The last line of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” which translates to mean “evil be to him who thinks evil of it.” Since the two previous lines asked “he who wore the thorny crown” for peace, and seemed to be mostly religious banter, I first believe that the closing line was more of the same.
After a bit of research though, I found that this line is strangely related to the rest of the poem. In addition to being the closing line to Sir Gawain, “honi soit qui mal y pense” is also the motto of elite English group called the Order of the Garter. This chivalrous order was founded in the 14th century, and the story behind its motto has interesting parallels to the plot of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Legend has it that one night King Edward, the founder of the Order of the Garter, was having a party in his castle. With all the dancing going on, one of the women in attendance accidentally let her garter slip off her leg onto the floor. This was an embarrassing occurrence under the circumstances, and while folk in attendance laughed at her, King Edward picked up the garter, tied it around himself, and proclaimed “evil be to him who thinks evil of it.”
This legend of the founding of the garter is not identical, but still quite similar to Gawain”s green garter in the poem. I was hopeful that perhaps a historical conspiracy theory existed that would claim that the Order of the Garter originated long before King Edward and was instead founded by Arthur and Gawain after the incident with the Green Knight. As interesting as that would be, I couldn”t find any evidence that even began to suggest such a thing. Having hit a wall on my short journey down that road, I turned to other possible meanings of the quotation.
In the historical account of the founding of the Order of the Garter, I take King Edward”s use of the phrase to be a bit of individualism. I imagine that a man wearing a garter in medieval times would be comparable to a modern man wearing women”s underwear over his clothing. By wearing a garter and then standing up and wishing “evil to him who thinks evil of it,” the King was relishing in his individuality, acknowledging his strange actions, and daring anyone to criticize his eccentricity.
In Sir Gawain, I do not find the quotation to convey the same importance of the individual. Sir Gawain wears the green garter back to the court not out of personal pride, but “as a sign of [his] shame.” (2433) Then, instead of being criticized or just recognized as different, his individualism is stripped from him when all the other knights follow suit and begin to wear green garters themselves.
I”ve tried, but I cannot reconcile the two conflicting outcomes of these stories. I imagine that neither King Edward nor the Gawain poet coined the phrase “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” and I”m tempted to believe that presence of a garter in the poem has no more than a coincidental relationship to the story behind the founding of the Order of the Garter.