Sir Gawaine And The Green Knight Comparison

The Greene Knight and Sir Gawaine In old British Literature, “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight” is one of the many works that we know little about. Its author is unknown, and no context is given aside from what the poem tells us. The work is composed of three parts: the first is a beheading legend, then “an exchange of winnings”, and finally, the flirtatious test laid upon Sir Gawaine himself. This poem and another similar poem are often compared and contrasted. In “The Greene Knight”, the readers follow a very similar plot, except for one main difference – we know that Sit Gawaine is being tested by the Greene Knight himself. This difference accurately changes how readers interpret the poem – even if they have prior knowledge with “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight”. In the “Sir Gawaine” poem, Gawaine sets out on his final quest to try to track down the Green Knight. He comes upon a castle where he decides to stay until he can set out again to find his opponent. When he finally meets the lord of the house, the man is described as “a great sized knight …show more content…
When meeting the master of the castle, the readers are given descriptions that would accurately describe the Green Knight as well without actually connecting the two seemingly different characters. Sir Gawaine describes the mysterious knight as someone with a “broad and glossy… beard, all reddish brown…standing firmly on powerful legs” (lines 845-846). This can tie back to the beginning of the poem where the Green knight is described as having “a great beard… down over his chest like a bush” (line 182) and “his stature [was] the very tallest on Earth” (line 136). This foreshadowing hints at the fact that the knight and the lord are one in the same, but it still is not as bluntly obvious as the other author forces it to