Neohelicon (2017) 44:431–444

DOI 10.1007/s11059-017-0405-x

An animal studies and ecocritical reading of Sir Gawain

and the Green Knight

Iris Ralph1

Published online: 10 July 2017

© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2017

Abstract In this ecocritical and animal studies reading of the anonymous four-
teenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1375–1400), I focus on
what the poem divulges about medieval attitudes toward hunting animals for sport.
Studies that focus on the blurring of conceptual, cognitive, and ethical distinctions
between animals and humans in medieval literature invite consideration of that
blurring as it is found in the triple hunt scenes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
My argument is that the triple hunt scenes confront the problem of truth (trawþe) in
the context of animal sports as well as in the context of the games in which Bertilak
invites Gawain and the court of Camelot to participate. In elaborating on the given
content, I also note the thematic and conceptual overlaps among Bertilak, Gawain,
and the fox, a tripling that scholars have overlooked in their focus on the parallels
between Gawain and the deer, boar, and fox. I rely on scholarly studies by such key
figures in animal studies and medieval studies as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Susan
Crane and such key figures in ecocriticism and medieval studies as Gillian Rudd and
Corinne J. Saunders in my focus on animal hunting in medieval Britain. In addition,
I refer to several modern translations of the poem: two recent translations by W.
S. Merwin and Simon Armitage and three older and canonical translations by J.
R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, Marie Borroff, and Brian Stone.

Keywords Sir Gawain and the Green Knight · Animal studies · Ecocriticism ·
Medieval literature

In Philosophy and Animal Life, a collection of essays edited by Cary Wolfe, a

seminal figure in posthumanism studies and animal studies, Wolfe identifies “the
question of the animal” as one of “the central ethical issues” confronting the present

& Iris Ralph

iris.ralph@gmail.com
1
Tamkang University, Tamsui District, New Taipei City, Taiwan

123
432 I. Ralph

century (2008, p. 3). That question turns on ethical, conceptual, and cognitive
distinctions between humans and animals that, as Wolfe and others argue, emerge
and are institutionalized under philosophical and metaphysical projects in the period
of modernity.1 In contrast with that period, as Wolfe notes in another publication, an
introduction to a special issue of Postmedieval, the “historically distant period” of
the Middle Ages and the present (posthumanist) period evidence a thinking that
allows for and even welcomes the possibility of ethically identifying animals as
“fellow creatures” and understanding “reciprocal relationships” that cross species
lines (2011, p. 2).2 In making that claim, Wolfe refers to the work of animal studies
scholars situated in medieval studies. Those include such figures as Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen and Susan Crane as well as ecocritics who specialize in medieval literature
such as Gillian Rudd and Michael W. George. Their argument is that animal
representation in medieval literature does not simply and reductively function as an
allegory or a trope for human beings and human traits. It functions as glimpses of
and insights into the worlds of animals “living outside fabulation” (Crane 2013b,
p. 125). It evidences that people in medieval Britain were asking complex and
compelling questions about “the animal” and “animality” that do not predictively or
invariably separate humans and other animals according to either ethical or
cognitive (physiological) criteria. It betrays that there was a great deal of empathy
for as well as fear of animals, and it manifests those conflicting beliefs and attitudes
in the figures of monsters and “monstrous” animal bodies as well as in the figures of
beings that are hybrids of human animals and nonhuman animals (Cohen
1999, 2003, 2006).3 As Crane writes, by “medieval as well as contemporary
convention,” animal representation “can both include humans and distinguish other
1
One of the inspirations for Wolfe’s essay and the term “the question of the animal” is a seminal text for
animal studies scholars: Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow”). In
Derrida’s words, that term and question (“of the living and of the living animal”) will always “have been
the most important and decisive question” (2002, p. 402). In longer passages in that essay, Derrida
articulates what he was “keenly aware of and intent on problematizing” in the earliest work that he
produced: “the anthropocentric dimensions of ontotheological humanism” (Calarco 2008, p. 104). For a
full discussion of Derrida’s essay, see Calarco (ibid., pp. 103–149). It is part of the larger task that Calarco
takes up of tracing the philosophical origins of the human/animal binary in key philosophical writings by
Heidegger, Levinas, Agamben, and Derrida,.
2
For a different set of arguments, see Karl Steel’s How to Make a Human (2011). Although, as Steel
argues, there are instances in medieval literature that “provide a more generous vision of being [animals]
in the world than that offered by the dominant strains of either medieval Christianity or modern
humanism,” the tradition copiously reflects “anthropocentric resistances” to and “refusals to acknowl-
edge” the ethical slippages between humans and other animals (2011, pp. 22, 15).
3
The most important study by Cohen for the arguments that I make here is Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and
the Middle Ages (1999). In the last chapter, “Exorbitance,” Cohen provides an extended discussion of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight. Although his main interest is in how monsters and giants in medieval
literature stand at the limits of the human in the contexts of queer identity, the self-contained or
autonomous body, masculinity, and homoerotic desire, his arguments intersect with my arguments here
and those of other scholars who focus on how animal figures in medieval literature test the limits of the
human in the context of animal and human identity. Where he comments on the humanization, or
“euphemization,” of monsters and giants that appear in medieval literature in such figures as the Green
Knight (ibid., p. 144) and where he argues that in SGGK bodies seem constantly “on the verge of
becoming corps morcelés” (broken bodies) and that “dismemberment and bodily disaggregation” betray
the text’s preoccupation with the limits of the human (ibid., p. 147), he points to work in animal studies
that focuses on how animal figures as well as monsters and giants test those limits.

123
An animal studies and ecocritical reading of… 433

animate beings,” for it not only is capacious but also reflects that animals “are fully
enmeshed…in human cultures” (2013b, p. 123). Such representation is exemplifed
in the anonymous fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca.
1375–1400) (hereafter referred to as SGGK), the main subject of this article.
Following a brief summary of the poem, the early critical reception of it, and the
discourse of animal rights as it emerged in the classical period and influenced later
Christian arguments against the killing of animals, I focus on the third section
(“Passus III”) of the poem, the triple hunt scenes. My main argument is that those
scenes raise questions about the moral lesson in honesty (trawþe) that conceptually
and figuratively bind together Gawain, Bertilak, and the beasts of the forest of
Hautdesert.4
In the first section of the poem (“Passus I”), the looming human yet not human
figure of the “Green Knight,” attired from top to toe in green, whose skin is of a
green hue, makes a sudden and spectacular entrance at King Arthur’s court of
Camelot at Christmastime and challenges King Arthur to a duel. Sir Gawain accepts
the challenge on behalf of his king. As part of the challenge, he strikes at the Green
Knight with his sword, severing the head of the Green Knight from his body. The
Green Knight promptly picks up his head from where it has rolled across the floor.
Gawain, who has agreed to submit to a return blow from the Green Knight, promises
to meet him on the first day of the following year at the “green chapel.” In the
second section of the poem (“Passus II”), Gawain journeys to find the green chapel
in a harsh and bitter winter season and across remote and heavily forested English
countryside.5 Exhausted, hungry, and cold, he comes, suddenly and unexpectedly,
across a castle. Its magnanimous host Bertilak, who, as the reader finds out in Passus
IV, is a disguise of the Green Knight, invites Sir Gawain to rest and regain his
strength at Hautdesert before he continues on his journey. He tells Gawain that his
wife will keep Gawain company during his absence: “[…] my wyf, þat wyth yow
schal sitte/and comfort yow with company, til I to court torne” (lines 1096–1099).
He also invites Gawain to participate in a game, and Gawain readily accepts. The
baron stipulates that he will give to Gawain whatever he wins in the woods when he
goes out each day to hunt and in return Gawain must give to Bertilak what he
“gains” at Hautdesert that same day: “Quat-so-euer I wynne in þe wod hit worþez to
yourez,/And quat chek so ȝe acheue chaunge me þerforne” (Whatsoever I win in the
woods, it will be yours/And what you gain you must give to me in exchange) (lines
1106-1107).
In the third section of the poem (“Passus III”), Gawain receives courteous kisses
from Bertilak’s wife while he rests at Hautdesert. On the third day of his stay,
Bertilak’s wife convinces him to accept the gift of a green sash, telling Gawain that
it will protect the life of anyone who wears it: “þer is no haþel vnder heuen tohewe
hym þat myȝt,/“For he myȝt not be slayn for slyȝt vpon erþe” (There is no knight
under heaven [who can] slay him who may,/for he cannot be slain in spite of all the

4
Unless otherwise noted, quotations from the Middle English text of SGGK are from Tolkien and
Gordon’s edition (1967) and translations of the Middle English text are mine.
5
Jeremy Noel Tod observes that the poem as a whole represents “one of the first great descriptions of
winter in English literature” (2004, paragraph 1).

123
434 I. Ralph

slyness on earth) (lines 1853–1854). Bertilak returns on the first and second days of
the hunt with the carcasses of deer and boar respectively, and he serves their bodies
to Gawain. Gawain bestows on Bertilak the kisses that he has received from
Bertilak’s wife. On the evening of the third day, when Bertilak brings back the skin
of a fox, an animal he and his men have pursued for many hours using dogs (a
practice that did not become a common practice among the nobility until after the
seventeenth century), Gawain does not disclose the gift of the green sash. On the
morning of the fourth day, he resumes his journey, finds the green chapel and the
Green Knight, and, in keeping with his promise to the Green Knight twelve months
earlier, bows his head before his erstwhile opponent. The Green Knight makes as if
to strike Gawain three times with the axe that he carries. On the third strike, he
lightly nicks Gawain’s neck, drawing blood. Angry and humiliated, Gawain
demands why the Green Knight toys with him thus, and so the Green Knight reveals
to Gawain that he is Bertilak and the third stroke of the axe that he dealt to Gawain
is in return for Gawain’s failure to disclose the gift of the green sash.
About fifty years ago, SGGK, along with three other texts attributed to SGGK’s
author (Cleanness, Patience, and Pearl), was rediscovered. Denton Fox, one of the
scholars who recognized the extraordinary literary and cultural significance of the
poem, described the poem’s unknown author as “perhaps one of the most badly
cheated by history” (1968, p. 4). Ralph W. V. Elliott similarly noted that the
Gawain-poet had no equal in English except for Geoffrey Chaucer (1968, p. 106). In
the flurry of critical appraisal of SGGK (and the companion texts) that followed,
scholars situated the text geographically in the regions of southeast Cheshire and
northeast Staffordshire; linguistically and stylistically in the Alliterative revival
period (approximately 1350 to 1400 [Fox 1968, p. 2]); and generically in the
Arthurian romance tradition. They also read the fox figure according to older
readings of the fox figure of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and
Robert Henryson’s “The Cock and the Fox.” That is to say, they read it essentially
as an allegory for the human, particularly an allegory for the human failings of
“slyness,” “deceit,” and “fraudulence” (Chadwick 1994, pp. 72–73). Further, similar
to the represented animals of deer and boars, they treated the figure of the hunted
fox as a subordinate or minor trope, or as something that functioned mainly as a
decorative or embellishing narrative detail. Such assessments of “the animal” (and
of “the environment”) are illustrated by a criticism made by J. R. R. Tolkien and E.
V. Gordon, celebrated editors of two early and widely circulated editions of the
poem (1925 and 1967). Responding to the lengthy and detailed descriptions of the
hunting of deer, a boar, and a fox in SGGK, Tolkien and Gordon conclude that “the
narrative is not without superfluities, most conspicuous in the descriptions of the
hunts and the breaking of the deer, which are extended, for enjoyment, rather
beyond the bounds of reasonable elaboration” (1967, p. xxi).
Beginning in the early 1980s, more scholars, in particular those working in the
emergent field in literary and cultural studies of ecocriticism, begin to examine
animal figures more closely and to speculate on their references to actual animals
and actual relations between humans and animals (and the environment). Despite
that salutary interest, the consenus is that the medieval literary tradition, ranging
from the bestiary to the spring reverdie lyric, bestows limited meanings upon

123
An animal studies and ecocritical reading of… 435

animals and, in contrast with the kinds of transformative capacities that it permits
human figures, subjects animal figures to “clearly defined” roles and positions (Palti
2013, p. 33). Even in the instances where the tradition shows “pleasure” in the
natural world’s “wealth” by “allowing” that wealth “to overspill exuberantly” into
the human ordering of the world, it represents that wealth in uncomplicated and
unsophisticated terms (ibid.).
More recently, since the 1990s, medievalist scholars who are situated in either or
both of the areas of animal studies and ecocriticism have been substantially adding
to and in many instances challenging the older findings. They are scrutinizing sites
in medieval literature where “the human” and “the animal” converge as well as
divide according to a diverse and by no means constant range of conceptual, ethical,
cognitive understandings of humans and animals.6 Their general agreement is that
the “medieval animal” indeed is a highly complex and sophisticated figure that at
the very least allows for “some resistance” to “the desire to allegorize” actual
animals and complicates the reader’s “awareness of human-animal difference and
similarity” (Oerlemans 2013, p. 299). Even in the most flattened representations of
“the animal, “something of itself” remains and “hearkens” back to actual creatures
(ibid., pp. 298–299). The “living animal” is always found “lurking beneath
textuality and figuration” (Withers 2013, p. 691), and animal represention expresses
“cross-species interactions” that both “question the status of the human” and
“contribute to community formation” (Crane 2013b, p. 132). As Wolfe summarizes
those and other findings, the “ontological difference between human and nonhuman
animals” is in fact a relatively recent philosophical construct and conceit and the
formidable wedge or “insuperable line” between “the human” and “the animal” as
well as the very notions of “‘the human’ and ‘the animal’” are “relics of a
philosophical humanism that flattens the actual complexity and multidimensionality
of what are, in fact, many different ways of being in the world that are shared in
myriad particular ways across species lines” (2011, pp. 3–4). Thus, as literary
scholars today continue to investigate questions of “the animal” and “the animality
of the human,” they are speculating about and challenging modern frameworks
according to which “the human” and “the animal” have always been “distinct and
discreet ontological substances” (ibid.).7
Other scholars, notably the animal rights philosophers Paola Cavalieri and
Michael Allen Fox, tracing the history of the discourse of animal rights from
antiquity up through the present similarly argue that in medieval Europe animals
were not separated from humans on the kinds of inflexible moral and philosophical
grounds that are seen in the modern period. Three influential figures whom they
6
A notable marker of the emergence of animal studies in literary and cultural studies is a March 2009
issue of the journal PMLA (Vol. 124, No. 2), which devotes a special section to the new area. See, in
particular, Lundblad’s discussion of “animality” (reprinted in Tsai, Chou, and Redmer).
7
Wolfe’s use of the phrase “the insuperable line” is an explicit reference to Jeremy Bentham’s An
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), in which Bentham, a philosopher who
advocated for animals’ rights (as well as the abolition of slavery and capital punishment). In that work
(under the section “Ch. XVII. Of the limits of the penal branch of Jurisprudence”), Bentham states: “It
may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the
termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same
fate [of people denominated as slaves]. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line?”.

123
436 I. Ralph

single out are the “vegetarian philosophers” Pythagoras (580–500 BCE) and
Xenocrates (400–500 BCE) and the philosopher Porphyry (200–300 CE).
Xenocrates, a successor in Plato’s school, persuasively argued that to kill another
animal being was to violate one’s own animal being, or commit the act of
homogenes (Cavalieri 2006, pp. 55–57). Porphyry reaffirms Xenocrates’ arguments
against animal killing inclusive of animal sacrifice (Cavalieri 2006, p. 58; M. A. Fox
1992, pp. 7–12). His arguments contrast with those of Aristotle (384–322 BCE),
who understands the world in terms almost entirely opposite to those of Porphyry as
well as Xenocrates and the Pythagoreans (Cavalieri 2006, p. 57). Aristotle’s focus
on differences of kind as opposed to differences of degree between human and
nonhuman animals becomes a central pillar in rationalizing animal suffering but not
until after the fifteenth century (ibid., 57). Moreover, although both “the
Aristotelian” and “biblical” conception that “humans and animals occupy separate
realms of being” take a hold on “the Western Mind (with a few noteworthy
exceptions)” for more than one and a half thousand years, it is not until the modern
period—when Rene Descartes (1596–1650) famously argues that animals do not
possess language therefore they do not feel—that those differences become virtually
unassailable (Fox 1992, p. 13).8
While much “Christian theological doctrine” in the Middle Ages is significantly
influenced by Aristotle’s moral framework dividing human and nonhuman animals,
some of that doctrine is tempered by the “philosophical vegetarianism” of other
frameworks (Fox 1992, p. 12). St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), founder of the
Franciscan monastic order, is one of the most celebrated thinkers in the medieval
period to reject the belief that “killing animals lies categorically beyond ethical
constraints,” a belief that rests on, in addititon to classical antecedents, the Book of
Genesis—the “foundational text for thought on animals in medieval Europe”—and
on its exegesis by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas (Crane 2015). Today,
Francis’ figure and name continue to be enlisted by supporters of a plethora of
“leftist causes” that include vegetarianism, veganism, organic farming, free-range
farming, and other animal and environmental rights initiatives (Acocella 2013,
p. 72; McClain 2009, p. 129.) One of the first (and now famous) writings on St.
Francis in ecocritical and animal studies scholarly contexts is an essay by Neil
White, first published in 1967 in the prestigious North American journal Science and
reprinted numerous times since then, most recently in two important anthologies of
ecocriticism (McKibben 2008, pp. 405–412; Hiltner 2015, pp. 39–46). In “The
Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” White calls St. Francis “the greatest
radical in Christian history since Christ” because Francis argues for the incorpo-
ration of the natural world into Christian moral frameworks and the recognition of
nonhuman animal species (as well as other agential beings) as moral subjects (2005,
p. 24). “With [Francis],” as White writes, “the ant is no longer simply a homily for
the lazy [human], flames a sign of the thrust of the soul [of the human] toward union
with God” (ibid., 24). “[N]ow, they are “Brother Ant and Sister Fire” to “Brother
8
For a full discussion of the impact of Cartesian philosophy on animal rights discourse, see Cavalieri
(2006, pp. 58–61) and Richard Sorabji’s study Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the
Western Debate (1993), an introduction to classical and medieval philosophical treatments of reason
(“logos”) and the animal.

123
An animal studies and ecocritical reading of… 437

Man” and full participatory members in the “democracy of all God’s creatures”
(ibid., 24). In addition to Franciscan-derived animal rights discourse, numerous
heretical Christian movements that sweep across Europe and the Middle East
between the first and thirteenth centuries oppose the killing of animals as a source of
food for humans (Fox 1992, p. 14). One of the most popular, the Cathar movement
in southern France and northern Italy, “grew so strong” that the Catholic Church
under Pope Innocent III (1161–1216) ordered a Holy Crusade to stamp it out”
(ibid.). “[V]egetarianism” was “repeatedly cited” as one of its reasons condemning
it and other radical sects (ibid., p.13).
The highly literate, “sophisticated and urbane” Gawain-poet (Greenblatt 2006,
p. 160) would have been acquainted with at least some of the animal rights
discourses that survived from ancient times as well as contemporary Christian
arguments such as those inspired by “the Franciscan doctrine of the ‘animal soul’”
(White 2005, p. 24). In addition, he may have been familiar with the many secular
acts, bills, charters, ordinances, statutes, and other orders issuing from parliament or
the crown in the fourteenth century that prohibited or curbed acts of cruelty to
animals. Those records in addition to the texts that literary scholars most focus on
reflect that many uses of animals, particularly the use of animals for sport—for
example, bear-baiting, bull-baiting, cock-fighting, fishing, fowling, hawking, and
horse-racing—were hardly settled or undisputed. The Gawain-poet also would have
been familiar with the restrictions placed on the hunting of animals by the nobility,
something that was formally addressed under a charter that was drafted as part of the
Magna Carta (The Charter of the Forest of King Henry III; Saunders 1993, p. 9).9
As scholars note, those animals—namely, foxes, “beasts of the chase,” and deer and
boar, “beasts of the forest”—similar to other animals species that were hunted and
baited for food or sport invited a broad range of responses from humans that
included sympathy as well as fear and loathing (Dugan and Steele 2016, pp. 47–48;
Judkins 2013). SGGK evidences those responses in the detailed and graphic
descriptions of the hunting and slaughter of deer, a boar, and a fox. The poem
highlights the animals’ vulnerability, plight, and desperateness as much as the fear
and excitement of their human predators. In describing those animals, it also
especially evokes medieval royal forests (“forests”) and their “private equivalent”
(“chases”), which were areas of managed natural resource (Rotherham 2013, p. 11).
As Saunders argues, those forests differ from forests that associate with “the concept
of the forest as the wild and wooded landscape [that is] […] both feared and
inhabited by the medieval population” (1993, p. 5). Those also appear in SGGK and
are recognizable in the descriptions of the “wyldrenesse of Wyrale” (line 701)
through which Gawain travels in search of the Green Knight before he comes across
Hautdesert. The first kinds of forests describe the forests of Hautdesert. They
associate with the “more specialized definition of the forest as a place set aside by
kings for hunting” (Saunders 1993, p. 3.). The “concept of the forest [as it] takes on
a legal sense of hunting preserve” as much as an imaginary sense “of mystery, fear
and danger” is important to note here, for, as Saunders argues, while the
descriptions of the castle of Hautdesert identify with an “autonomous otherworld,”

9
For a discussion of the Forest Charter, see Young (1979).

123
438 I. Ralph

the “geographical and climatic reality” of the forests of Hautdesert suggest that the
Gawain-poet is immersing his readers in an actual medieval forest or chase, one of
the main uses of which is animal hunting (ibid. p.3, p. 154).
The triple hunt scenes further bring up questions about “honesty” in the context
of animal hunting. Scholars have read Passus III, and the text as a whole, chiefly as a
narrative about the Green Knight’s/Bertilak’s testing of Gawain’s honesty or
trawþe, the first of the chivalric virtues of a knight (Burrow and Turville-Petre 1992,
p. 179). According to that same reading, the cut that Gawain receives from the
Green Knight/Bertilak is punishment for Gawain’s deception when he does not
disclose to Bertilak the gift of the green sash. What is not entirely satisfying about
the standard reading is it omits the issue of another untruth, which was as
problematic and difficult to rationalize in the time of the Gawain-poet as it is in our
own: the deception that humans practice on animals when they hunt them for
pleasure, for surely pleasure is an aspect of hunting animals, as the honing of one’s
skills of warfare and the maintaining of social hierarchy and aristocratic identity are
aspects of hunting animals in medieval Britain (Crane 2013a, pp. 101–119;
Saunders 1993, p. 152).10
While the fox and Gawain practice deceit to evade punishment or death, Bertilak
engages in a deceit in part for pleasure, and he does so in a double sense. He toys
with Gawain as he does with, and far more consequentially so, the life of other
(nonhuman) animals. Moreover, in contrast with the polite and decorous (if also
highly sexually charged) exchange between Gawain and Bertilak’s wife, the
exchange between Bertilak and the animals that Bertilak and his men hunt down,
corner, and kill in the three days of Gawain’s stay at Hautdesert seems less
balanced. As ecocritic Kathleen Palti argues, the entire poem “shakes to pieces the
boundaries men seek to establish between nature and civilization, inside and
outside”; […] inside and outside will not be kept separate” (2013, pp. 46–47). We
see that especially in the stark contrast between the descriptions of the still quiet
interior of Hautdesert and its forests, where countless deer, a lone boar, and a fox are
trapped and killed to the cacophonous accompaniment of men shouting, dogs
baying, and horns blowing. There, the Gawain-poet seems to be staging a lesson in
morality or truth that applies as much to the serious tricking of animals as to the
tricking of humans.
At the same time, the poem does not evenly, consistently, or predictably line up
right and wrong, honesty and deception, and civility and bestiality along the lines of
“the human” and “the animal.” It locates those traits in both humans and animals, as
scholars in the past have amply pointed out in noting the similarities between the
evasive Gawain and the elusive fox. However, what they overlook is the parallels
between Bertilak and the fox (and actual foxes that lived in England in the
fourteenth century). The bushy red-bearded crafty Bertilak of Hautdesert (“Brode
[…] watz his berde, and all beuer-hwed”) (Broad was his beard and reddish-brown
in color) (line 845) evokes the figural fox (and the common species of English fox
10
For another discussion of trawþe, see Robertson’s argument that the affinities between mute stones and
the character of Gawain at the moment he is being most tested complicates “any easy division between
the competing claims of [human] court and [nonhuman] wilderness that the poem so insistently
thematizes throughout” (2012, p. 107).

123
An animal studies and ecocritical reading of… 439

[Vulpes vulpes], commonly called the “red fox” because of its characteristic reddish
coloured fur). The sash (“grene lace”) (line 1851) that Gawain conceals in order to
save his skin and the fox’s skin that Bertilak showily discards as a worthless
accoutrement—a “stinking fox pelt” (“foule fox felle”) (line 1944) further link
Bertilak to Gawain and the fox. Called by several names inclusive of “Reynard,” the
poem’s figural fox alludes to a rich literary tradition known as renardie in which
foxes are allegorical figures for human deception and fraud (Mann 2009, p. 2). In
studies of that tradition, scholars have not focused on the issue of human trickery
across species lines—namely, the deception of nonhuman animals by human
animals. They also have tended to focus only on the similarities between Gawain
and the fox as those refer to their capacity for evasion. Bertilak, too, associates with
the fox. He is an equally important figure in the task of addressing the text as it
illustrates the chief chivalric virtue of trawþe and the opposite of it, deception and
trickery, for those are traits that Bertilak exhibits as well as Gawain and the fox.
On the morning of the first day, when Gawain is harboured in Sir Bertilak’s castle
and its lord is loose in the forest, at the sound of the first cry of the hunters and their
dogs, the deer panic: “At þe fyrst quethe of þe quest quaked þe wylde;/Der drof in
þe dale, doted for dred” (At the first cry of the hunt, trembled the animals/Deer
driven into the dale, lost their senses) (lines 1150-1). By the end of the day, Bertilak
and his men have killed a sum of animals that defies the bounds of reason: “Such a
sowme he þer slowe bi þat þe sunne heldet,/Of dos and of oþer dere, to deme were
wonder” (So many [deer] had he [Bertilak] slain by nightfall/of does and other deer,
that to tell it would be a wonder) (lines 1321-2). Marie Borroff provides this
translation of lines 1321-2: “He [Bertilak] had slain such a sum, when the sun sank
low,/of does and other deer, as would dizzy one’s wits.”11 W. S. Merwin provides
this translation: “By the time the sun was setting he [Bertilak] had killed so many/
Does and other deer that they could hardly count them.”12 The Middle English word
“wonder” makes the interpretation of these two lines a crux, for “wonder” means
beyond something that is natural or beyond something that can be reasoned. As
another scholar, Simon Armitage, translates lines 1321-2: “[…] by the setting of the
sun [Bertilak] had slaughtered so many/of the does and other deer that it beggared
belief” (emphasis added).
In contrast with the exchange between Gawain and Bertilak’s wife, the lines
(quoted above) reflect that there is far less modesty, humility, and fair exchange in
the exchange between Bertilak and the animals he hunts. Merwin notes that at least
one past translator (unidentified by Merwin) describes the triple hunt episode as one
of “joyous […] sheer delight […] physical sport at its best […] innocent” (2009,
xxii). He also comments that “[…] for all we know the [Gawain-poet] may himself
have regarded the organized mauling and murder of living creatures” according to
that translator’s interpretation (ibid., xxii). However, the sheer excessiveness of the
descriptions of “the panic and pain […] and […] screams of the wounded

11
Borroff’s translation was first published in 1967 and is directly from the original medieval manuscript,
British Library MS Cotton Nero A X (Greenblatt 2006, p. 161).
12
Merwin based his translation of SGGK on the first standard (1925) edition by Tolkien and Gordon
(Merwin 2009, p. xi).

123
440 I. Ralph

[animals],” as Merwin also notes, seems to be intended as much to question that as

to ask a reader to vicariously indulge in and be excited by it (ibid., xxii). That
becomes even more apparent in the subsequent scenes of the hunting of a boar and a
fox.
In “Gawain’s Struggle with Ecology: Attitudes toward the Natural World in Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight,” Michael W. George argues that the behaviour of
Bertilak and his men articulates a position that is analogous to the modern day
“conservationist” environmental argument (2010, p. 37). He notes that when
Bertilak and his men hunt the deer, the men observe the laws of the “close-season”
(“fermysoun”) (line 1156), which prohibit killing male animals at certain times of
year in order to ensure the continuing supply of deer (ibid., p. 37): “þay let þe
herttez haf þe gate […] For þe fre lorde hade defende in fermysoun tyme/þat þere
schulde no mon meue to þe male dere” (They let the harts free […] for the good lord
had ruled that in close season time/no man could interfere with the male deer) (lines
1154-7). According to George’s argument, Bertilak represents a human who “exists
in relative harmony” with the environment and “mitigates” the “binary opposition”
between the environment and the human, and the triple hunt scenes articulate the
need for “regulated dominance over the natural world” even while they reflect the
medieval belief that the natural world, although it “should be respected,” exists
essentially “to serve humans” (ibid., pp. 37–39).
George’s reading of SGGK is difficult to reconcile with either the excessiveness
of the descriptions of animal killing or the descriptions of the ostensible delight of
Bertilak and his men when they engage in baiting, trapping, and taunting cornered
animals. As Merwin rhetorically asks: “What are we being shown in the three days
of grotesque, excited slaughter…set up in artful contraposition to the scenes of
seduction behind the curtains of Gawain’s ornate bed?” (2009, p. xxii). Is it possible
that the Gawain-poet, in composing the triple hunt scenes, is sensitive to an
audience who at least is debating the ethics of hunting animals for sport? The scenes
in which a boar and a fox are hunted also seem to raise that question.
As Gillian Rudd points out in referencing the scenes in SGGK where Bertilak
and his men pursue a boar, there is very little competition between the humans
and the animal (2011, p. 30). A solitary and old (if also still powerful) animal, the
boar has been “[l]ong sythen fro þe sounder þat siȝed for olde” (long since
estranged from its own species) (line 1440), and so, as in the earlier scenes of the
hunting of deer, “the power is very much on the side of the [human] hunter” and
“the narrative line moves in one direction with no question over who controls the
plot” (Rudd 2011, p. 30). Even where the boar is given “some space to make his
own point as he gores the men coming after him” and even when he is allowed
“some agency” in being able to choose a place of defense, which “forces single
combat with Bertilak” (which contrasts with the “the mass slaughter in the deer
drive”), there is little uncertainty as to the outcome of the violent exchange (ibid.,
p. 31).
As Rudd also argues, the boar is “in the text […] mostly to provide excitement,
color, proof of Bertilak’s hunting prowess and the assurance that humans win over
animals” (ibid., pp. 31–32). “Exhilarating as the [boar hunting] episode is,” Rudd

123
An animal studies and ecocritical reading of… 441

concludes, “we are on familiar ground and never doubt the eventual outcome”
(ibid., p. 32).13
In contrast with George, Rudd makes a very persuasive case for the argument that
the triple hunt scenes depict deeply imbalanced human-animal relations. She also
argues that the boar episode is “mostly to provide excitement, color, proof of
Bertilak’s hunting prowess and the assurance that humans win over animals” (2011,
pp. 31–32). As I suggest, the episode does even more than that. It seems to serve to
question the pastime of deliberately protracting the death of an animal to give
pleasure to the animal’s pursuers as well as to wear down the animal. The boar is
taunted, goaded, and driven mad by Bertilak and his men: “[…] þe dyntez hym
dered of her dryȝe strokez” (the blows hurt him of their [the blows] incessant
strokes; he becomes “braynwod for bate” (line 1461) (demented by the fight) (line
1460). Only the end is quick. The baron drives a dagger deep into the animal’s chest
and shatters his heart: “hit hym vp to þe hult, þat þe hert schyndered” (drove it up to
the hilt, such that the heart shattered) (line 1594).
To be sure, as one reviewer of an early draft of this article pointed out, the
dangerous activity of hunting and killing boars in the time of the Gawain-poet ought
not be underestimated from the vantage point of a middleclass liteature professor
who has considerable access to plant-based protein. Nonetheless, the triple hunt
scenes of SGGK do seem intended to invite a medieval reader to empathize with the
suffering of the boar as well as fear his great strength. We see this in particular in
these passages, which describe the last moments of the boar, when, after he
collapses, Bertilak’s men drag him to the shore and their dogs finish him off:
And he ȝarrande hym ȝelde, and ȝedoun pe water
ful tyt.
A hundredth houndez hym hent,
pat bremely con hym bite,
Burnez him broȝt to bent,
And doggez to dethe endite. (lines 1595–1600)
And snarling he surrendered himself, and went down the stream
full quickly
A hundred dogs followed him
that fiercely seized him,
The men heaved him to the shore,
And the dogs finished him off.
I am relatively conservative and literal in my translation (above). Other translations
underscore far more than mine does the sadness and pathos of an animal torn apart
and maimed in a contest heavily tipped in favor of, if not a single human, a group of
13
Rudd makes a similar argument in Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature
(2007). She notes that the superficial opposition in the poem between Gawain and Green Knight is, at a
deeper level, “a competition between like power” more than “a contest between contrasting realms”
(2007, p. 112; emphasis added). The Green Knight initially appears “bigger, more kingly, more courtly,
and more indestructible than the best of the human court [of Arthur],” but his “direct challenge of that
court and its values” brings him into the human world “as surely as he has ridden into Arthur’s hall”
(ibid., p. 113).

123
442 I. Ralph

human predators. Brian Stone and W. S. Merwin translate the lines respectively as
follows:
And the spent beast sank snarling and was swept downstream, Teeth bare.
A hundred hounds and more
Attack and seize and tear;
And the dogs destroy him there.14

And he buckled snarling and collapsed in the water all at once.

A hundred hounds seized him
In their sharp jaws.
And the men dragged him
Ashore for the dogs to finish.
As the boar and deer have been driven to fear and madness, the fox is tormented
by its human hunters. Its body is torn apart, its fur is matted with its own blood, and
it dies a lingering death for the benefit of Bertilak, who wishes to bring something
back to Hautdesert to show for his day in the forest. After hours of pursuing and
baiting the fox, the animal suddenly bursts out of a thicket. Bertilak and his men
(mounted on horses) and dogs, “alle pe rabel” (all the rabble), quickly turn to follow
the animal “in a res ryzt at his helz” (all in a pack on his [the fox’s] heels) (lines
1899). When the fox becomes trapped between the men mounted on horses and the
dogs, the pack of dogs fall excitedly on the animal (“fel on hym alle”) (line 1904).
Bertilak quickly seizes the mauled fox, raising it clear of the dogs from where he sits
perched on his horse, only to throw the fox’s body back to the dogs: “þe lord…
Rased hym ful radly out þe rach mouþes” (The lord…Raised him full promptly out
of the reach of their fangs) (lines 1906–1907); “Hor hounde þay þer rewarde” (The
men give the hounds their reward) (line 1918); “And sypen pay tan Reynarde,/And
tyruen of his cote” (And then they take Reynard,/And strip him of his coat) (lines
1920–1921).
In a review of Merwin’s translation of SGGK, Alan Garner criticizes Merwin for
forwarding arguments that are more apropos of an “animal rights activist” than a
credible let alone authoritative translator of Middle English (2003, p. 10). Garner’s
review, “Benighted Verse,” and Merwin’s translation (2002) were published at a
time when animal studies was still emerging as a discipline in its own right in
literary (and cultural) studies and scholars were only just beginning to challenge
standard scholarly treatments of animal representation. Both texts, as with older
canonical translations of the poem, nonetheless stir up important questions about the
meanings of animal representation in medieval literature. Those questions are
especially pertinent to reading SGGK, a text that not only engages with “the natural
world” more so than other texts of the time but also describes animal hunting at
more length and in more frank and naturalistic language (Rudd 2007, p. 109). It
does so in ways that raise difficult and still unsettled questions about truth and

14
Stone’s translation of SGGK was first published in (1959) and fully revised in 1973. It is based on the
second edition of J. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon’s text (1967) and on a text by Sir Israel Gollanzc (1940)
(Trapp 1973, p. 286).

123
An animal studies and ecocritical reading of… 443

morality in the context of practices of animal hunting as well as games of deceipt

between humans.

References
Acocella, J. (2013). Rich man, poor man: The radical visions of St. Francis. The New Yorker, pp. 72–77.
Armitage, S., trans. (2012). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In C. T. Christ (Ed.), Norton anthology of
English literature (9th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 186–238). New York: W. W. Norton.
Bentham, J. (1789). An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. www.econlib.org/library/
Bentham/bnthPMLhtm. Accessed 23 September 2016.
Borroff, M., trans. (1967, 2006). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In S. Greenblatt (Gen. ed.), The
Norton anthology of English literature (8th ed, Vol. 1, pp. 162-213). New York: W. W. Norton.
Burrow, J. A., & Turville-Petre, T. (1992). A book of middle English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Calarco, M. (2008). Zoographies: The question of the animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Cavalieri, P. (2006). The animal debate: a reexamination. In P. Singer (Ed.), In defense of animals: The
second wave (pp. 54–68). Carlton: Blackwell.
Chadwick, J. V. (1994). The fox: A medieval view and its legacy in modern children’s literature. Between
the Species, 10(1&2), 71–75. http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=
1880&context=bts. Accessed 15 July 2015.
Cohen, J. J. (1999). Of giants: Sex, monsters, and the middle ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Cohen, J. J. (2003). Medieval identity machines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cohen, J. J. (2006). Hybridity, identity, and monstrosity in medieval Britain: On difficult middles. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Crane, S. (2013a). Animal encounters: Contacts and concepts in medieval Britain. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Crane, S. (2013b). Animality. In M. Turner (Ed.), A handbook of middle English studies (pp. 123–134).
Chichester: Wiley.
Crane, S. (2015). Medieval animal studies: Dogs at work. Oxford handbooks online. doi:10.1093/
oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.103.
Derrida, J. (2002). The animal that therefore I am (more to follow) (trans. David Wills). Critical Inquiry,
28(2), 369–418.
Dugan, H., & Steel, K. (2016). Introduction: Fabulous animals. Early Modern Culture, 11(3), 46–52.
http://tigerprints.clemson.edu/emc/vol11/iss1/3. Accessed 29 September 2016.
Elliott, R. W. V. (1968). View points. In D. Fox (Ed.), Twentieth century interpretations of Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight (pp. 106–109). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Fox, D. (1968). Introduction. In D. Fox (Ed.), Twentieth century interpretations of Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight (pp. 1–12). Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Fox, M. A. (1992). Deep vegetarianism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Garner, A. (2003). Benighted verse. Rev. of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A new verse translation by
W. S. Merwin (2003, U.K.: Bloodaxe Books). The Times p. 10.
George, M. W. (2010). Gawain’s struggle with ecology: Attitudes toward the natural world in Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight. The Journal of Ecocriticism, 2(2), 30–44.
Greenblatt, S., Gen. ed. (2006). Introduction. In S. Greenblatt (Gen. ed.), The Norton Anthology of
English Literature, Vol. 1., 8th ed. (pp. 160–162). New York: W. W. Norton.
Hiltner, K. (Ed.). (2015). Ecocriticism: The essential reader. London: Routledge.
Judkins, R. R. (2013). There came a hart in at the chamber door: medieval deer as pets. Enarratio:
Publications of the Medieval Association of the Midwest 18, pp. 23–48. http://hdl.handle.net/1811/
69738. Accessed 4 September 2016.
Lundblad, M. (2009, 2015). From animal to animality studies. In C. Tsai, S. S. Chou & G. Redmer (Eds.),
Key readings in ecocriticism (pp. 245–260). Taipei: Bookman Books.
Mann, J. (2009). Reynard in England. From Aesop to Reynard: Beast literature in medieval Britain.
doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217687.003.0007.

123
444 I. Ralph

McClain, J. (2009). A Christian modernist and the awe of nature as presented in Olivier Messiaen’s opera,
Saint Francois d’Assise. In C. Ho, B. A. Mulvaney, & J. K. Downey (Eds.), Finding saint Francis in
literature and art (pp. 129–137). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McKibben, B. (Ed.). (2008). American earth: Environmental writing since Thoreau. New York: The
Library of America.
Merwin, W. S. (Trans.) (2002, 2009). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A new verse translation. New
York: Alfred E. Knopf.
Oerlemans, O. (2013). The animal in allegory: From Chaucer to Gray. ISLE, 20(2), 296–317.
Palti, K. (2013). The bound earth in Patience and other middle English poetry. ISLE, 20(1), 31–51.
Robertson, K. (2012). Exemplary rocks. In J. J. Cohen (Ed.), Animal, vegetable, mineral: Ethics and
objects (pp. 91–122). Washington: Oliphant Books.
Rotherham, I. D. (2013). Ancient woodland: History, industry and crafts. Oxford: Shire Publications.
Rudd, G. (2007). Greenery: Ecocritical readings of late medieval English literature. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Rudd, G. (2011). The Green Knight’s balancing act. In D. Matthews & A. Bernau (Eds.), In strange
countries: A collection of essays (pp. 25–45). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Saunders, C. J. (1993). The forest of medieval romance. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer Ltd.
Sorabji, R. (1993). Animal minds and human morals: The origins of the western debate. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Steel, K. (2011). How to make a human: Animals and violence in the Middle Ages. Columbus: The Ohio
State University Press.
Stone, B, trans. (1959, 1973). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In J. B. Trapp (Ed.), The Oxford
anthology of English literature: Medieval English literature (pp. 286–348). New York and London:
Oxford University Press.
The Charter of the Forest of King Henry III (1215–1217). Forests and chases of England and Wales c.
1000 to c. 1850. St. John’s College Research Centre, University of Oxford. http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/
forests/Carta.htm. Accessed 10 July 2015.
Tod, J. N. (2004). To sleep among icicles. Rev. of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A new verse
Translation by W. S. Merwin (2003, U.K.: Bloodaxe Books). http://www.guardian.co.uk.book/2004/
feb21/featuresreviews.guardianreview15/ print. Accessed 12 April 2015.
Tolkien, J. R. R., & Gordon, E. V. (Eds.). (1967). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2nd ed.). Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press. http://www.quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/Gawain?rgn=main;
view=fulltext. Accessed 4 June 2016.
Trapp, J. B. (Ed.). (1973). The Oxford anthology of English literature: Medieval English literature. New
York and London: Oxford University Press.
White, L. (1967, 2005). The historical roots of our ecological crisis. Science 155 (1967), (pp. 1203–1207).
Rpt. in L. P. Pojman (Ed.), Environmental ethics: Readings in theory and application, 4th ed. (pp.
20–25). Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth.
Withers, J. (2013). Rev. of animal encounters: contacts and concepts in Medieval Britain (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) by Susan Crane. ISLE 20(3), 690–692.
Wolfe, C. (2008). Exposures. In C. Wolfe (Ed.), Philosophy and animal life (pp. 1–41). New York:
Columbia University Press.
Wolfe, C. (2011). Moving forward, kicking back: The animal turn. Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies,
2, 1–12.
Young, C. R. (1979). The royal forests of medieval England. Leicester: Leicester University Press.

123