Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The poem makes constant reference to games, laughter, and entertainments, and nearly all the action takes places at the holidays, when gifts are exchanged. The Green Knight insists that he has not come to fight but to play a game, and a Christmas game at that. Yet if you compare this game to the light-hearted kissing games the court had been playing earlier in the day, the stakes seem frighteningly high. It soon becomes clear to the court that Gawain will have to give up his life rather than just a few kisses — although kisses will figure again in the game before it ends. If the beheading really is a game, perhaps the Green Knight's challenge is actually a kind of exchange of gifts. The Green Knight's insistence that Gawain rehearse the terms of their agreement, within the hearing of the entire court, sets the rules of the game. But these rules also sound like the terms of a legal contract, in which goods or services are exchanged under mutually agreed circumstances. Gawain's and the reader's understanding of the rules is unfortunately incomplete, and the Green Knight offers no help: Even though he promises to tell Gawain his name and where to find him, he says only to look for the Green Chapel, without indicating where that might be. Fairy tales and folk tales often involve impossible conditions and mysterious requirements imposed on the hero, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has many elements that recall fairy tales — for example, the tendency for events to occur in threes, as will happen when Gawain actually finds the Green Knight.