Green Knight

His wider role in Arthurian literature includes being a judge and tester of knights, and as such, the other characters consider him as friendly but terrifying and somewhat mysterious.

[4] Some identify him as the Green Man, a vegetation being of medieval art;[3] others as a recollection of a figure from Celtic mythology;[5] a Christian "pagan" symbol – the personified Devil.

The later poem, The Greene Knight, is a late medieval rhyming romance that likely predates its only surviving copy: the 17th-century Percy Folio.

Despite disclaim of war, the knight issues a challenge: he will allow one man to strike him once with his axe, with the condition that he return the blow the next year.

The Knight features next as Bertilak de Hautedesert, lord of a large castle, Gawain's host before his arrival at the Green Chapel.

The Green Knight eventually gains so much control over the sprite through this text that he convinces it to take a sword and strike off its master's head.

The stories of Saladin feature a certain "Green Knight"; a Spanish warrior (maybe from Castile, according to an Arab source) in a shield vert and a helmet adorned with stag horns.

[15] Similarly, a "Chevalier Vert" appears in the Chronicle of Ernoul during the recollection of events following the capture of Jerusalem in 1187; here, he is identified as a Spanish knight who earned this nickname from the Muslims due to his eccentric apparel.

Both the Arthurian Green Knight and Al-Khidr serve as teachers to holy men (Gawain/Moses), who thrice tested their faith and obedience.

It has been suggested that the character of the Green Knight may be a literary descendant of Al-Khidr, brought to Europe with the Crusaders and blended with Celtic and Arthurian imagery.

The challenger in this story is named "Fear", a bachlach (churl), and is identified as Cú Roí (a superhuman king of Munster in the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology) in disguise.

[20] In the Life of Caradoc, a Middle French narrative embedded in the anonymous First Continuation of Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail, another similar challenge is issued.

The French romances La Mule sans frein and Hunbaut and the Middle High German epic poem Diu Crone feature Gawain in beheading game situations.

Hunbaut furnishes an interesting twist: Gawain cuts off the man's head, and then pulls off his magic cloak before he can replace it, causing his death.

In English folklore and literature, green has traditionally been used to symbolise nature and its embodied attributes, namely those of fertility and rebirth.

[28] Stories of the medieval period also portray the colour as representing love and the amorous in life,[29] and the base, natural desires of man.

[33] Because of his strange colour, some scholars believe him to be a manifestation of the Green Man figure of medieval art,[3] or as a representation of both the vitality and fearful unpredictability of nature.

[31] Scholars like Curely claim the descriptive features of the Green Knight suggest a servitude to Satan such as the beaver-hued beard alluding to the allegorical significance of beavers for the Christian audience of the time who believed that they renounced the world and paid "tribute to the devil for spiritual freedom.

"[34] Another possible interpretation of the Green Knight views him as combining elements from the Greek Hades and the Christian Messiah, at once representing both good and evil and life and death as self-proliferating cycles.

This interpretation embraces the positive and negative attributes of the colour green and relates to the enigmatic motif of the poem.

[3] The description of the Green Knight upon his entrance to Arthur's Court as "from neck to loin… strong and thickly made" is considered by some scholars as homoerotic.

Lewis declared the Green Knight "as vivid and concrete as any image in literature" and further described him as: a living coincidentia oppositorum; half giant, yet wholly a "lovely" knight"; as full of demoniac energy as old Karamazov, yet in his own house, as jolly as a Dickensian Christmas host; now exhibiting a ferocity so gleeful that it is almost genial, and now a geniality so outrageous that it borders on the ferocious; half boy or buffoon in his shouts and laughter and jumpings; yet at the end judging Gawain with the tranquil superiority of an angelic being [36]The Green Knight could also be interpreted as a blend of two traditional figures in romance and medieval narratives, namely, "the literary green man" and the "literary wild man.

[38] Due to the nature imagery associated with the Green Knight, the ceremony has been interpreted as possibly deriving from his famous beheading in the Gawain poem.

The final meeting at the Green Chapel has caused many scholars to draw religious connections, with the Knight fulfilling a priestly role with Gawain as a penitent.

[40] Gawain's journey 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.

[41] The Green Chapel is thought to be in either Lud's Church or Wetton Mill, as these areas closely match the descriptions given by the author.