In his history of Scotland, Andrew of Wyntoun mentions a poet called Huchoun ("little Hugh"), who he says made a "gret Gest of Arthure, / And þe Awntyr of Gawane, / Þe Pistil als of Suet Susane" [great history of Arthur, / And the Adventure of Gawain, / The Epistle also of Sweet Susan].
The stress placed on chivalric duty in the contemporary Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is in the Morte Arthure of a more practical nature and has more to do with personal loyalty.
Also the Morte Arthure is less clearly part of the romance genre than Sir Gawain and other Arthurian poems and more like a chronicle of the times.
It contains little of the magic and symbolism of these other works, with no mention of Merlin, although it does use the literary device of the dream vision common in courtly romance and Chaucer.
The Alliterative Morte is “more interested in the fates of men than of armies,”[4] and even Arthur himself transforms from a “prudent and virtuous king to cruel reckless tyrant.”[5] The work's perspective is more critical of war in general than most Arthurian legends, showing mixed reactions toward the "pitiless genocides" surrounding the tale.
[6] Rather than an end rhyme, the Alliterative uses alliteration on metrical stresses, such as the “grete glorious God through grace of Himselven” (li 4) and a parataxis style of short, simple sentences similar to those seen in Iliad and Beowulf.