The Ends of Enchantment: Colonialism and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

����� ��� By the thirteenth century, the English had learned that the Welsh were treacherous and Þ ckle. 1 In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the English trembled when the Welsh both raided English territory and produced an alarming increase in the number of settlers migrating into English border counties. 2 After the widespread Welsh uprising in the Þ rst decade of the Þ fteenth century, the English realized that the Welsh were not the submissive and deferential natives they had feigned to be, but were a perÞ dious people, on par with the wild Irish. 3 These “insights” into the nature of the Welsh were widely held perceptions among the English in the late Middle Ages. Lest the English forget that the Welsh possessed these characteristics, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) was prepared to remind them. SGGK was thoroughly tied to England’s colonial project in Wales when the poem was composed. SGGK is typically dated between 1350 and 1400 (a common ascription being the last quarter of the fourteenth century), a period during which the English were attempting to complete their colonization of Wales, while the Welsh violently opposed such domination. Resembling several Arthurian histories from medieval Britain, 4 SGGK is structured by these colonial cons icts and, appropriately, arises from a border culture: the poem is conventionally believed to have been composed in northwest England, alongside the Welsh border, and employs a northwest midlands dialect, speciÞ cally, the dialect of Lancashire and Cheshire. Appropriately, the bulk of SGGK’s narrative action unfolds in the EnglishWelsh borderland. This location is speciÞ ed at the beginning of Gawain’s quest to Þ nd the Green Knight. Gawain initially journeys through the realm of Logres (England, south of the Humber) 5 and eventually reaches northern Wales. Gawain passes the Anglesey Islands, fords rivers near the headlands, crosses at Holy Head, and lands “In þe wyldrenesse of Wyrale” (“In the wilderness of Wirral,” 701), 6 a peninsula just inside England, by the northeastern border of Wales. Gawain is in Wirral when Bertilak’s castle magically appears, making SGGK a border romance.