King Arthur and his lads and ladies have just enjoyed a sumptuous Christmas feast. Arthur is pondering what tournaments or other games they might top their festivities with. For a Christian king, Roman-style gladiator fights are out. But as a fighting man among warriors, neither does he wish to settle for a placid round of touch football.

Just then a mysterious Green Knight, the Incredible Hulk of his day, rides in on a tall horse and dares the assembled crowd. “If any of you ‘mighty warriors’ has what it takes, grab this axe and take a whack at my neck! Then in a year and a day, seek out my dwelling, and let me return the blow! That is, if any of you valiant ‘Knights of the Round Table’ has the guts!”

Arthur moves to accept the challenge, but his cousin Gawain grabs the axe, and chops off the Knight’s head in one fell blow. The big lug picks up his own bloody noggin, jumps on his horse, says “See you in a year and a day,” and rides off into the winter sunset.

So begins one of the strangest yet most beautiful tales in western literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It may sound, at first, like a story to tell at Halloween, or to teenagers around a campfire. Certainly it is meant for after-hours, when you kick up your feet, and have consumed a feast, even if only hotdogs and s’mores.

Does God demand that we always keep our noses to the grindstone? (Or at least, our heads on our necks?)

God Rested From His Work

Those who listen to Genesis know how to kick back:

“Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array … Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.”

Sir Gawain is a serious and lovely poem that teaches young men what it means to be heroes. It is a poem about self-restraint and the virtue of chastity. Yet it also shows what party animals people could be in the Middle Ages. And it reminds us that fun, relaxation, and beauty are part of God’s original design.

I assigned this poem to middle school students one fall. That winter, I read a couple of their essays for history class, in which they portrayed the Middle Ages as gloomy, superstitious, and backwards. Students are often taught that the Middle Ages were a sour and life-suppressing era, and that this gloominess was the fault of the Church.

“Have you forgotten Sir Gawain?” I asked.

These folk loved bright colors. Sir Gawain’s horse Gringolet was better dunned-up than a Hollywood starlet at the Oscars, with the saddle “gleaming right gaily with many gold fringes” (in Tolkien’s translation).

The author loved to play with sound:

Wild wind in the welkin makes war on the sun, the leaves loosened from the linden alight on the ground, and all grey is the grass that green was before: all things ripen and rot that rose up at first, until the year runs away in yesterdays many … Sir Gawain then full soon of his grievous journey thought.

And while it would be naïve to assume Europeans were all serious Christians — the Green Knight turns out to have been cursed by a witch — this strange Halloweenish tale ultimately reveals itself as an ode to both “muscular Christianity” and self-control.

Too Much Work is Harsh

“Progress” can rob the joy from life. Hunters and gatherers often led fairly leisurely lives, managing to catch, prepare, and repair all they needed with much time to spare.

As a boy, Charles Dickens spent ten hours a day pasting labels on boot polish in a factory, an experience that lent vividness to his searing portrait of the cruelty of child labor. David Livingstone worked longer hours. The Victorian Era was the best of times and the worst of times for kids. English and Americans were richer than anyone had ever been. But this burst of wealth was achieved in sweat shops.

Lacking the Genesis concept of a Sabbath rest, some pagans had it worse yet. Girls forced into the sex trade in Taiwan in the 1980s were sometime only given a day or so off a year. A shop owner told me she worked all day, every day, except for New Year’s.

Even after China grew richer, some administrators in my field (education) remained slaves to cell phones and hyperactive bosses, who would call them on school business late into the evening. (Management knew it could push Westerners only so far.)

God Teaches Us to Rest

Beginning in Genesis, the Bible teaches us to work well without becoming workaholics.

God created all things in six days, then rested. Later, He doubled down by commanding the Children of Israel to take yearly camping trips. (Did you obey that commandment this summer? After working long hard hours in “the Harvest,” Jesus went back-packing and fishing with his disciples!)

The Old Testament introduces other holidays, which involved campouts in ornamented huts, watching the moon, blowing rams’ horns, ritual meals, repentance, tithes, charity, and prayer.

The Medievals build on that solid foundation of pious community fun.

The Church helped work out a routine of holidays featuring processions with straw dragons, boys acting as bishops, eating pancakes and playing football (Shrove Tuesday), girls and boys “capturing” one another and then holding an auction (Hocktide), pelting a “Jack-a-Lent” effigy, giving gifts to mothers before Easter, processions to church with candles (“Candlemass”), and town fairs. It all added up to months of good cheer annually.

Medieval Times Highlight Beauty, Rest and Fun

So I was amazed when students parroted a picture of Medieval Man as gloomy, uncreative, and focused on the next world to the neglect of this.

Why does the world still beat a path to Europe for vacation? Why do the tourists line up outside structures built for a Sabbath rest? Why did Mark Twain rhapsodize over French cathedrals? (Which those “kill-joy” Christians started erecting long before Sir Gawain was penned?) What public spaces in the neo-pagan West compare with the Sistine Chapel, showing scenes from Genesis, including a famous painting of the creation of Adam?

Medieval peasants may not have had much, but on their days of rest, they did have the universe, as depicted by the greatest artists who ever lived, painted in vivid colors, on tapestries and in blossoms of soaring stone.

My wife often watches Japanese TV programs exploring the beauty of European cathedrals and classical music. Who, a millennium from now, will listen to our music, tour our stolid box skyscrapers, or dress up for revival fairs in the drab, tattered jeans of our streets?

The Medievals didn’t usually chop one another’s heads off for a lark. (Though capital punishment was too much-employed for my taste!) But they told lively and often wild stories like Sir Gawain and Canterbury Tales.

We Also Should Learn to Rest

Unlike modern Americans, they dressed in beautiful clothes, when they could afford them. They wrote poetry, a forgotten art in our society, and centered their cities on exquisite beauty, aesthetically pointing peasant and prince to God. (Then giving them time to sing His praises.)

Thank God and the Christian inventors of science for modern medicines, airplanes, Rainier cherries, and skill saws! But when it comes to fun, relaxation and beauty, we have much to learn from the ages that learned from Genesis. “And the seventh day He rested.”

David Marshall, an educator and writer, has a doctoral degree in Christian thought and Chinese tradition. His most recent book is The Case for Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia.