A User's Guide to Medieval Shapeshifting

PART three

The Green Knight

Heures d'Antoine le Bon, duc de Lorraine, exécutées en 1533.f.56v

The Green Knight isn't your standard muscle-bound marauder turning up to ruin everyone's Christmas dinner. He performs a delicate pas de deux between the Green Man (nature doing whatever nature does) and the stiff moral tut-tutting of Christianity at every naughty impulse.

Turns out, the architects were in on the game. The Green Man crops up everywhere: capitals, tympanums, corbels. Medieval Christianity was perfectly happy sharing the room with fertility symbols, provided they behaved themselves. More or less.

The Green Man's leafy visage and ties to renewal, rebirth, and general botanical shenanigans find their literary culmination in the Green Knight's verdant appearance and regenerative powers. The Gawain-poet's innovation lies in transforming this seasonal fertility figure into a complex moral challenger. His greenness stops being merely botanical and starts looking theological.

The trail leads deep into Celtic back alleys. Juliette Wood and her chums have done the legwork, and what they’ve turned up makes a mess of the tidy courtly façade. Scratch the surface of Arthurian romance and you hit a Celtic substrate, particularly the concept of the Otherworld as a space where normal moral and physical laws are suspended. The Green Knight's ability to survive decapitation, his connection to seasonal cycles, and his role as tester of Christian virtue all point to origins in fertility religion and seasonal kingship traditions documented in Irish and Welsh sources.

Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 143, f. 001

His admission into the Arthurian world tells you how medieval culture could incorporate pagan elements without necessarily undermining Christian orthodoxy. The Green Knight functions simultaneously as supernatural challenger and agent of divine providence, embodying what Caroline Walker Bynum has identified as the medieval capacity for 'both/and' rather than 'either/or' thinking.

The Green Knight's challenge operates through a similar logic to David's sacred dance. Gregory the Great's interpretation of David dancing before the ark emphasised how 'he whom the Lord preferred specially above all, condemns himself beneath the Lord, both by equaling himself with the least, and by displaying abject behaviour.' David’s rota turned him through voluntary abasement, which, oddly enough, ended up elevating him. It's the same topsy-turvy tightrope Gawain has to tiptoe along. Like David's saltus, Gawain's journey involves choreographed humiliation: the beheading game's ritualised movements, the bedroom scenes' verbal dance, and ultimately the donning of the green girdle as penitential emblem. Both narratives conceive of transformation not merely as physical change but as performative submission to divine order.

As a natural cavern overgrown with vegetation, the Green Chapel defies conventional expectations of sacred space whilst serving as the site of moral revelation. This liminal setting embodies what Arnold van Gennep identified as the 'threshold space' where transformation becomes possible, where Gawain must confront both the Green Knight's challenge and his own moral limitations.

Breviary France, ca. 1511 MS M. 8 fol. 406r

Gardens as Liminal Spaces

The medieval garden functioned as a fundamentally ambivalent symbol, simultaneously representing innocence and transgression, order and wildness, containment and escape. Jessica Levenstein's 1996 analysis of the Decameron's garden settings illuminates how Boccaccio employed the imagery of enclosure and transgression to explore the tension between reason and natura. The second garden in the Decameron is described as possessing 'bello ordine' with plants 'ordinate poste,' yet this controlled space teems with fertile, flourishing life: grape vines promising abundant yield and citrus trees heavy with fruit. The garden is 'tutto da torno murato,' completely walled, yet within those walls desire threatens to overflow its bounds.

This dynamic parallels the Green Chapel's function as a liminal threshold space. Like Boccaccio's walled garden where the brigata attempts to contain their passions within the 'segno della ragione,' the Green Chapel represents simultaneously a space of confinement and revelation. The overgrown grotto where Gawain confronts the Green Knight embodies what Levenstein identifies as 'a picture of nature left to its own devices', utterly uncontrolled and disordered, 'the very antithesis' of the cultivated garden. These natural grottos and wilderness settings in medieval literature function as spaces where human attempts at order dissolve, where transformation becomes not merely possible but inevitable.

MS 1-2005 41v

When Gawain finally tracked down the so-called Green Chapel, what he found wasn’t a chapel at all. Merely a swollen hump of earth, choked with weeds. Winter had missed the memo. The place was too alive for the season. Gawain took one look and figured it for the kind of joint where the devil clocks in for midnight prayers.

Gawain, as usual, read the room wrong. This wasn’t a devil’s chapel, but a fairy mound. Throughout Celtic tradition, the sidhe were said to live in ancient burial mounds. These liminal spaces, literally doorways into the earth, served as portals to the Otherworld.

And here's where the Green Knight's real name gets interesting: Bercilak de Hautdesert.

Which would be rendered as something like 'Bercilak of the High Desert' or 'Bercilak of the Wilderness', although Winny, Neilson, Weston, Gardner, Armitage, Borroff, and Tolkien kept the original Hautdesert. The Celtic scholar Elizabeth Alewine points out that desert comes from a Celtic word meaning 'the dwelling place of a hermit', a remote, sacred space set apart from civilisation.

So his name really cashes out as this: Bercilak of the High Hermitage.

He's a hermit. But not a Christian hermit serving God in the wilderness. He's a hermit of the sidhe, serving Morgain le Fay in her green chapel-that's-not-a-chapel. The parallel is precise: just as Christian hermits withdrew from the world to serve God in isolated holy places, Bercilak dwells in this remote fairy mound, serving the goddess who was once the Irish war deity the Morrigain.

The religious imagery is inverted. The Green Chapel is consecrated not to Christ but to older powers. Bercilak is both host and priest, welcoming Gawain to his castle and then administering the ritual test at the mound.

Shapeshifting and Metaphysics

Medieval shapeshifting narratives engage with fundamental philosophical problems about personal identity and its relationship to physical form. Influenced by Aristotelian concepts of form and matter, medieval thinkers struggled with questions about what constitutes the essential self and how that self relates to bodily existence.

Augustine's condemnation of metamorphosis as 'ludificatio daemonum' (devil's tricks) created theological problems that reverberated throughout medieval culture. If shapeshifting was purely demonic illusion, how could it serve legitimate narrative and moral functions? If it was real, how could it be reconciled with Christian teachings about the integrity of divine creation?

Medieval culture resolved this tension through what we might call 'theological compartmentalisation', accepting shapeshifting as legitimate literary and artistic device whilst maintaining its theological illegitimacy. This allowed continued use of transformation narratives whilst preserving orthodox doctrine, but it also created underlying tensions that give medieval shapeshifting literature much of its psychological complexity.

Cross-cultural analysis reveals distinct regional approaches to these problems:

Irish Literature emphasised cyclical transformation and reincarnation, reflecting Celtic concepts of time as circular rather than linear. The sequential transformations of figures like Tuan Mac Cairill suggest worldviews in which identity itself is fundamentally fluid, capable of maintaining continuity across multiple incarnations and species.

Yet Irish shapeshifting operates through distinct mechanisms. Camilla With Pedersen identifies three categories: voluntary (self-initiated transformation), genetic (inherited ability), and involuntary (transformation through external curse). The involuntary transformations, despite their pagan settings, adhere closely to Christian theological frameworks, revealing how Christian scribes integrated shapeshifting into orthodox worldview.

Tochmarc Étaíne demonstrates this synthesis. When Fuamnach strikes Étaín with a rod of scarlet quicken tree, Étaín transforms sequentially: woman to pool of water, water to worm, worm to purple fly. The text specifies the transformative agents: 'the heat from the fire, the air, and the seething ground.' This echoes the ninth-century Irish text In Tenga Bithnua, which describes human composition as air (breath), fire (blood), and earth (flesh and bone). Étaín's resurrection from water through these three elements mirrors Christian resurrection theology: transformation not by arbitrary magic but through 'the inmost fabric of creation,' as John Carey argues, connecting Eriugena's miraculum miraculorum (Christ's resurrection) to Irish cosmology.

The curse operates as theological punishment but also reveals essence. When Étaín becomes a fly, she remains recognisable by her eyes, 'the most beautiful fly in the land.' This recognition motif appears across medieval European shapeshifting: Ovid's Lycaon retains his fierce eyes as wolf, Giraldus Cambrensis's twelfth-century werewolves keep human eyes and souls, Old Norse Bjǫrn is recognised as bear by his eyes. The eye as soul-window transcends cultural boundaries, marking where human consciousness persists within animal form.

Similarly, Bran and Sceolang (Finn mac Cumaill's hunting dogs) were human fetuses when their mother Tuirnn was cursed by a jealous rival who 'took her dark druidical wand from under her garment, and having struck the young woman with it, metamorphosed her into a greyhound.' The transformation occurred in utero, during the liminal state between conception and birth. Finn, himself a liminal figure dwelling in wilderness with the fíanna, appropriately owns dogs who are simultaneously animal and human kin, supernatural yet material. The curse creates categorical crisis: are Bran and Sceolang dogs or men? The narrative refuses resolution, preserving their hybridity as emblem of the fíanna's own liminality.

Irish involuntary shapeshifting thus functions as simultaneously punishment, revelation, and participation in cosmic order. The cursed retain enough humanity to be recognised (eyes), enough animality to serve narrative function (supernatural hounds), and enough theological coherence to satisfy Christian scribes who recorded pagan tales.

Yet this intellectual transformation operates by identical principles to physical shapeshifting. Rafał Borysławski argues that shapeshifting constitutes 'the fundamental compositional principle of the riddle form,' noting that 'the essence of literary shapeshifters and the essence of riddles lie in the elusiveness of their meanings and in the intention to deceive those that come in contact with them.' The riddle is a textual shapeshifter, simultaneously revealing and concealing identity through transformation.

The Exeter Book riddles create what Borysławski calls 'hypostatic' transformation, focusing not on external appearance but on internal essence and process. Riddle 40 'Creation' embodies endless mutation through divine will, describing itself through antithetical attributes: 'fragrant as a rose and reeking of the stench of decay,' 'higher and greater than heaven and present in underground pits,' 'older than the universe and born the previous day.' This endless becoming mirrors the Green Knight's simultaneous identities as courtly host and supernatural challenger. Both figures resist stable categorisation.

Riddle 26 'The Bible' presents transformation as sequential shapeshifting: an animal becomes hide, hide becomes vellum, vellum becomes book, book becomes Scripture. Each transformation involves violent deformation: the animal is 'deprived of physical strength,' wetted, stretched, scraped with knives, written upon, bound in boards, decorated with gold. This sacrificial sequence mirrors Christ's transformative death, the animal's destruction enabling spiritual life. The riddle creates what we might call theological shapeshifting: death becoming life, flesh becoming word, material becoming divine.

The Anglo-Saxon approach thus transfers shapeshifting from body to language, from physical metamorphosis to semantic transformation. Yet the underlying logic remains identical: creating categorical crisis, demanding confrontation and resolution, providing insight through de-familiarisation. As Borysławski notes, 'the riddle is a monstrous text and the monster is a textual riddle', both exist to be solved, and solving them transforms the solver's understanding.

The Poetics of Transformation

The Gawain-poet's choice of northwest Midlands dialect represents more than regional preference. It constitutes deliberate assertion of cultural otherness within the emerging dominance of London English, paralleling the poem's thematic concern with relationships between surface appearance and essential identity.

The heavy use of Norse-derived vocabulary connects the poem to the same cultural streams that produced Germanic animal aesthetics. Words absent from Chaucer's vocabulary create linguistic texture evoking pre-Conquest cultural synthesis that shaped northern English identity. This linguistic archaeology supports the poem's thematic exploration of relationships between Christian knighthood and older, darker traditions of identity and obligation.

This linguistic shapeshifting finds structural parallel in the Old English riddle tradition, where transformation operates through what Borysławski calls 'simultaneous and multiple acts of transforming the identity of the riddled subject.' The Dream of the Rood's cross, wendан wædum and bleom ('changing its clothes and colours'), transforms from shame to glory just as the Green Knight transforms from beheading-game challenger to moral instructor, from supernatural threat to agent of divine testing.

The riddle's method of concealing through revelation, revealing through concealment mirrors Gawain's psychological transformation. He doesn't physically shapeshift, yet he undergoes categorical transformation no less complete than Ovid's metamorphoses: from legendary perfection to acknowledged fallibility, from ideal knight to flawed human. His journey enacts what the riddles accomplish linguistically: de-familiarization of the familiar, transformation of established identity, reversal revealing deeper truth.

Riddle contests in medieval tradition (Vafþrúðnismál's confrontation between Óðinn and the giant, Hervarar saga's battle of wits between Óðinn disguised as Gestumblindi and King Heiðrekr) combine shapeshifting with riddling, demonstrating their intimate connection. Both involve deception, both demand wisdom, both transform participants through confrontation with the unknown.

Heures d'Antoine le Bon, duc de Lorraine, exécutées en 1533. f.57r

The Green Knight embodies the persistence of pre-Christian traditions within nominally Christian culture. His dual nature as both Bercilak de Hautdesert (courtly host) and supernatural challenger exemplifies the identity instability that characterises all medieval shapeshifting narratives. He is not simply disguised; he is genuinely both identities simultaneously, suggesting worldviews in which individual identity is far more fluid and contextual than modern assumptions would suggest.

Gawain's journey represents psychological shapeshifting which parallels physical transformations found in other medieval narratives. His movement from legendary hero to flawed human being constitutes fundamental identity change no less profound for being internal rather than external. The poem's treatment of reputation and identity reveals sophisticated understanding of the social construction of selfhood.

The green and gold girdle functions as more than magical protection. It becomes a symbol of Gawain's transformation from ideal knight to flawed human being. Its acceptance marks psychological shapeshifting where Gawain chooses self-preservation over perfect honour. The girdle's retention as penitential emblem demonstrates how material objects can carry the memory and meaning of psychological transformation.

The bedroom scenes at Hautdesert represent not merely a test of chastity but a linguistic contest in which Gawain finds himself outmatched. Cindy L. Vitto's 1999 analysis reveals Lady Bertilak consistently dominates their verbal exchanges, speaking significantly more than Gawain on each successive morning: 49 lines to his 28 on the first day, 39 to 24 on the second, and 33 to 22 on the third. More significantly, she controls the level of discourse, 'put[ting] their conversation on an ironic level where words suggest but do not make explicit each speaker's real intent.' Gawain, renowned throughout Arthur's court for his skill in 'luf-talkyng,' discovers that mastery of courtly speech proves inadequate when faced with Lady Bertilak's linguistic sophistication.

This verbal contest parallels the physical transformations found elsewhere in medieval romance. As the Green Knight transforms from challenger to host, from civilised courtier to monstrous beheading-game opponent, Lady Bertilak's language shifts and transforms, moving from flattery to temptation to triumph. Her final success in persuading Gawain to accept the girdle represents the culmination of a progressive linguistic seduction mirroring the escalating intensity of the hunting scenes outside the castle walls. As Vitto notes, the lady demonstrates 'shrewd timing,' catching Gawain off guard 'just when he thinks it is safe to relax'. A pattern of deceptive transformation that makes language itself a shapeshifting force.

The poem's final image of Arthur's court adopting green baldrics in solidarity with Gawain suggests how individual transformation can reshape entire communities. Gawain's personal shapeshifting becomes collective acknowledgement of human fallibility that transforms Camelot itself from a court of ideal knights to a community of flawed human beings striving for virtue despite their limitations.

Parallel Transformations

The elaborate hunting sequences during Gawain's stay at Hautdesert castle we see each day's hunt mirrors Gawain's internal struggle with Lady Bertilak's advances:

Day 1: The Deer Hunt mirrors Gawain's initial courtesy and restraint. Deer, associated with timidity and innocence, reflect Gawain's attempts to maintain chivalric propriety whilst navigating unexpected moral challenges. The successful hunt parallels Gawain's initial success in managing the lady's advances without compromising either courtesy or chastity.

Day 2: The Boar Hunt represents escalating conflict and internal struggle. The boar's ferocity and dangerous tusks mirror the increasing intensity of Lady Bertilak's seduction attempts and Gawain's mounting internal tension. The hunt's violence reflects the psychological violence of Gawain's moral conflict.

Day 3: The Fox Hunt embodies cunning, deception, and moral compromise. The fox's reputation for cleverness parallels Gawain's decision to conceal the green girdle, representing his first significant departure from perfect honesty. The fox's evasive tactics mirror Gawain's increasingly complex moral calculations.

This symbolic structure demonstrates medieval literature's capacity for sophisticated psychological analysis embedded within apparently straightforward narrative frameworks. The hunting sequences serve the same function as monster-musicians in manuscript margins: they create spaces where deeper truths about human nature can be explored through symbolic representation.

BM Verdun, ms. 107, f. 101

Like Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight explores heroism, morality, and tensions between pagan and Christian values. However, while Beowulf is out there brawling with dragons, trolls, and basically every monster who dares blink, Gawain's trials reveal internal flaws, reflecting medieval literature's shift toward individual introspection.

Both works use symbolic landscapes as arenas for transformation. Beowulf's moors and lairs echo the wilds Gawain traverses. These liminal spaces strip heroes of societal constructs, testing intrinsic virtues. The Green Knight's regenerative powers and moral authority embody fusion of pagan motifs and Christian themes of redemption.

The evolution from Beowulf to Sir Gawain represents fundamental shifts in medieval conception of heroism. Beowulf faces monsters representing external threats to social order; Gawain faces a monster who reveals contradictions and limitations inherent in that order itself. The Green Knight is not defeated because he represents not a problem to be solved but reality to be acknowledged: the persistent power of the wild, natural, and uncontrollable within human experience.

This evolution reflects broader changes in medieval culture as it matured from the relatively simple binary oppositions of early Christian warrior culture to the complex moral psychology of high medieval chivalric romance.

These shape-shifters, whether Viking hamr-changers, manuscript baboons with bagpipes, or the Green Knight himself, were never mere decoration. They were the medieval world thinking out loud about what it meant to be human when humanity itself refused to stay still. They were the confession that transformation isn't aberration but essence, that the boundaries we draw around ourselves are provisional at best, theatrical at worst.

And so, when you’re programming a thirteenth-century concert, take a moment. Ask yourself: what would the baboon with the bagpipe play? Until we take the monsters as seriously as the monks, we’re only hearing half the story.