SGGK and Islam

After Doug mentioned the Green Knight's potential relationship to Islam, I couldn't stop thinking about the storyline in those terms. Islam's existence in Spain would have been on its decline at this time, and the indigenous Christians in Spain would have been fighting harder and harder to reclaim the land for "Christ". This adds a new gravity to the poem, and a new depth to the quiz question we had about spirituality and SGGK. At this point, Sir Gawain’s quest to find the green knight becomes about more than the development of an immature knight.  It becomes a battle to save Christendom from this dangerous religion that Christians had been fighting against for centuries, that was even in their own backyard.

Does Christianity emerge as a victor over Islam in this epic poem, or does it end the other way around? Morgan le Fay and Sir Bertilak do, after all, trick the naive Christian knight. The maturity of Sir Bertilak’s court and its connection with the successful bamboozlement of Sir Gawain and Arthur’s court would suggest (at least for me) that Islam is connected to a more mature sense of spiritual development in the epic poem. In the end Gawain is tempted by the green girdle. By doing so Sir Gawain can be seen as accepting the Islamic faith as a protective element against the Green Knight. While he adopts it as a sign of shame in the end, the other knights of King Arthur’s court are too naive to understand what it means—they think it is merely a cool, protective charm, as Gawain once did.

And I think that’s the point. The poem is a satire, showing how to be a poor knight. I think it presents Sir Bertilak’s court and its connection with Islam to show what’s really at stake if chivalrous knight’s fail: ultimately, their religion will fail too.