The Green Knight

Also Known As: Middle English *þe grene knyȝt*; named late in the poem as Bertilak de Hautdesert, a line editors have also read as Bercilak and printed as Bernlak; called Bredbeddle in the Percy Folio versions; Welsh *Marchog Gwyrdd*
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: English Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: An axe cannot kill him, and he can carry his own severed head and speak through its mouth.
Role in Mythos: He rides into Arthur’s court to set a beheading wager that is really a year-long test of one knight’s honesty.
Relation to Humans: He treats mortals as candidates rather than prey, judging them by rules he states plainly in advance and then keeps to the letter. Nobody he tests in his own poem is harmed beyond a cut on the neck and a permanent dent in their self-regard.

The first course at Camelot had barely been served when the hall door swung wide and what came through it was not music. A horse the colour of wet grass carried a rider taller than any man in the room, and the court went still. Not all of that stillness was fear. Some of it was manners.

He was green. Not dressed in green, which would have been merely eccentric, but green all through: the skin of his face, the hair fanning out across his shoulders, the beard hanging over his chest like a bush, greener than grass and brighter, the poet insists, than green enamel glowing on gold. From neck to waist he was square and thick, his loins and limbs enormous, and the poet lets himself entertain the thought that the man might be half giant before deciding he had better call him a man after all. Under all that bulk the waist was trim. The horse matched him, mane combed and knotted through with gold thread, tail bound in a green band set with stones and tied off in a hard knot, hung about with small bells of burnished gold, so the whole apparition arrived making a sound like harness on a feast day.

He wore no helmet, no hauberk, no plate, and carried neither spear nor shield. In one hand he held a sprig of holly, which the poet notes is at its greenest when the woods are bare. In the other he held an axe. The axe was the serious part. Its head ran the length of an ell-yard, the blade of green steel worked with gold and honed to shear like a razor, the haft wound with iron to its end and cut all over with green tracery, a lace looped at the head and tassels hanging from richly braided green buttons. He rode straight to the high dais, greeted nobody, and asked who governed the company.

What he wanted was a game. One blow now, another in a twelvemonth and a day, and he would take the first himself, sitting exactly as he sat. Nobody answered. He rolled his red eyes over them, pulled his bristling green brows down, stroked his beard, and then laughed at the silence until Arthur went red and reached for the axe himself. Gawain asked for the stroke instead, and got it. The green man dismounted, bent his head, and swept his long hair forward off his neck to make the target clear.

The head came off cleanly and rolled among the feet of the court, who kicked it away from them. Blood came out of the neck. The body did not fall. It walked, caught the head up by the hair, remounted, and sat as steady in the saddle as if nothing had gone wrong at all, and then the head turned its face towards the high table, lifted its eyelids, and gave Gawain his instructions: the Green Chapel, New Year’s morning, come or be called a coward. He went out through the door with his head in his hand and the fire of the flint flying off his horse’s hooves.

Keeping that appointment takes Gawain up through Gloucestershire and North Wales to Holyhead and into the narrow peninsula of the Wirral, where the poet says few loved either God or man. He fights serpents, wolves, bulls, bears, boars, giants and things in the woods, and the poet reckons the winter worse than any of them: water shed from the clouds froze before it reached the ground, and he slept in his armour on bare rock more nights than he cared to count. What he finds at the end of it is not a chapel but a castle, ringed with high hills in a wild forest of hoary oaks standing a hundred together, hazel and hawthorn shaggy with moss, birds piping thinly for the cold.

The lord of that castle is a big, bearded, tremendously hospitable man who proposes another bargain: he will hunt each day and hand over whatever he takes, and Gawain will hand over whatever he gains indoors. On the third evening he comes in from a fox hunt in high spirits, holds up the pelt, and complains that a whole day’s riding has bought him nothing but the skin of one foul fox. A deer and a boar have already changed hands. Gawain has been paying him in kisses, which are what the lady of the house keeps pressing on him. On the third morning she presses a green silk girdle as well, and tells him that whoever wears it cannot be killed, and Gawain keeps that back.

The Green Chapel turns out to be no church. It is a mound with a crevice in an old crag at the bottom of a valley, and Gawain, looking at it, calls it the most cursed place of worship he ever saw and says the Devil could recite matins there. The Green Knight comes down to it and swings three times. Twice he checks the blade short of the neck. The third fall opens the hide and goes no deeper, and Gawain, seeing his own blood on the snow, gets his helmet back on and his sword out and points out that the covenant said one stroke.

Then he is given the arithmetic. Two feints for the two kisses honestly handed over, and one nick for the girdle kept back. The lady was sent, the entire household was in on it, and Gawain is the most faultless man alive apart from the one place where he loved his own life a little too well. Gawain throws the girdle at him and curses cowardice and covetousness. The knight laughs, hands it back as a keepsake, and invites him home for the New Year, which Gawain declines. Only then does he give his name and the reason for the shape: Morgan le Fay, who lives in his house, learned a great deal from Merlin, is Arthur’s half sister and Gawain’s own aunt, and wanted both to try the Round Table and to frighten Guinevere to death with the sight of a man talking out of a head held in his hand. In the later Percy Folio telling the same figure is called Bredbeddle, is only dressed in green rather than made of it, and is set on by his wife’s mother instead, with the added complication that he knows his wife is in love with Gawain. Camelot’s answer to all of it is to laugh, and to agree that every knight of the brotherhood will wear a bright green belt from then on.

The poem never says what he is. That gap has been filled in energetically ever since. He has been read as a death god and lord of the underworld, as the Devil in the colour English tradition liked to dress him in, as a recollection of Irish sovereignty ritual, and most durably as the Green Man of the church carvings. That last identification is younger than it looks. Lady Raglan named the foliate head “the Green Man” in the journal *Folklore* in 1939, reasoning outward from a single carving in a Monmouthshire church, and folklorists have been dismantling her pagan-survival case ever since. The vegetation reading was already being questioned three years before she wrote, and Larry Benson’s argument in 1965 was that the poet had welded two existing literary types together, the green man of youth and love and the wild man of the woods, which is why the figure comes out jolly and appalling in the same breath.

His powers reduce to one enormous fact, which is that the axe does not work on him, and to the borrowed shape that lets him be a monster in one hall and a host in another, knowing everything said in his own house because he arranged all of it. His limits are stranger. He is bound by rules he set himself, and Gawain enforces them on him with a drawn sword and gets away with it. The errand was never his either: he is somebody else’s instrument, wearing a colour he did not choose, sent to test a court he seems rather to like. In one of the cousin tales in the beheading-game family the challenger dies when the hero snatches his cloak away before he can put his head back on. The Gawain poet never lets his own green man be in danger for a moment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Green Knight?

The Green Knight is an enormous green-skinned challenger who rides into King Arthur’s court in the late fourteenth-century English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He is later revealed to be Bertilak de Hautdesert, a mortal lord whom Morgan le Fay put into that shape and sent to test the Round Table. He also appears in later English versions under the name Bredbeddle.

What is the beheading game in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?

It is the wager the Green Knight offers Arthur’s court: one man may strike him with his axe on the condition that he returns the blow a year and a day later. Gawain takes the challenge and cuts the Green Knight’s head off, and the Green Knight simply picks it up and rides away, telling Gawain to find him at the Green Chapel. The whole plot of the poem is Gawain travelling to keep that appointment.

Is the Green Knight the same as the Green Man?

No, though the two are constantly confused. The Green Man is a foliate head carved in medieval churches, and it only got that name in 1939, when Lady Raglan coined it in the journal Folklore and argued it was a surviving pagan vegetation god. The Green Knight predates the label by roughly six centuries, and his own poem never presents him as a nature spirit.

Why does the Green Knight only nick Gawain’s neck?

Because the three axe strokes are a scorecard for the three days Gawain spent in his castle. Two feints answer the two kisses Gawain honestly handed over under their exchange-of-winnings bargain, and the single cut answers the green girdle he kept for himself. The Green Knight calls him the most faultless man alive apart from that one lapse, and lets him go.

Where is the Green Chapel?

In the poem it is not a building at all but a green mound with a crevice or cave in an old crag, sitting at the bottom of a valley, and Gawain thinks it looks like somewhere the Devil would hold a service. Scholars who have tried to place it on a real map point to the Staffordshire and Cheshire moorlands near Swythamley, with Lud’s Church and Wetton Mill as the leading candidates.