‘Stille as the stone, or a stubbe other’: Mineral and Energy Imaginaries in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This article explores the narrative function of energy and mineral imaginaries in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, posing new theoretical questions concerning the relationship between fictionalisation, place, and resource six centuries before the age of ‘Petrofiction’. Situating the poem within the context of its geographical allusions to (in sequence) regions of coal, lead, and wood/charcoal, it argues that these are components not simply of the poet’s worldbuilding but the text’s narrative logic. It locates Sir Gawain and the Green Knight within the Galfridian tradition – derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain – and suggests that it owes a debt to Geoffrey’s variation on a familiar insular descriptio, engaged with the island’s terranean and subterranean riches. It traces the poem’s interconnected treatment of energy and mineral resources as they appear, and recur, across its fictionalised landscapes, exploring these both as Galfridian topoi and as pressing contemporary points of resource contestation. It reads the poem in relation to mining laws in Flintshire and Denbighshire from the second half of the fourteenth century, as well as the disafforestation of the Wirral during the 1370s – a concern regarding ‘venison and vert’ that underlies the interests of the Gawain-poet and offers a new interpretative code for reading the green girdle and Gawain’s final encounter at the Green Chapel.