In the Old English poem Beowulf, the warrior culture is centered upon the heroic codes. Those who are members of Hrothgar’s court are ranked based upon the identities and reputations of their ancestors. It can be said that the armor of these...

In his 1959 translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the literary critic Brian Stone writes of “a Romance both magical and human, powerful in dramatic incident, and full of descriptive and philosophic beauty”. Indeed, this late medieval...

In Shakespeare’s <i>Winter’s Tale</i>, the “death” of Hermione catalyzes the narrative development. Quantitatively, she plays little role beyond the first three acts, but the play revolves and eventually unites around her. It is,...

As Derek Brewer comments, the Gawain-Poet creates an “honour-driven”[1] society. From this, almost everything within Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is assumed to be in a chivalric context, specifically Gawain’s through the romance typically...

While Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, chivalric romance by Pearl Poet, might seem as no more than a tale about heroic quest of the noble knight, an observant reader would notice a number of deeper issues discussed in this work. Perhaps the most...

The idea that humans succumb to natural urges is a literary topic that has been written on for hundreds of years. Authors have often pitted human urges against a higher code, like the knightly code from the days of King Arthur. Sir Gawain and the...

The tale of Sir Gawain and his encounter with the Green Knight is a tale that weaves itself through deceit and trickery by characters who do not hold the same values that Sir Gawain does. His moral standing both as a knight and a Christian is...

To illustrate the universal themes of his medieval tale, the Gawain Poet uses elements outside of dialogue. In particular, the subtle use of colors expresses the values that impact Sir Gawain throughout the poem. In Sir Gawain and the Green...

In explanation of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, J.R.R. Tolkien said “They depend on a balance and a weight and emotional content. They are more like masonry than music” (59). The original manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is written...

Gender in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is caged within a static binary composed of the masculine and the feminine; relative opposites within which individuals are expected to conform to a certain quota of behaviors – for to fit into neither...

The romances Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Marie Borroff, and Le Morte d’Arthur, written by Sir Thomas Malory, tell of the heroic adventures and chivalrous deeds of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Through...

In the first chapter of his novel, How to Read Literature like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster discusses the idea of a quest narrative. "They [protagonists] go because of the stated task, mistakenly believing that it is their real mission. We know,...

Our lives are seemingly centered around numbers. We count the years we have been alive, recall events based on the numerical dates they occurred on, and organize our finances with the help of simple numbers. Life itself appears to be a...

The manner in which amorphous female identities overlap and echo each other in Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wife of Bath’s Tale and La Morte D’Arthur may appear to represent the ambiguity of distinguishable female personalities in romances...

While Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is, for the most part, a heroic poem about a heroic knight who resists temptation, the story also has an interesting dialogue on sexuality interwoven in its lines. From King Arthur’s “ebullience” (line 86) all...

A dream, as we conceive of it in modern thought, is considerably different to the dreams which featured in Middle English dream vision poetry. Where today we might generally think of one’s dreams as an abstract, introspective reflection of...

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translated by James J. Wilhelm and Yvain the Knight of Lion by Chrétien de Troyes are both Arthurian stories that focus in on the chivalrous tales and adventures of two very brave knights, Gawain and Yvain. Although...

In the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, after two failed attempts at seducing Gawain, Lady Bertilak grants the knight a gift in response to his disinterest and inability to give her a keepsake of any sort. As Gawain refuses the gift...

In the anonymously written, late 14th century Middle English Arthurian poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, human instinct intersects with chivalrous codes in Gawain’s conflicting tests of integrity. While the narrative promotes chivalrous...

Heroes are supposed to embody society’s ideals as an individual, but they do not always manage to live up to expectations. There are numerous circumstances that cause a person to act in a way that is dissonant to what he or she believes. The short...

During the medieval ages, there was a set of rules and customs the knights referred to as the Code of Chivalry. Leon Gautier condensed the Chivalric Code into the ten commandments of the Code of Chivalry that was expected of the knights to follow....

Medieval British women had few choices in regards to how they chose to spend their life: marriage to a man or marriage to God through joining a convent. The limitations set upon them by society, even in only this example, show a societal female...

Sir Gawain, as an extension of King Arthur, and folk hero Robin Hood, are heroic characters that both figure in the British literary tradition. Their narratives have both contributed to the construction of national history, and have been used to...

At first, references to the four seasons in the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight seem to function merely as devices to paint a picture of the story’s setting. Upon further investigation, however, it grows apparent that the seasonal...