Written in stanzas of alliterative verse, each of which ends in a rhyming bob and wheel,[1] it draws on Welsh, Irish, and English stories, as well as the French chivalric tradition.

In his struggles to keep his bargain, Gawain demonstrates chivalry and loyalty until his honour is called into question by a test involving the lord and the lady of the castle at which he is a guest.

Refusing to fight anyone there on the grounds that they are all too weak, he insists he has come for a friendly Christmas game: someone is to strike him once with his axe, on the condition that the Green Knight may return the blow in a year and a day.

Gawain seizes his sword, helmet, and shield, but the Green Knight, laughing, reveals himself to be none other than the lord of the castle, Bertilak de Hautdesert, transformed by magic.

The Knights of the Round Table absolve him of the blame and decide that henceforth each will wear a green sash in recognition of Gawain's adventure and as a reminder to be honest.

This story parallels Gawain in that, like the Green Knight, Cú Chulainn's antagonist feints three blows with the axe before letting his target depart without injury.

A beheading exchange also appears in the late 12th-century Life of Caradoc, a Middle French narrative embedded in the anonymous First Continuation of Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail.

The first seduction scene follows in a similar vein, with no overt physical advances and no apparent danger; the entire exchange is humorously portrayed.

In an article by Vern L. Bullough, "Being a Male in the Middle Ages," he discusses Sir Gawain and how normally, masculinity is often viewed in terms of being sexually active.

The Arthurian enterprise is doomed unless it can acknowledge the unattainability of the ideals of the Round Table, and, for the sake of realism and wholeness, recognise and incorporate the pagan values represented by the Green Knight.

The violence that is part of this chivalry is steeply contrasted by the fact that King Arthur's court is Christian, and the initial beheading event takes place while celebrating Christmas.

Some scholars interpret the yearly cycles, each beginning and ending in winter, as the poet's attempt to convey the inevitable fall of all things good and noble in the world.

[67] The poet goes on to list the ways in which Gawain is virtuous: all five of his senses are without fault; his five fingers never fail him, and he always remembers the five wounds of Christ, as well as the five joys of the Virgin Mary.

[69] This intimate relationship between symbol and faith allows for rigorous allegorical interpretation, especially in the physical role that the shield plays in Gawain's quest.

The surviving manuscript features a series of capital letters added after the fact by another scribe, and some scholars argue that these additions were an attempt to restore the original divisions.

Medieval romances typically recount the marvellous adventures of a chivalrous, heroic knight, often of super-human ability, who abides by chivalry's strict codes of honour and demeanour, embarks upon a quest and defeats monsters, thereby winning the favour of a lady.

"[75] In viewing the poem as a medieval romance, many scholars see it as intertwining chivalric and courtly love laws under the English Order of the Garter.

A slightly altered version of the Order's motto, "Honi soit qui mal y pense", or "Shamed be he who finds evil here," has been added, in a different hand, at the end of the poem.

Gawain was written around the time of the Black Death and Peasants' Revolt, events which convinced many people that their world was coming to an apocalyptic end and this belief was reflected in literature and culture.

But the idea of Christ's divine/human nature provides a medieval conceptual framework that supports the poet's serious/comic account of the Green Knight's supernatural/human qualities and actions."

After Gawain returns to Camelot and tells his story regarding the newly acquired green sash, the poem concludes with a brief prayer and a reference to "the thorn-crowned God".

To support this argument further, it is suggested that the poem creates an "us versus them" scenario contrasting the knowledgeable and civilised English with the uncivilised borderlands home to Bertilak and the other monsters that Gawain encounters.

Lander thinks that the border dwellers are more sophisticated because they do not unthinkingly embrace the chivalric codes but challenge them in a philosophical, and—in the case of Bertilak's appearance at Arthur's court—literal sense.

Lander's argument about the superiority of the denizens of Hautdesert hinges on the lack of self-awareness present in Camelot, which leads to an unthinking populace that frowns on individualism.

[92] Gawain's trek leads him directly into the centre of the Pearl Poet's dialect region, where the candidates for the locations of the Castle at Hautdesert and the Green Chapel stand.

[102] Queer scholar Carolyn Dinshaw argues that the poem may have been a response to accusations that Richard II had a male lover—an attempt to re-establish the idea that heterosexuality was the Christian norm.

According to Dinshaw, in his other poem Cleanness, he points out several grievous sins, but spends lengthy passages describing them in minute detail, and she sees this alleged 'obsession' as carrying over to Gawain in his descriptions of the Green Knight.

[115] The artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins produced fourteen screenprints for a 2018 special edition of Armitage's translation; these images where also exhibited in 2018 at MOMA Machynlleth art gallery in Wales.

[123] A partial adaptation appears in the Adventure Time episode "Seventeen," which breaks from the original story after the main character, Finn, decapitates the Green Knight.

Plowman's version was praised for its approachability, as its target is the family audience and young children, but criticised for its use of modern language and occasional preachy nature.