Reynard (with the death of his virtue in its most pure state [although Gawain of course maintains some of his virtue]), with a terrible music close behind.
Concluding Remarks
When we broadly consider medieval music in England, as illustrated in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it seems that the anonymity of the music reflects a fundamental aesthetic for understanding the poem and music in the fourteenth century. The anonymous musical production of the poem usually serves a purpose—for entertainment at a feast, for worship at mass, and for coordinating action in the hunt. As vague as the musical descriptions may be, they continually return throughout thereby revealing where music was found and how music was used in late medieval English life. What the Gawain-poet does especially well is capture the anonymity of the art, the authorship of which is subservient to the meaning it expresses. The art of the music, as the art of the poem, therefore resides in a reader’s ability to grasp its significance as the pendulum swings between the real and the unreal, through the fantastical descriptions of King Arthur’s court and the ruckus of fourteenth century life.
