The Ends of Enchantment:Colonialism and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Lynn Arner By the thirteenth century, the English had learned that the Welsh were treacherous and fickle.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 first decade of the fifteenth century, the English realized that the Welsh were not the submissive and deferential natives they had feigned to be, but were a perfidious 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 conflicts 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 north-west midlands dialect, specifically, the dialect of Lancashire and Cheshire. Appropriately, the bulk of SGGK's narrative action unfolds in the English-Welsh borderland. This location is specified at the beginning of Gawain's quest to find 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. [End Page 79] This article investigates SGGK's participation in colonial struggles between the English and the Welsh in the late fourteenth century. As the models of ideology employed in British cultural studies attest, a text does not simply reflect the political climate in which it is composed but intervenes in the political terrain and participates in the production of the social formation. Hence, using a methodology in dialogue with Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci,7 this article examines how the ideologies speaking through SGGK attempted to reformulate readers' conceptions of themselves and of their neighbors and thus shape their perceptions of how to negotiate English-Welsh conflicts. The defining work of SGGK in relation to England's colonization of Wales is that of Patricia Clare Ingham, and we disagree dramatically about how to understand the English-Welsh negotiations embedded in the poem. Ingham argues that, as the poem unfolds, the issues surrounding colonization raised early in the text disappear and that the ethnic and geographic disparities between the English and the Welsh in the first half of the poem collapse to be replaced by gender difference.8 I maintain that SGGK insists throughout the entire poem—as did, in general, the English and the Welsh in the late fourteenth century—that the two peoples differed greatly. Ethnic and geographic incongruities are not effaced as SGGK unfolds, but are reinscribed at the locus of gender—more precisely, at the site of female sexuality—in a conventional move that acts to further elaborate and consolidate colonial power by buttressing ideologies of colonialism with ideologies of gender. This divergence points to a more fundamental disagreement between Ingham's work and my own. We understand the English colonization of the Welsh, and hence the poem's colonialist politics, very differently. Ingham writes, Welsh and English interaction in march towns, at regional marketplaces, on the battlefield, or in the narrative tropes of a Middle English poem become the multiple places where unity is forged from ethnic heterogeneities. Colonial union becomes...