What is the function of slaughter in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Its detail seems thematically beside the point, a distraction from the real business of erotic seduction and chivalric moral and psychic crises. Tolkien and others have denied any relevance at all between the deer-hunting and bedroom scenes, but the poet's depiction of Bertilak's quarry has long been seen to shed light on the tense interaction between Gawain and the Lady of Hautdesert, especially since Savage's essay of 1928. Yet the quasi-allegorical import of deer, boar, and fox really has nothing to do with how these animals are so graphically flayed and gralloched or ripped from their skin, scenes which the poet openly relishes with the other motifs portraying the material culture of the Arthurian world, such as weapons-arming, castle architecture (exterior and interior), hospitality customs, and feasts. John Cummins points out that “The dainty unmaking of the hart was evidently more ritualized in France, at least initially, than elsewhere,” and that The Master of Game downplayed it, yet the English poets seem determined to exploit such ritual for all it was worth. And there is no little irony in the fact that the Gawain-poet has rendered the butchering of the quarry with a vividness that puts the teaching of contemporaneous treatises to shame. While a reader may naturally expect sanguinary detail in the treatises, in romance the poet's indulgence in it strains the amorous decorum to the limit. In Sir Gawain the “ritual” of slaughter ostensibly contains the violence it conjures forth by sublimating it through customs of venery, but its interlacing with erotic fantasy unravels that containment by letting the action drift as close to violate dissolution as it can. Of course, this could be the poet's cunning scheme, so as to involve the reader vicariously in Gawain's self-mortification. But such mortification implies resolvable didactics that the paradox of venery—a word that embraces sportive killing and venereal sex—will stubbornly subvert.

While the chase on the beasts of venery stirred the passions of the warrior nobility to feats of imagination, weapons-handling, and work with horse and hound, passion also inspired bloodsport with a violence that overbore the discipline with its own infectious thrill. In his Policraticus John of Salisbury departed from clerkly commonplaces to level fresh invective at the courtly hunt itself (see chapter 2).