[1] In response to Gawain and Guinevere's questions, she advises them to live morally and to "have pité on the poer [...] Sithen charité is chef" ("have pity on the poor [...] Because charity is paramount"),[2] and prophesizes that the Round Table will ultimately be destroyed by Mordred.
Medievalist Ralph Hanna, who edited the text, felt that the first episode had been adapted by a second, less technically assured author, who added the Galeron section and ended with the original final stanza of the first poem.
[7] For example, Carl Grey Martin notes that both parts include graphic depictions of nobles in states of physical distress, offering the possibility of reading Gawain's fight with Galeron as a kind of chivalric equivalent to the ghost's spiritual purgation.
[8] The first episode, featuring characters who, while on a hunt, are plunged into darkness before meeting a ghost, has strong thematic similarities to another stanzaic alliterative poem, The Three Dead Kings, and seems to be derived from a popular legend of Saint Gregory.
While the identity of the poet is unknown, the English palaeographer Frederic Madden attributed it to the fifteenth century Scottish makar Clerk of Tranent whom William Dunbar refers to as the author of the Awnteris of Gawaine in his poem Lament for the Makaris.