c. 1350 The guests at Camelot have just sat down to their dainty dishes served up in such abundance that there is scarcely room for them on the table, when in at the door of the feasting hall there bursts a frightening spectacle, a huge knight dressed all in green, with green skin and hair and riding a green horse. He is looking not for a fight, but for ‘a Christmas gomen [game], / For it is Yol and Nwe Yer [Yule and New Year]’, the season of games.
The game is an odd one. The Green Knight will allow one of the king’s young knights to strike off his head, providing he can return the blow in a year’s time in his own Green Chapel. Gawain, Arthur’s youngest knight, accepting the challenge, severs the head, which the Green Knight picks up again, departing with the reminder not to forget their rendezvous.
A year later, after an arduous journey through woods and wilderness, Gawain comes across the castle of Bertilak de Hautdesert, who tells him the Green Chapel is only two miles away, so he can stay for three days before his fateful encounter. Three times over the three days, as Bertilak goes out hunting, Gawain is tempted by Bertilak’s beautiful wife entering his bedroom and asking for the usual courtly favours. Three times Gawain resists, only a little less so on each occasion. Finally she gives the young knight a green girdle, which she promises will keep him from harm.
Come the meeting at the Green Chapel, and Bertilak reveals that he is none other than the Green Knight. His axe swings three times at Gawain’s neck; only the third blow causes a wound – a slight one. Gawain returns to Camelot, where his fellow knights take to wearing green girdles as light-hearted memorials of his peccadillo.
The 14th-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the best-plotted of medieval romances, and one of the most intriguing works of English literature. It poses and doesn’t quite resolve so many tensions: sex and hunting (the word ‘venery’ means both); the exchange of gifts and blows; games and serious combat; chastity and courtly love; even the relative modernity of Middle English against the old alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse. The Knight of the title is a version of the old green man, the pagan god of rebirth at the year’s turning (he even carries a branch of holly – ‘That is greatest in green when greves [groves] are bare’), yet the stress on redemption is certainly Christian. It really does belong between Yule and New Year.