Bombadil’s Green Girdle

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

While I am very much taken with the idea of Tom Bombadil using an ultra-powerful magical item simply to hold up his trousers, I can see some problems with identifying his belt with the girdle of Bertilak.

Firstly there is the question of description. The girdle that the lady of Hautdesert bestows on Gawain is made of silk, embroidered with gold:

Gered hit watʒ with grene silk and with golde schaped,
Noʒt bot arounde brayden, beten with fyngreʒ
(Tolkien & Gordon, ll. 1832-3)

Fashioned it was of green silk, and with gold finished,
though only braided round about, embroidered by hand
(Translation by JRRT)

Although Tolkien's poem says little about Tom's belt beyond its colour, the green trousers that he wears with it are made of leather. Tom's sartorial choices are unconventional, but his otherwise homely clothes would seem all the more outlandish for the addition of a gold-edged silk belt, particularly as pendants are mentioned in Gawain's exchange with Bertilak at the Green Chapel. It is also possible to read "Green were his girdle and his breeches all of leather" to mean not only that both Tom's trousers and his belt are green, but also that they are both made of leather. I note that Tolkien's poem makes no mention of Tom's belt being woven with gold.

More significant is that the article suggests that the girdle originally came from Goldberry. The description of Tom's clothes in the first stanza includes his swan-wing feather because one of the outcomes of the story is his acquisition of the blue feather that he wears in his hat in LR. Therefore we can presume that this description is intended as a portrait of its protagonist before the events of the poem. Tom's apparent first meeting with Goldberry is described in the third stanza, and their encounter is not one much conducive to gift-giving.

Is Tom invulnerable because of a magic belt? I doubt it, and I think that a more interesting question is whether or not Gawain is invulnerable wearing his, since the entire episode of his being offered it, accepting the gift and using it to protect himself against Bertilak's strokes has been planned in advance by Bertilak, his lady and Morgan Le Fay (the crone who accompanies the lady of the castle and is unflatteringly described in ll. 948-69). Bertilak's stroke cuts Gawain's neck, and Bertilak confidently announces that he could have done Gawain more harm had his failure been greater. We only have the word of Bertilak's lady that the belt is one that grants invulnerability against cuts from weapons, and she has become ever more desperate in her temptations throughout her last encounter with Gawain, and could simply be lying. I find the hunting scenes very significant in their juxtaposition with Gawain's temptations, and the wily fox Reynard is the last victim of Bertilak's wildlife holocaust, dying possibly the most gruesome death.
Given the strong Christian message of Gawain and the Green Knight and the Pearl manuscript in general, it is possible that faith alone would have been a greater protection against the Green Knight's axe than a fancy belt.

Added to these problems, we have the far simpler explanation offered by Morthoron that green completes a palate of colours that represent the natural world of which Tom Bombadil is the spirit, and that girdle simply works better in the poem's structure than does its humble synonym belt. If we apply Occam's razor (another historical Bill, incidentally), that symbolism wins out. I should add the further note that there is a certain hubris implicit in assuming that one has spotted something in Tolkien that nobody has ever pointed out before, given the number of medievalists who have applied themselves to Tolkien's sources. Gawain is a pretty obvious place to start looking, given JRRT's history with the poem and its dialect, and Tom Shippey at least can probably quote the original line for line. It might not be well known to the general public, but in the field of medieval English studies, Gawain is a staple piece.