The story starts around the holiday time at King Arthur’s court. All of the knights and women congregate to celebrate and feast. King Arthur will not eat until he has heard a great adventure story. Just as everyone sat down to eat, a large strange knight with green skin and green clothing entered the dining hall. The stranger was carrying a large decorated axe.
The Green Knight came to test the honor of the legendary Knights of the Round Table. The green Knight proposes a game to all of King Arthurs legendary knights that he will take a single blow with an axe from any knight that was at the table. The only rule to the green knight proposal was that the knight who delivered the blow, would agrees to meet him in a year and a day to receive a blow in return. No one volunteers to play the game with the strange green knight.
The Green Knight requested that King Arthur himself take the challenge. But before Arthur can respond to the Green Knight, his nephew, Sir Gawain volunteers himself and chopped off the Green Knight’s head. The Green Knight picks up his own head and tells Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year and a day. Prior to arriving to the green chapel, Sir Gawain faces another challenge that could give him the tools he would need to stay alive. His honesty allowed the green knight to spare his life.
The Middle Ages describes the time in which the Roman Empire collapses and the Renaissance and Reformation begins. The Middle Ages was a major time of change historically, socially and linguistically despite the stay of the Roman Catholic church. In literary terms, the period can be divided into the Anglo-Saxon period (c. 450-1066), the Anglo-Norman period (1066- c. 1200), and the period of Middle English literature (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). The language and social changes were sped up in Britain during the Middle Ages by the Norman Conquest of 1066, basically French words now became part of the English vocabulary. There then was a...