By Keenan Wallace
In both Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Lanval, love and relationships are portrayed not as personal components but as social elements that test the hero’s adherence to chivalric ideals. Both texts use courtly love1 to question honor and morality, illustrating the conflict between the authentic expression of affection and the artificial expectations of courtly culture. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight presents love as a trial to be withstood through the structure provided by courtly ideals, using this conflict to satirize the ideal of “love” and the inherent contradictions it contains. Lanval achieves a similar satirization through its characterization of real love as a private bond that must exist outside of the constraints of courtly society. Taken together, these works expose the instability of the courtly ideal itself. Gawain shows it to be a flawed framework that can corrupt the very morality it seeks to uphold under the weight of repression and temptation, while in Lanval it becomes an inhospitable social environment that renders authentic love impossible within its bounds.
1In his article The Discourse of Courtly Love in Medieval Verse Narratives, Albrect Classen defines courtly love as “narrative, musical, performative, and ritualistic medium within secular aristocratic society to explore the relationship between the genders in erotic terms”
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins in a court obsessed with ritual and reputation, depicting a world where public standing must be sustained through constant performance. In King Arthur’s court, “all those trusted brothers sat/ amid merriment unmatched and laughter without care” (Mantyk 14). In this context, the phrase “without care” connotes not innocence but indifference, making it clear that this court is one that lives only by a facade of virtue. It exemplifies a lack of self-scrutiny that later allows the court to make Gawain’s shame into spectacle. This depiction of Arthur’s court portrays it as one that is entirely unconcerned with reality, focused only inward and blind to the outside world. Arthur’s court fosters a performative environment where the idea of virtue is more valuable than the real thing. As he leaves the courtly world behind the tenets of courtly virtue continue to crumble under the weight of their own contradictions. Nowhere are these contradictions clearer than in his meetings with Lady Bertilak. Her position as a lady of the court as well as the actions she takes force him into a paradoxical position as the chivalric ideal that Gawain seeks to emulate collapses into contradiction. Gawain must simultaneously refuse her repeated advances and at the same time submit to them. To refuse outright would violate his code of courtesy and yet to submit would betray not only his knightly chastity but also his host. Her flirtation becomes a test, not just of Gawain’s own virtue but also of the system he exists within. In this moment Gawain is shown to be uncomfortable with Lady Bertilak’s advances as he “made the sign of the cross, thus safeguarding himself with/ what’s right” (57) and is said to feel embarrassed by her actions. Despite his discomfort he must respond as his station requires of him. “He countered her courteously, ever careful in his manner” (59). The dissonance between Gawain’s own desires and the demands placed upon him by the system he exists within is indicative of that system’s shortcomings.
The culmination of this dissonance comes with Gawain’s acceptance of the green girdle and the court’s reaction to it. For Gawain, his acceptance of the girdle is representative of his moral failure. “Worrying about the hit I would take, Cowardice led me/ to consent to Desire, forsaking my true nature” (94). Again though, the court’s values are misaligned with his own. Upon his return to Arthur’s court the trials he has gone through and his ultimate failure to uphold his knightly virtue is turned into spectacle. Despite Gawain’s proclamation of the girdle as a representation of his “violating virtue” (98), “the court made this law in merriment:/ whichever lords and ladies belonged to the Table,/ and every knight in its Brotherhood, must wear a sash,/ a band of bright green across the chest”(98). As the court celebrates the token and Gawain’s ‘success’ they erase any real meaning his quest may have had. The token’s meaning as a reminder of failure disregarded. Instead as Gawain is reassimilated into the court its meaning is reabsorbed, becoming remade into a performance of virtuous success. Their disregard shows the court’s inability to look past the performative aspect of the sash. All they can see is a beautiful token of affection; remaining unable to acknowledge the personal meaning it holds for Gawain.
While Gawain and the Green Knight critiques the performance of virtue within courtly life Lanval imagines authenticity as impossible within its constraints. Marie de France’s fairy mistress presents an alternate social framework built on privacy. When she tells Lanval, ”Don’t reveal yourself to any man!” (France, line 144), she forms a new covenant that fundamentally opposes the performative love of Arthur’s court. Their agreement’s reliance on secrecy converts love from a public performance to a private truth, breaking the logic of courtly love. Within their new covenant love no longer exists as a “ritualistic medium”, becoming separated from the corrupting restrictions of the court. Through the boons she offers, primarily in the form of material wealth, Lanval gains immense social standing within the court, allowing him to keep up the appearance of conformity. However, the secret nature of their relationship places him in direct conflict with the established social system. This underlying conflict is quickly brought to the surface by Queen Guenevere as she seeks an affair with Lanval, forcing him to reveal his fairy mistress. “But I do love–I alone love/ A lady who’d win the prize/ Over all women I’ve known of” (lines 293-295). In this moment the inauthentic love of the court, represented by Guenevere’s infidelity, forces him to reveal his actual love, destroying the fragile equilibrium between private authenticity and public expectation. Guenevere’s subsequent accusation and the trial that follows are a dramatic representation of the court’s inability to accept authentic love. In this sense, Gawain’s metaphorical and Lanval’s literal trial are the same, both confusing moral worth with social conformity. The resolution, in which Lanval’s fairy lover whisks him off to Avalon represents not a success but an escape. As Natania Barron notes “The fairy-queen, free as she might seem, cannot function within the same structure as Guenevere”(26). Despite her supernatural nature she cannot overcome the intrinsic hostility the court bears to social non-conformity. Lanval’s eventual removal from the environment of the court critiques the artificiality of the courtly system and proposes that real love can exist only outside of it.
Together, Sir Gawaian and the Green Knight and Lanval construct a powerful critique of courtly ideals. In Gawain chivalry collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, at the same time demanding impossible virtue while rewarding submission to desire, transforming love into a test to be overcome. In Lanval, that same code renders love impossible under its influence forcing authentic expression of emotion into exile. Both texts expose the courtly vision of love as a social fiction perpetuated through repression and hypocrisy. These works are united in their depiction of love as a moral litmus test, a means by which society reveals its shortcomings. For Gawain the results of this test produce guilt and a newfound self-awareness but provide no redemption within the courtly system. In Lanval authentic love provides escape, but only through the wholesale abandonment of the courtly system. Alexa Keating points to the “problematic identification of romantic love with marriage” (2). This false equivalence between performance and reality is the central theme that these works seek to address. Both Lanval and Gawain provide a lens that can be used to examine what happens at the meeting point between authenticity and performance, exposing how each corrodes the other. Both poems reveal that when love becomes performance, authenticity becomes radical. In this way the critique Lanval and Gawain and the Green Knight offer speak to the perennial human struggle to find balance between what we feel and what society allows us to express.
Work Cited
Barron, Natania J. “Courtly Contradictions: A Case For Guenevere” (2007). Masters Theses https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/umi-uncg-1501.pdf?
Classen, Albrecht. 2024. “The Discourse of Courtly Love in Medieval Verse Narratives” Encyclopedia 4, no. 4: 1904-1917. https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia4040124
France, Marie de. Lanval. Translated by Judith P. Shoaf, University of Florida, 1991. University of Florida, https://people.clas.ufl.edu/jshoaf/files/lanval.pdf.Keating, Alexa Leigh, “Courtly Love in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Modern Reflections “(2015). Honors Theses. 303.
Mantyk, Evan, translator. Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. Classical Poets Publishing, 2021. Classical Poets, https://classicalpoets.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Sir-Gawain-and-the-Green-Knight-for-online-publishing_two-pages.pdf.
Sprockets and Springes 