"The Green Knight" is adapted from a 14th century epic poem called "Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight." This is a sampling of some of the biggest questions the film probably left you with -- some
that can be answered by investigating the original text, and some meant to be unanswerable.
When Gawain heads off to celebrate Christmas with the king and queen, his mother opts to stay home.
She says she isn't feeling up to partying, but she's very up to casting some spells:
She and three other women perform a ritual which ultimately summons the Green Knight.
And you would be absolutely right to ask why the heck she'd do that. After all,
if not for this summoning, Gawain would never have ended up in the situation he finds himself in.
"The Green Knight" never answers this question, but "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" does -- at least kind of.
The thing to remember here is who the players are. The king and queen, for example,
aren't just anyone -- they are King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. And Gawain's mother is Arthur's
sister, making her Morgan le Fey, an enchantress and not exactly a great sibling. In the original
text, le Fay's intention is to frighten Guinevere and also prove that Arthur's knights
aren't as heroic as they're made out to be. Whether those motives remain the same in "The
Green Knight" is unclear. One would think she might be upset that her son winds up connected
with the Green Knight in such a lethal way, but she seems fine with it. Perhaps she resents her
son — or perhaps she believes the quest Gawain must go on thanks to the Green Knight will lead
to him succeeding Arthur as king. Either way, we're never supplied with a definitive answer.
Shortly into Gawain's quest to find the Green Chapel, he comes upon a young man hovering
over the dead bodies from a recent battle. The young man seems like he wants to help Gawain,
but he turns out to be a thief. Both the thief and his two compatriots leave Gawain
tied up while stealing both his horse and his axe — the one he got from the
Green Knight at the beginning of the tale. After escaping his bonds, Gawain comes upon a
small cottage haunted by the ghost of its former resident, Winifred, played by Erin Kellyman.
Winifred reveals that someone chopped her head off and dumped it in the nearby lake -- she even
asks Gawain if he was the one who killed her. Gawain decides to help Winifred by
fetching her head and returning it to the rest of her dead body in the cottage. When he does,
Winifred reveals that the Green Knight is someone Gawain knows and Gawain's axe magically appears.
Where did the axe come from? Did the thief who stole the axe kill Winifred? That seems
unlikely, since Winifred is already decayed to a full skeleton. However,
time seems to operate very strangely in "The Green Knight," so it is possible.
Regardless, we never find out for sure who killed Winifred, or how Gawain's axe finds its way
into her cottage -- other than to say that maybe Gawain isn't quite all there. Speaking of which...
Gawain spends much of his journey without any human companionship. As we've seen,
even when he does encounter other people, things don't work out terribly well for him.
Beaten down by the elements and starving, he winds up eating some wild mushrooms;
moments later, he vomits and begins to imagine moss growing all over his hands.
Although the movie never states this explicitly, it's a safe bet that those mushrooms were a
little poisonous and a lot hallucinogenic. The real question is: how long do those
hallucinations last? Furthermore, how reliable a narrator is Gawain even from the start? While
tied up by thieves, he seems to imagine himself as a rotting skeleton that never escaped its bonds.
That alone makes it difficult to know what's real and what isn't along Gawain's quest.
And things get even more unbelievable when Gawain runs into a group of naked giants roaming the countryside.
He attempts to get them to carry him the rest of the way to the Green Chapel.
Instead, they're warded off by a fox who spends much of the film following,
and perhaps guiding, Gawain on his journey. Are the giants real? "The Green Knight" never
answers this question. The fact that he's never aided by the giants suggests that they're probably
just a hallucination. In fact, since Gawain feeds the fox some of those wild mushrooms,
it's possible they're both hallucinating -- assuming the fox is real, of course.
Weaving in and out of Gawain's journey to the Green Chapel is a fox who seems to act
as companion and guide. They rest in a cave together, they eat those mushrooms together,
and, by the end of the story, the fox even speaks to Gawain, cautioning him away from
meeting with the Green Knight.
"Your doom is at hand."
Is the fox friend or foe? And what does the fox represent in
the larger narrative of "The Green Knight"? Foxes hold all sorts of different symbolic
meanings across history and cultures. They can represent that a solution is at hand,
or they can represent a need for patience. Sometimes they're benevolent; sometimes
they're tricksters meant to be eyed warily. In the context of "Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight," the fox is tied to a specific character -- the wife of a lord Gawain encounters late in his travels.
In the original text, Gawain stays with the pair in their castle and forms a pact
with the Lord: the Lord will provide Gawain with the best food he captures in his hunt,
and, in exchange, Gawain will give the Lord anything he gains during his stay in the castle.
During this time, the lord's wife kisses Gawain two times before giving him a magical,
protective green belt. The Lord struggles to succeed in his hunt that day -- he is,
of course, hunting a fox. The fox is meant to possess a similar guile and manipulative nature
as the lord's wife does attempting to bed Gawain. In "The Green Knight," the Lord captures the fox,
only to let it get away after Gawain refuses to give up the belt. In other words,
we're left open-ended over whether or not the fox can be trusted in the movie.
The Lord and his wife are not the only two people Gawain meets during his time in the Lord's castle.
There is a third, ever-present figure throughout this part of the film: the grey-haired,
perpetually blindfolded Sightless Woman. She appears during meals, and, more importantly,
she's present when the lord's wife eventually succeeds in seducing Gawain with the green belt.
Who is the Sightless Woman and why is she there? At no point does "The Green Knight" directly
answer this question. However, in the poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," she's Morgan le
Fay -- and that's relevant to the film as well. At the start of his journey, Gawain is given what
appears to be the same green belt by his mother. However, when Gawain is captured by thieves,
they steal the belt along with most of his other belongings. He is completely
shocked when the lord's wife somehow offers what seems to be the same green belt later.
One could hypothesize that it is the same green belt, and that it
comes courtesy of the Sightless Woman who is actually Gawain's mother in disguise.
We're never told that explicitly, but that is one possible interpretation. After all,
both the lord's wife and Gawain's paramour back home, Essel, are portrayed by Alicia
Vikander -- so why couldn't his mother and the Sightless Woman secretly be the same person?
Gawain has one ultimate end point for his journey -- to meet the Green Knight in the
Green Chapel on Christmas Day a year after their first encounter. We don't know why his mother
conjured the knight and we also don't know who the Green Knight is beyond what appears to be a
supernatural being incapable of death. However, during Gawain's journey,
Winifred tells him the Green Knight is someone he knows. Later, the fox wards Gawain away
from the Green Knight, explaining that the figure is inhuman and utterly without mercy.
So who exactly is the Green Knight? The movie never actually explains this. However, in the
poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," we're told definitively who he is -- he's the Lord from the
castle, entreated and enchanted by Morgan le Fay as a means to bring harm to Arthur and Camelot.
The film adaptation gives us no such connection between the Lord and the Green Knight.
It's possible that they're the same person, but it's more likely that in this version,
the Green Knight isn't so much a someone Gawain knows but a something.
The Green Knight represents the horrible knowledge that Gawain would make a bad knight, a bad father,
and a tragically unfit king. The Green Knight brings Gawain this knowledge through a merciless
vision so horrifying that Gawain chooses to be decapitated by the Green Knight rather than live.
Do we know who the Green Knight really is? No. But we do know what he is -- Gawain's mortal fate.
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