Image: Dover Castle from Fort Burgoyne by Marius Warriner
"Does the land wait the sleeping lord - or is that wasted land the very lord who sleeps?'
(David Jones The Sleeping Lord and other Fragments. London: Faber, 1974, pg 96)
(David Jones The Sleeping Lord and other Fragments. London: Faber, 1974, pg 96)
Introduction.
I am fortunate to live in a land saturated by myth and legend; but I didn’t always know it. When I first started to ‘get in to’ myth (the Arthurian legends were my doorway in) I felt bereft, because coming from Dover – as far south and east as you can get in the UK - I was as far as possible geographically from the myth-haunted and legend-soaked peripheries to the west, the misty Celtic enclaves of mountainous Cymru and sea-blasted Kernow. There, the last vestiges of folklore had clung belligerently to the rocks, able to survive the processes that had seemingly leached such traditions from the rest of Britain. My own south-eastern corner, especially, seemed empty of folklore. The English, as Tolkien had ruefully noted, were a nation bereft of a mythology, having been stripped of their myths partly through early Christianisation, and partly through cultural suppression after to the Norman Conquest that saw a whole body of Anglo-Saxon tradition vanish practically overnight (in contrast, tales of Celtic Arthur, fashionable in the Norman courts, saw a boom – probably because Arthur, like the Normans, had fought the Saxons…). Tolkien had tried to remedy this by producing his mown ‘mythology for England’ in his tales of Middle Earth.
However, as I would later discover when researching my book on the Old English poem Beowulf (Beowulf and Grendel, 2005), there was much English tradition that had survived the twin powers of Christ and the Conqueror - the beloved folk traditions of our land, old Albion (‘the shining land’ – perhaps a reference to the white cliffs), I would come to realise, owed as much to the Anglo-Saxons as the Celts (if such terms have any meaning any more).
What’s more, and more importantly for this current article, I had been wrong to believe that my hometown, closer to Continental Europe than to London, had no bearing or connection to those misty Celtic tales of Arthur and his Knights – there was a connection, of which I, and everyone I subsequently spoke to on the matter, had been wholly unaware. And probably are still, in the main.
I was reminded of this forgotten connection this last weekend when I attended an event near Dover held at Fort Burgoyne, a Napoleonic-era fort set in the hills behind Dover Castle; the event was called ‘Waking the Giant’ – with the tagline : Exploring a mythical past to create an imaginary future...
However, as I would later discover when researching my book on the Old English poem Beowulf (Beowulf and Grendel, 2005), there was much English tradition that had survived the twin powers of Christ and the Conqueror - the beloved folk traditions of our land, old Albion (‘the shining land’ – perhaps a reference to the white cliffs), I would come to realise, owed as much to the Anglo-Saxons as the Celts (if such terms have any meaning any more).
What’s more, and more importantly for this current article, I had been wrong to believe that my hometown, closer to Continental Europe than to London, had no bearing or connection to those misty Celtic tales of Arthur and his Knights – there was a connection, of which I, and everyone I subsequently spoke to on the matter, had been wholly unaware. And probably are still, in the main.
I was reminded of this forgotten connection this last weekend when I attended an event near Dover held at Fort Burgoyne, a Napoleonic-era fort set in the hills behind Dover Castle; the event was called ‘Waking the Giant’ – with the tagline : Exploring a mythical past to create an imaginary future...
http://albionincorporated.com/waking-the-giant/
The giant of the title is the fort itself, woken to public consciousness after years of obscurity (it had been located behind the military barracks, and mostly out of bounds) and to a new purpose and direction.
The flyer for this rather unique event stated:
“Fort Burgoyne has lain dormant for some years, a Victorian ‘Palmerston Fort’ carved out of the earth nearly two hundred years ago – yet it rarely saw action in any conflict.
Since it was acquired by The Land Trust, Pioneering Places East Kent has been exploring ideas for a new role for Fort Burgoyne, and for one special day will be welcoming visitors to explore its hidden depths.
Will it be a hub for heritage handicrafts or an academy for endangered skills? Will it be a Museum of Folklore? Will it house creative new businesses or social enterprise?
Waking the Giant is an open day showcasing some of the themes Pioneering Places has explored…”
This exploration of place was the brainchild of the suitably named Albion Inc, a partnership that describes itself as ‘a company with an unusual blend of skills and experience in the field of reinventing places’ (http://albionincorporated.com/); Walking round the brick casemates of the fort, watching pots being thrown, baskets being woven, I found myself caught up in something that wasn’t as straightforward as the flyers had intimated – there was an undercurrent to this… think ‘The Wicker man’… think 1970s folk-horror, or the recent film Midsommar… giant Punch and Judy figures towered menacingly in one room; in another corn dollies hung innocently in front of an image of a straw-woven face with hollow eyes besides the words ‘John Barleycorn Must Die’; nightmarish images of Ghillie-clad figures appeared in mesmeric films projected on the walls (a Ghillie suit is used for camouflage, usually for a military or hunting function); another room had projected on its whitewashed walls along poems written about the waking of the giant, and linking him to the poet William Blake’s giant Albion, the primal man, whose fall and division appear in his uniquely weird mythology. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill family day out; all kinds of archetypal tendrils were cracking through the bricks of the fort from some deeper place.
The flyer for this rather unique event stated:
“Fort Burgoyne has lain dormant for some years, a Victorian ‘Palmerston Fort’ carved out of the earth nearly two hundred years ago – yet it rarely saw action in any conflict.
Since it was acquired by The Land Trust, Pioneering Places East Kent has been exploring ideas for a new role for Fort Burgoyne, and for one special day will be welcoming visitors to explore its hidden depths.
Will it be a hub for heritage handicrafts or an academy for endangered skills? Will it be a Museum of Folklore? Will it house creative new businesses or social enterprise?
Waking the Giant is an open day showcasing some of the themes Pioneering Places has explored…”
This exploration of place was the brainchild of the suitably named Albion Inc, a partnership that describes itself as ‘a company with an unusual blend of skills and experience in the field of reinventing places’ (http://albionincorporated.com/); Walking round the brick casemates of the fort, watching pots being thrown, baskets being woven, I found myself caught up in something that wasn’t as straightforward as the flyers had intimated – there was an undercurrent to this… think ‘The Wicker man’… think 1970s folk-horror, or the recent film Midsommar… giant Punch and Judy figures towered menacingly in one room; in another corn dollies hung innocently in front of an image of a straw-woven face with hollow eyes besides the words ‘John Barleycorn Must Die’; nightmarish images of Ghillie-clad figures appeared in mesmeric films projected on the walls (a Ghillie suit is used for camouflage, usually for a military or hunting function); another room had projected on its whitewashed walls along poems written about the waking of the giant, and linking him to the poet William Blake’s giant Albion, the primal man, whose fall and division appear in his uniquely weird mythology. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill family day out; all kinds of archetypal tendrils were cracking through the bricks of the fort from some deeper place.
John Barleycorn by Matt Rowe
I realised that despite the tagline stressing the festival’s exploration of ‘a mythical past’, and the clear folkloric undercurrent, noticeably absent was a direct mention of that Arthurian connection that I had chanced on as a teenager – one involving, as we will see, green-clad nature spirits and giants waking from the dead or slumber. These elements were being referenced in the Fort Burgoyne event, yet, it seemed, albeit drawn unconsciously from the existing, if forgotten, mythos. Or was I just seeing shadows… shadows of my own past projected onto this modern myth-making, just as the forts walls became the canvas and screen for projected images in the many artistic installations? A Ghillie-clad Rorschach image of my own making? It would help if I told you what the ‘lost’ legend was…
Me, left, at 'Waking the Giant'
“There May all see the Skull of Him…”
The story concerns a knight and a relic, and through that connects to other tales of a giant of ancient Albion and a green man...one tale entwined with another, interwoven like ancient knotwork, and as hard to unravel as the Gordian knot. And a web of tales that would have personal resonances for me and my own life.
Let us begin where I began, as a 15-year-old – with my surprise discovery of an Arthurian link to my hometown.
You see, Arthur had come to Dover; he had, in fact, fought a battle on Dover beach, having been forced to return from campaigning in France when his bastard son, Mordred, had seized the throne in his absence; it was Mordred who he fought in Dover, and afterwards at Barham Downs, before they would both die at each other’s hands at the fateful battle of Camlann. But the legend did not just mention a battle; it stated that Arthur’s nephew, the noble Sir Gawain, had died during this skirmish, and was found dying offshore in a ship, bearing a great head wound. Gawain had then been buried in a chapel in Dover Castle.
This sounded like pure medieval fantasy – Arthur, if he existed, was a Lowland Scottish, Welsh or Cornish chieftain, and probably never had any dealings further east than the Midlands, let alone France… and Gawain – (Gwalchmai – ‘Hawk of May’) in Welsh, was certainly more mythical than real – his strength increased during the day like the sun, only to wane in the evening – and it is likely he was one of a number of half-remembered pagan deities drawn into the orbit of the magnetic central figure of Arthur, to become a Knight of the Round Table .. So, I mused, it couldn’t be true – could it?
While one might doubt the details of the legend (i.e. the unlikely presence of a Pagan Welsh-solar deity buried in an as yet un-built Castle - the Castle is Norman in date - by a probably fictional Dark-Age warlord) there was one element that couldn’t be overlooked: Sir Thomas Malory’s 1485 bestseller Le Morte DArthur, which probably did most to popularise the legends of King Arthur, when describing Gawain’s burial in the castle chapel writes ‘and there may all see the skull of him’ – complete with the head wound. Caxton, Malory’s editor and printer, a one-time merchant who had travelled through Dover on many occasions and was therefore probably speaking from experience, recounts in the introduction to Malory’s book that he himself had seen this grisly relic first-hand. Nearly a century earlier there is a reference to the same relic in Raimon de Perillo’s account of his journey from Avignon to Dublin at the end of the fourteenth century, where he, too, informs us that Gawain's skull could be seen in Dover, along with Caradoc’s mantle. Such literary figures as Gawain and Caradoc were the Marvel superheroes of their day, famous throughout all of Europe (we see both Carrado and Galvagin, Caradoc and Gawain, tilting at each other on a twelfth-century archway from Modena Cathedral in Italy, for instance). The presence of Gawain’s skull and Caradoc’s mantle (which could test for virginity, no less) would be like a modern day church housing Thor’s hammer and Iron Man’s armour… or perhaps the skull of the Hulk, as we’ll see, green giants begin to figure frequently from now on in…
Let us begin where I began, as a 15-year-old – with my surprise discovery of an Arthurian link to my hometown.
You see, Arthur had come to Dover; he had, in fact, fought a battle on Dover beach, having been forced to return from campaigning in France when his bastard son, Mordred, had seized the throne in his absence; it was Mordred who he fought in Dover, and afterwards at Barham Downs, before they would both die at each other’s hands at the fateful battle of Camlann. But the legend did not just mention a battle; it stated that Arthur’s nephew, the noble Sir Gawain, had died during this skirmish, and was found dying offshore in a ship, bearing a great head wound. Gawain had then been buried in a chapel in Dover Castle.
This sounded like pure medieval fantasy – Arthur, if he existed, was a Lowland Scottish, Welsh or Cornish chieftain, and probably never had any dealings further east than the Midlands, let alone France… and Gawain – (Gwalchmai – ‘Hawk of May’) in Welsh, was certainly more mythical than real – his strength increased during the day like the sun, only to wane in the evening – and it is likely he was one of a number of half-remembered pagan deities drawn into the orbit of the magnetic central figure of Arthur, to become a Knight of the Round Table .. So, I mused, it couldn’t be true – could it?
While one might doubt the details of the legend (i.e. the unlikely presence of a Pagan Welsh-solar deity buried in an as yet un-built Castle - the Castle is Norman in date - by a probably fictional Dark-Age warlord) there was one element that couldn’t be overlooked: Sir Thomas Malory’s 1485 bestseller Le Morte DArthur, which probably did most to popularise the legends of King Arthur, when describing Gawain’s burial in the castle chapel writes ‘and there may all see the skull of him’ – complete with the head wound. Caxton, Malory’s editor and printer, a one-time merchant who had travelled through Dover on many occasions and was therefore probably speaking from experience, recounts in the introduction to Malory’s book that he himself had seen this grisly relic first-hand. Nearly a century earlier there is a reference to the same relic in Raimon de Perillo’s account of his journey from Avignon to Dublin at the end of the fourteenth century, where he, too, informs us that Gawain's skull could be seen in Dover, along with Caradoc’s mantle. Such literary figures as Gawain and Caradoc were the Marvel superheroes of their day, famous throughout all of Europe (we see both Carrado and Galvagin, Caradoc and Gawain, tilting at each other on a twelfth-century archway from Modena Cathedral in Italy, for instance). The presence of Gawain’s skull and Caradoc’s mantle (which could test for virginity, no less) would be like a modern day church housing Thor’s hammer and Iron Man’s armour… or perhaps the skull of the Hulk, as we’ll see, green giants begin to figure frequently from now on in…
Norman archway from Modena Cathedral, Italy
Given the extreme unlikely identification of the skull with any historical Arthurian Knight or mythical demi-god, whose was it, and how had its identification with Gawain take place?
To begin to untangle this I would first suggest that the skull was neither medieval nor Dark Age, but older. Prehistoric, in fact. And that it became attached to Gawain partly because of his popularity in the medieval world. But it’s not quite that simple. I suggest it already had surrounding it strange stories or remnants of old beliefs into which the medieval figure of Gawain was able to seamlessly fit, given his own connection to severed heads and giants, as we will see…
Why do I think the skull was prehistoric? I began by asking myself why a skull might be kept in a chapel in the first place – moreover, one with a visible head wound? Also to be answered (and I still do not know the answer to this one) was whether the ‘chapel at Dover Castle’ was the Saxon church, St Mary in Castro, or the chapel within the Keep, dedicated to St Thomas Becket. Becket had, like Gawain, died of a blow to the head – and the idea of a skull in that chapel bearing an identical wound sounded fitting, if a little distasteful. As it wasn’t normal practice to show random human remains in churches, it may have been that the skull had been once considered a relic, but if so it wasn’t Becket’s – for to house such a relic would, in that pious age, have certainly eclipsed having the head of Arthur’s nephew. Nor was it the head of any other named saint or holy man, or, one would have thought, prior to the reformation, the name attached to the head would have been recalled, and not clumsily associated with some secular Welsh hero – a bit like deciding to pretend the remains of Lenin in the Kremlin were actually those of, oh I don’t know, Dr Strange…
To return to the skull – the presence of a nameless skull (or at least, not named as a Christian saint, worthy of a relic) was odd - but not unprecedented; many places in Britain house such skulls. These ‘screaming skulls’ as they are known, are often seen as guardians of place – and were said to scream if moved; misfortune is sure to befall any that dare move them, such as death in the family or the destruction of the house in which they are kept...
To begin to untangle this I would first suggest that the skull was neither medieval nor Dark Age, but older. Prehistoric, in fact. And that it became attached to Gawain partly because of his popularity in the medieval world. But it’s not quite that simple. I suggest it already had surrounding it strange stories or remnants of old beliefs into which the medieval figure of Gawain was able to seamlessly fit, given his own connection to severed heads and giants, as we will see…
Why do I think the skull was prehistoric? I began by asking myself why a skull might be kept in a chapel in the first place – moreover, one with a visible head wound? Also to be answered (and I still do not know the answer to this one) was whether the ‘chapel at Dover Castle’ was the Saxon church, St Mary in Castro, or the chapel within the Keep, dedicated to St Thomas Becket. Becket had, like Gawain, died of a blow to the head – and the idea of a skull in that chapel bearing an identical wound sounded fitting, if a little distasteful. As it wasn’t normal practice to show random human remains in churches, it may have been that the skull had been once considered a relic, but if so it wasn’t Becket’s – for to house such a relic would, in that pious age, have certainly eclipsed having the head of Arthur’s nephew. Nor was it the head of any other named saint or holy man, or, one would have thought, prior to the reformation, the name attached to the head would have been recalled, and not clumsily associated with some secular Welsh hero – a bit like deciding to pretend the remains of Lenin in the Kremlin were actually those of, oh I don’t know, Dr Strange…
To return to the skull – the presence of a nameless skull (or at least, not named as a Christian saint, worthy of a relic) was odd - but not unprecedented; many places in Britain house such skulls. These ‘screaming skulls’ as they are known, are often seen as guardians of place – and were said to scream if moved; misfortune is sure to befall any that dare move them, such as death in the family or the destruction of the house in which they are kept...
These legends are thought, ultimately, to derive from the so-called Celtic ‘cult of the head’ – that viewed the head as the seat of the soul – and severed examples as magical talismans – capable of magical acts, and even prophetic speech; many of the so-called ‘screaming skulls’, when tested, have been dated to the Iron Age (see David Clarke and Andy Roberts’ ‘Twilight of the Celtic gods’, or Anne Ross’s ‘Pagan Celtic Britain’). In the first medieval Grail romance the Welsh myth of Peredur, in place of the Grail is a bloody severed head. These skulls were seen as supernatural protectors – and givers of wisdom and power - and this, I would come to see, may have been why the Dover skull had stayed put - there was, perhaps, a taboo on moving it because its presence was seen as protective.
The Head of the Giant
Capel Landscape by David Jones, 1925
The clearest appearance of the talismanic severed head in myth comes from the medieval (but originating far earlier) collection of Welsh legends named the Mabinogion – one of which tells of the fate of a giant named Bendigeidfran – ‘Brân the Blessed’, (Brân means ‘Raven’ in Welsh) king of Britain; he owns a magical wonder working cauldron – a kind of proto-Grail that can bring the dead back to life, given to him by strange ogre-like couple who have been subjected to a weird attack – placed in an ‘iron house’ and set on fire. When Brân’s sister is mistreated by her husband, the King of Ireland, the gigantic Brân wades across the Irish sea with his army on his shoulders to rescue her, yet he is mortally wounded in the process. He commands that his head be struck-off and be buried in the White Hill (Tower Hill) in London, facing towards France, where it will magically protect the land – that is, until the chagrined King Arthur, many generations later, decides only he should protect the land, and so digs it up (though Brân’s ravens, it seems, are still present at the Tower…). Free of the magical protection of Brân the Saxons are able to invade. Did, I wondered, the Dover skull perhaps originate as such a magical talisman of protection, guarding the channel? Was the ‘white hill’ in which Brân was buried not originally that in London, but a misunderstood reference to the White Cliffs of Dover, crowned by an almost identical Norman keep – a far more useful position for burial if one’s goal was to protect from invasion? Was the Dover head (at least symbolically) that of the giant Brân – placed above the shining white wall of chalk that gave Albion its name?
The killing and dismemberment of a giant is a motif that I have explored elsewhere (in my book ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’ and in my PhD) where I have argued that it is, in origin, an ancient creation myth, in which an original god or giant is dismembered to form the earth. The most well-known version is the Norse Ymir, dismembered at the start of time to create the world:
‘Out of Ymir's flesh was fashioned the earth,
And the mountains were made of his bones;
The sky from the frost cold giant's skull,
And the ocean out of his blood’ (Bellows, Henry Adams (1923). The Poetic Edda. American-Scandinavian Foundation. Pg. 74)
The body-parts of Ymir form the land itself and, originally, I have argued, those of his female partner, in a lost myth, form the sky (again, see my PhD, if you want to know more).
The decapitation and dismemberment of the giant or god, then, is a creative act – an act of world-creating sacrifice. The giant is the land… the land is the giant…this is an image taken up by war-poet and artist David Jones, whose works, such as the Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord, ought to be much more widely known. In his poem The Sleeping Lord, referring to the legend that Arthur did not die but lies sleeping in the isle of Avalon, he asks:
"Does the land wait the sleeping lord - or is that wasted land the very lord who sleeps?”
His sleeping lord is not just Arthur but also the titan Cronos of Greek myth, reputed to have been imprisoned in an island in the north – he is poet William Blake’s giant Albion in another guise, fallen and divided – the land of Britain personified.
The killing and dismemberment of a giant is a motif that I have explored elsewhere (in my book ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’ and in my PhD) where I have argued that it is, in origin, an ancient creation myth, in which an original god or giant is dismembered to form the earth. The most well-known version is the Norse Ymir, dismembered at the start of time to create the world:
‘Out of Ymir's flesh was fashioned the earth,
And the mountains were made of his bones;
The sky from the frost cold giant's skull,
And the ocean out of his blood’ (Bellows, Henry Adams (1923). The Poetic Edda. American-Scandinavian Foundation. Pg. 74)
The body-parts of Ymir form the land itself and, originally, I have argued, those of his female partner, in a lost myth, form the sky (again, see my PhD, if you want to know more).
The decapitation and dismemberment of the giant or god, then, is a creative act – an act of world-creating sacrifice. The giant is the land… the land is the giant…this is an image taken up by war-poet and artist David Jones, whose works, such as the Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord, ought to be much more widely known. In his poem The Sleeping Lord, referring to the legend that Arthur did not die but lies sleeping in the isle of Avalon, he asks:
"Does the land wait the sleeping lord - or is that wasted land the very lord who sleeps?”
His sleeping lord is not just Arthur but also the titan Cronos of Greek myth, reputed to have been imprisoned in an island in the north – he is poet William Blake’s giant Albion in another guise, fallen and divided – the land of Britain personified.
In ‘Waking the Giant’ this sleeping lord, the giant that was to be woken from sleep, was the Fort Burgoyne itself. During the event the giant’s heart, crafted by local potters Rainna Erbas and Gemma Dyer, was re-forged in the fire. Elsewhere on site one could see artist Masima’s giant hands, reaching skyward as if emerging from the earth; and it struck me that all this was occurring under a kilometre, as the crow (raven?) flies, from where the head of ‘Gawain’ or, perhaps, originally ‘Brân’, with its vicious wound suggesting violent and maybe sacrificial death, had once been on display. What, exactly, were Albion Inc waking? A very ancient myth, it seemed.
Giant's heart by Rainna Erbas and Gemma Dyer
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Firing the heart
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Giant hands by Masima (click image for a link to his website) or visit his instagram at https://www.instagram.com/masima________/
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Sir Gawain
But now I need to turn to the question of why the Dover skull had become associated with Gawain. If this wasn’t merely arbitrary, it probably lay on the fact that Gawain was connected in the medieval imagination with the beheaded giant. Gawain was, in legend at least, the son of a prince of Orkney and Arthur’s sister Morgause, but was originally derived, as I said earlier, from an earlier Welsh hero or even demigod named Gwalchmai – Hawk of May – who I, without any proof, had once equated with a line in the mythical Irish poet Amergin’s mystical verses – ‘I am a hawk above a cliff’. The cliff, the younger I reasoned, must be Dover, and the hawk, Gwalchmai, a reference to the head of Gawain. Being born in May myself, and coming from the place of his skull, I developed a rather naiive youthful attachment to the figure of Gawain.
When Raimon de Perillo and, later, Caxton saw the skull in Dover Castle, Gawain was most well-known for his dealings with the mysterious Green Knight.– best told in a supernatural fourteenth-century poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.’ There are many great translations (Tolkien and Simon Armitage, for example) but for anyone who prefers a visual medium, a film version is to be released this summer starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander and Joel Edgerton
When Raimon de Perillo and, later, Caxton saw the skull in Dover Castle, Gawain was most well-known for his dealings with the mysterious Green Knight.– best told in a supernatural fourteenth-century poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.’ There are many great translations (Tolkien and Simon Armitage, for example) but for anyone who prefers a visual medium, a film version is to be released this summer starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander and Joel Edgerton
‘The Green Knight’ from the forthcoming film of the same name
Here’s a summary of the story from my book ‘Beowulf and Grendel’ which dealt with the links between the mysterious Green Knight and the monstrous Grendel who haunts the Danish feasting hall of Heorot..
“It is Christmastide at Camelot – and into King Arthur’s hall bursts a giant figure, green in colour, bearing an axe in one hand and a holly branch in the other. He challenges Arthur’s knights to a ‘Christmas Game’– that he will receive a blow to the neck with his axe if the champion is willing to have the blow returned in a year and a day’s time. Gawain, Arthur’s nephew accepts on the King’s behalf. He takes up the axe and cuts off the head of the Green Knight, thinking that would be the end of the matter, but the Green Knight takes up his severed head and asks Gawain to journey to the ‘Chapel Green’ in a year and a day’s time.
“It is Christmastide at Camelot – and into King Arthur’s hall bursts a giant figure, green in colour, bearing an axe in one hand and a holly branch in the other. He challenges Arthur’s knights to a ‘Christmas Game’– that he will receive a blow to the neck with his axe if the champion is willing to have the blow returned in a year and a day’s time. Gawain, Arthur’s nephew accepts on the King’s behalf. He takes up the axe and cuts off the head of the Green Knight, thinking that would be the end of the matter, but the Green Knight takes up his severed head and asks Gawain to journey to the ‘Chapel Green’ in a year and a day’s time.
Illustration from the British Library 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' Manuscript
Just under a year later, Gawain sets off to meet his doom. He travels north to the Wirral and is in the wilds on Christmas Eve when a castle appears magically and its owner, Sir Bertilak, welcomes him. He asks Gawain to spend Christmas with him before he journeys to the Chapel Green that is only a few miles away. Gawain feasts with Bertilak, noticing two ladies – Bertilak’s beautiful young wife and an ugly old hag.
Bertilak goes out to hunt each day and he sets Gawain another Christmas game – each will give to the other whatever he receives that day. Gawain soon finds this uncomfortable as he is being seduced by Bertilak’s wife, and each night he has to give his host the numerous kisses he has receives from the temptress.
On the last day before his departure, Gawain nearly succumbs to the lady’s advances, but his piety and morality win over. When Bertilak returns with a paltry fox’s skin from his hunt, Gawain still only has welcoming kisses in return – but he has hidden from his host one thing. Lady Bertilak has given him a green silk girdle that she says will protect him from the axe of the Green Knight.
The next day Gawain comes to the Chapel Green, a cave or ancient burial mound beside a stream, and he hears the sharpening of an axe – it is the Green Knight. Heroically, he offers his neck, but flinches and is berated by the Green Knight. Once more, the giant moves to strike, and seeing Gawain is ready he swings his axe down a third time. This time he grazes the skin – no more – and Gawain jumps up, having fulfilled his promise.
Then the truth comes out. The Green Knight is Sir Bertilak under enchantment. The whole thing has been a test by the ugly hag – in fact, Arthur’s sister Morgan le Fay, who had sought to bring dishonour to Camelot, and thus is foiled. Gawain has passed the test, save for failing to mention the green girdle – hence the chiding nick on the neck he receives.”
You can see why the images of wounding and severed heads might have suggested a link between Gawain’s legendarium and the Dover skull, especially if the Dover skull was already connected to a Brân-type legend containing elements of death, rebirth and magic. Only the legends coagulating around the Dover skull went one step further – and instead of this being the skull of the beheaded giant, presented it as the head of the heroic knight who had faced him, having finally lost his head at last, defending the land for his uncle and King.
Bertilak goes out to hunt each day and he sets Gawain another Christmas game – each will give to the other whatever he receives that day. Gawain soon finds this uncomfortable as he is being seduced by Bertilak’s wife, and each night he has to give his host the numerous kisses he has receives from the temptress.
On the last day before his departure, Gawain nearly succumbs to the lady’s advances, but his piety and morality win over. When Bertilak returns with a paltry fox’s skin from his hunt, Gawain still only has welcoming kisses in return – but he has hidden from his host one thing. Lady Bertilak has given him a green silk girdle that she says will protect him from the axe of the Green Knight.
The next day Gawain comes to the Chapel Green, a cave or ancient burial mound beside a stream, and he hears the sharpening of an axe – it is the Green Knight. Heroically, he offers his neck, but flinches and is berated by the Green Knight. Once more, the giant moves to strike, and seeing Gawain is ready he swings his axe down a third time. This time he grazes the skin – no more – and Gawain jumps up, having fulfilled his promise.
Then the truth comes out. The Green Knight is Sir Bertilak under enchantment. The whole thing has been a test by the ugly hag – in fact, Arthur’s sister Morgan le Fay, who had sought to bring dishonour to Camelot, and thus is foiled. Gawain has passed the test, save for failing to mention the green girdle – hence the chiding nick on the neck he receives.”
You can see why the images of wounding and severed heads might have suggested a link between Gawain’s legendarium and the Dover skull, especially if the Dover skull was already connected to a Brân-type legend containing elements of death, rebirth and magic. Only the legends coagulating around the Dover skull went one step further – and instead of this being the skull of the beheaded giant, presented it as the head of the heroic knight who had faced him, having finally lost his head at last, defending the land for his uncle and King.
The Spirit of the Land
There is a side to this myth that needs elucidating – a side that deals with nature and the fertility of the land. The tale of the Green Knight derives from older tales in which the spirit of fertility itself was killed and reborn each midwinter, like the John Barleycorn of the folksong. Just as the corn is cut and springs back anew the next year (after being ‘buried’, i.e. planted), so these old green gods died and were reborn cyclically. The ‘Christmas Game’ of the Green Knight was a shorthand for this fertility cycle, that aped, exactly, the first creative sacrifice of the primal giant (Brân/Yemo/Albion) whose body would become the earth. All these images were inextricably linked. Written on the walls of the first casemate I had entered at Fort Burgoyne had been the words ‘John Barleycorn Must Die’… die, so that he may rise again – like the fort dying to its military past to be reborn to some new, as yet unidentified, future.
Gawain’s foe, then, like Brân and Ymir, seems to be one with the land – he is green like the vegetation, and like the cut grass just springs back after he is chopped down. All this seemed implicit in artist Matt Rowe’s films and images of the men in Ghillie suits that were being projected on the walls of the fort (http://mattroweportfolio.co.uk/). The original word Ghillie comes from the gaelic Ghillie Ddu – black or dark boy, a type of fairy (don’t think Tinkerbell – original fairies closer resembled powerful nature spirits, and were much feared) who could blend in with the forest leaves and branches; the name then transferred to helpers on Highland estates who would camouflage themselves for hunting and fishing expeditions). Matt’s Ghillie-men resemble these original spirits, guisers, mummers, becoming one with the land, merging into the vegetation. In one striking image the Ghillie-man bends down and becomes one with the earth – blending in to branch, root, blasted earth and ruined brickworks… begging the question ‘is that wasted land the very lord who sleeps?’. The green man had merged with the land – the primal giant.
Gawain’s foe, then, like Brân and Ymir, seems to be one with the land – he is green like the vegetation, and like the cut grass just springs back after he is chopped down. All this seemed implicit in artist Matt Rowe’s films and images of the men in Ghillie suits that were being projected on the walls of the fort (http://mattroweportfolio.co.uk/). The original word Ghillie comes from the gaelic Ghillie Ddu – black or dark boy, a type of fairy (don’t think Tinkerbell – original fairies closer resembled powerful nature spirits, and were much feared) who could blend in with the forest leaves and branches; the name then transferred to helpers on Highland estates who would camouflage themselves for hunting and fishing expeditions). Matt’s Ghillie-men resemble these original spirits, guisers, mummers, becoming one with the land, merging into the vegetation. In one striking image the Ghillie-man bends down and becomes one with the earth – blending in to branch, root, blasted earth and ruined brickworks… begging the question ‘is that wasted land the very lord who sleeps?’. The green man had merged with the land – the primal giant.
(Courtesy of Matt Rowe)
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(Courtesy of Matt Rowe)
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It all seemed strangely coherent, plucked on some ancient, invisible string. But there again, was I, like the participant in a Rorschach ink-blot test, seeing what I wanted to see? You see, I was, and am, biased. Born in May, beside the cliffs – Hawk of May – I had long felt connected with the figure of Gawain, and as a teen I had become obsessed with the tale of the Green Knight and with the motif of the beheading game – at one time painting a portrait of myself (aged 18) as Orpheus – whose decapitation fits the same theme of regeneration through death.
Self-portrait as Orpheus, 1990
My A-level art projects focussed on the Green Knight and his kin, such as the images below, that on the left drawing on the horned god of Celtic tradition, and that in the middle a later work based on the medieval manifestations of the green clad Christmas visitor – the (original and best) green Father Christmas, painted as a Christmas Card… Later years would see me embody the figure in person at a Halloween fancy dress party in 2016...
Cernunnos/The Green Knight 1988; Green Father Christmas, c 2000; Me, Halloween 2016
iMy first solo book (Warriors of the Wasteland, 2002) focused on Lindow man, an Iron Age body found in a peat bog in Cheshire, possibly sacrificed and bearing a wound to the neck, then laid close to another decapitated body in what was probably a sacrificial killing ground - which I linked in that book to the beheading of Brân and the Green Knight…
When I wrote my next book, on Beowulf (2005), again a chapter in it linked the Green Knight’s Christmas visit to Camelot to the fen-dwelling monster Grendel’s yuletide visit to the feasting hall of Heorot; linking this myth to all kinds of ancient rites involving sacrifice, sex and sacred hallucinogenic-drinks, to the death and rebirth of the vegetation god – and quoting the whole Barleycorn song in its pages. Shortly after I received a CD of new interpretations of folk-songs by various artists, with an accompanying booklet stating how the project had been partly inspired by my ideas; the title of the album – John Barleycorn Reborn: Dark Britannica. You can see why walking into the fort the other weekend seemed to push so many buttons.
When I wrote my next book, on Beowulf (2005), again a chapter in it linked the Green Knight’s Christmas visit to Camelot to the fen-dwelling monster Grendel’s yuletide visit to the feasting hall of Heorot; linking this myth to all kinds of ancient rites involving sacrifice, sex and sacred hallucinogenic-drinks, to the death and rebirth of the vegetation god – and quoting the whole Barleycorn song in its pages. Shortly after I received a CD of new interpretations of folk-songs by various artists, with an accompanying booklet stating how the project had been partly inspired by my ideas; the title of the album – John Barleycorn Reborn: Dark Britannica. You can see why walking into the fort the other weekend seemed to push so many buttons.
John Barleycorn Reborn: Album Cover Art (https://burningworldrecords.bandcamp.com/album/john-barleycorn-reborn-dark-britannica)
A decade or more ago I made a pilgrimage to the area of the Gawain poem – the Peak District – where I searched for two possible locations for the mysterious Chapel Green of the poem, the haunt of the Green Knight where Gawain had to bend before the axe; Ludd’s chapel at Swythamley and Wetton Mill near Leak. I took a picture of myself there and posted it on Facebook with the words ‘I survived the Chapel Green’ or something similar…
Wetton Mill, Derbyshire (my photograph)
Ludd's Church, and me at Wetton Mill
And then 3 years ago I was diagnosed with a parathyroid tumour, and last year with a schwannoma of the spinal cord – both luckily benign growths, but ones that saw me under the surgeon’s knife, so that I now walk abroad, like Gawain, bearing a scar on my neck (two, actually, the one on the back of my neck is the most impressive. Apologies for the graphic image on the left, taken a day after surgery, but the scar is now hardly visible).
And so, after a lifetime of obsession, and scarred like my teenage hero, I found myself last weekend wondering through exhibits and installations set just a stone’s throw from the original magical burial place of the head of some (possibly sacrificial) prehistoric hero, while continually, so it seemed to me, being bombarded with images of a buried vegetal giant, one with the land – woken from slumber by Albion Inc and their team of artisans who were re-forging him bit by bit like that other famously green god, the Egyptian Osiris, dismembered and beheaded by the evil Seth but reconstituted and magically revived by his wife Isis.
It was a strange and magical experience.
It was a strange and magical experience.
The Green Man – Respecting the Land
So if the giant is been woken, let us make sure he is woken for good purpose; and I ought to state, firmly, what the waking of the giant is NOT about - Albion is a rich land, whose tapestry of folklore is made more the richer through being continually re-woven, and new threads added; yet the original head of Brân was planted to keep invaders out… when Arthur dug it up the Saxons were allowed to invade. Invasion is a word with negative connotations. I’d rather see it as a continual and positive process of acculturation, a tide, washing another layer of tradition onto our shores; the English, after all, were immigrants once… Waking the giant, then, is NOT about nationalism; it’s not about putting Brân’s head back in place to defend our shores now we’re no longer in the EU… it’s about re-awakening our sense of connection to what’s under our feet, but also a continuing and changing sense of what it is to belong to any landscape, and ultimately, to the planet. It’s about taking what was a defensive feature – a military fort -and turning it into something different, using the militaristic origins to better use – like Matt Rowe’s Ghillie suits – once used as military camouflage, now expressing, in my interpretation at least, a unity with nature, the environment – man as a guardian of the natural world, not its exploiter; the soldier returning to the Ghillie-ddu… the nature spirit.
Besides, we don’t need to be wary of others as we were in the past. The greatest threat we face is ourselves, and our impact on the planet. Waking the giant is really, in my humble opinion, about re-awakening a connection to the land and its traditions, as well as welcoming new ones into the weave, but by doing so establishing a connection, a felt connection, of guardianship to the land so we no longer rape it for resources. If we saw the landscape as our forebears did, as literally the body of a god, sacrificed to become the earth, we would treat it with more respect – with honour. We’d see all creatures walking on it as our brothers and sisters, not our underlings, not as material assets. The old myth of Brân may originally have had a more isolationist overtone – but myths, like the heart of the giant, can be re-forged; they can spring up anew like the Green knight. John Barleycorn, reborn, is a new being – the giant can shake off old and outdated attributes; just as an old Napoleonic fort can shake off its militaristic past as a defensive site, and open its doors to a new way of being, embracing culture and all manner of folk -which is why I’d like to see it as a venue for the Museum of Folklore, a centre for the arts (or as a venue for me to put on a theatrical version of the Green Knight poem, something I’ve always had an urge to do…)
It is about reading the land and our relationship to it in a new way – like the Dreamtime of the aboriginal Australians… and seeing this not as a static process, looking backwards, but literally re-forged in every moment; it’s about this country, whatever one you happen to be standing on while reading this; it’s about connection, and sacrifice- laying our isolationist self-interest and ephemeral material desires on the block and sacrificing them for the common, planetary good…about sticking your neck out for what is best for the green giant slumbering under our feet…and heeding the lesson of the 'screaming skull' - pay me due respect or your house will fall down...
The giant is waking; and we are, as a species, hastening towards our own Chapel Green to receive the return blow, having spent generations hacking away at the neck of the natural world. If we continue to ignore the demands of nature, the swing of the Green Knight’s axe, when it comes (and it is coming) may not be as merciful as that dealt to Sir Gawain.
Besides, we don’t need to be wary of others as we were in the past. The greatest threat we face is ourselves, and our impact on the planet. Waking the giant is really, in my humble opinion, about re-awakening a connection to the land and its traditions, as well as welcoming new ones into the weave, but by doing so establishing a connection, a felt connection, of guardianship to the land so we no longer rape it for resources. If we saw the landscape as our forebears did, as literally the body of a god, sacrificed to become the earth, we would treat it with more respect – with honour. We’d see all creatures walking on it as our brothers and sisters, not our underlings, not as material assets. The old myth of Brân may originally have had a more isolationist overtone – but myths, like the heart of the giant, can be re-forged; they can spring up anew like the Green knight. John Barleycorn, reborn, is a new being – the giant can shake off old and outdated attributes; just as an old Napoleonic fort can shake off its militaristic past as a defensive site, and open its doors to a new way of being, embracing culture and all manner of folk -which is why I’d like to see it as a venue for the Museum of Folklore, a centre for the arts (or as a venue for me to put on a theatrical version of the Green Knight poem, something I’ve always had an urge to do…)
It is about reading the land and our relationship to it in a new way – like the Dreamtime of the aboriginal Australians… and seeing this not as a static process, looking backwards, but literally re-forged in every moment; it’s about this country, whatever one you happen to be standing on while reading this; it’s about connection, and sacrifice- laying our isolationist self-interest and ephemeral material desires on the block and sacrificing them for the common, planetary good…about sticking your neck out for what is best for the green giant slumbering under our feet…and heeding the lesson of the 'screaming skull' - pay me due respect or your house will fall down...
The giant is waking; and we are, as a species, hastening towards our own Chapel Green to receive the return blow, having spent generations hacking away at the neck of the natural world. If we continue to ignore the demands of nature, the swing of the Green Knight’s axe, when it comes (and it is coming) may not be as merciful as that dealt to Sir Gawain.
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" by John Howe. Cover art for the HarperCollins 1996 edition of J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo © Th e J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1975
Thanks to:
Albion Inc
Matt Rowe
Masima
Rainna Erbas
Gemma Dyer
Future Foundry (http://futurefoundry.org.uk/)
Albion Inc
Matt Rowe
Masima
Rainna Erbas
Gemma Dyer
Future Foundry (http://futurefoundry.org.uk/)
