...“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” follows the classic tale of a knight accepting a challenge and the journey that the challenge takes him on. While on this challenge Sir Gawain is tested and finds about the price of pride and sin. Throughout the story there are repeated references to the color green and the girdle that he uses to hide from his fate. The color and the girdle are symbolic, with the green representing man’s connection to nature and his primal instincts, and the girdle representing man’s sin, as well as his desire to redeem himself of that sin. The color green is mentioned throughout the course of the story. When the mysterious knight interrupts Arthur’s feast on New Year’s Eve, “he was clad all in green…hose had he of the same green…and all his vesture was verily green” (“Sir Gawain”). When this is combined with the fact that he carries a holly branch in one hand and an axe in the other, this large green knight is closer to an element of nature than a regular man. Green also comes into the story in the later meeting place. The Green Knight tells Sir Gawain to meet him in the Green Chapel. The chapel is described as being in the wild, “all overgrown with grass,” clearly another connection to nature, and the fact that the grass is taking over can be seen as symbolic as Gawain’s survival instinct increasing (“Sir Gawain”). The more he is in this setting, the stronger his desire to escape becomes and he has to use all of his courage to stay and search out the Green...
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...The Role of Lady Bertilak in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight The role of women was a key role in medieval times. In the poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, two women represent this role. They are Lady Bertilak, who is Lord Bertilak’s wife, and Morgan La Faye. It all starts when Sir Gawain is welcomed to Lord Bertilak’s castle and then he meets these two women living there. At all times, Bertilak requests Gawain to feel at home and socialize with these women without problems. Bertilak trusts Gawain even though he would be away and Gawain would remain alone with women. However, his nameless wife uses many different ways to chase Sir Gawain and take advantage of her condition as the host’s wife. Lady Bertilak is a superior being that uses seduction and a supernatural power as a tool to hunt Sir Gawain in order to break his Christian, chivalric and loyal codes. Scholars, that I’ll mention it later, agree that women can emotionally manipulate men, but lacked political power in real life. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight poem is represented by two women mentioned above. “Morgan the Goddess therefore is now her name; none has such high haughtiness that she cannot make full tame” (¶ 98, P. 83). Even though Morgan la Faye, considered to be “The Goddess”, does not appear much in the poem, she represents a certain passive feminine power. Nonetheless, Lord Bertilak’s wife is shown as an active feminine power. She embodies a male character and specifically in the room scenes...
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...Sir Gawain Versus Beowulf Strength can be described as the audacity to fight until the last breath. In the case of both Sir Gawain and Beowulf these were the ideals that these men followed. In the poems Sir Gawain and The Green Knight and Beowulf, the main characters, Sir Gawain and Beowulf, show the physical attribute of strength and valor. However, Sir Gawain and Beowulf are different in the form of strength and qualities. One represented a king who fought for the people and the other who showed loyalty towards the kingship. Beowulf was regarded as an ideal hero by the Anglo Saxon community. The main trait that regards him as the perfect hero was his courage and strength that he shows at the very end of his life. Beowulf shows his physicality throughout the story. "Beowulf, Higlac follower and the strongest of the Geats - greater and stronger than anyone anywhere in the world"(Beowulf 46). This quote exemplifies the fact that Beowulf is considered the best warrior in the region. He is also considered by many people to have superhuman abilities and superhuman strength when he ferociously rips the arm off of Grendel in the poem. Beowulf portrays the ideals of an epic hero as well as the elements of Germanic tribes which gave him super human strength and super human qualities. He is also " A man of great strength " (Helen web). This also reinstates the detail that shows the agile nature in Beowulf and also physical toughness of him as a whole. As a result, Beowulf is a sign...
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...Ernesto Aleman English Dr. Curran Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a romance poem from the middle Ages (14th Century) and was written by an anonymous poet. Sir Gawain, the protagonist of the poem, has to overcome two different challenges throughout the poem: to behead the Green Knight and to let the green knight behead him a year later; and resist the temptation to commit adultery with the wife of Lord Bercilak, who we later learn is the Green Knight. This story is symbolic of life, because it illustrates the life challenges humans must overcome, and how the consequences of failure or success affect the individual. In this poem, the character of Sir Gawain is highly symbolic for innocence. He was not afraid to accept the Green Knight’s challenge because it meant saving the whole kingdom by saving the king. Sir Gawain’s acceptance of the challenge represents an unquestionable characteristic of a knight, fearlessness. Even though Sir Gawain assumed a brave attitude towards the challenge, his innocence led him to...
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...In both John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the anonymous work Sir Gawain and the Green Knight temptation is used as a vital tool, contributing conflict to the plot. The means, purpose, and consequences of temptation lead the protagonists to different conclusions. The stories follow a parallel, diverging only when one protagonists fails and the other succeeds. With the idea that God gave mortals freedom and therefore they have the ability to choose in mind, it is arguable that the tale of Adam and Eve could have resulted in the same storybook conclusion as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The many parallels between the two stories indicate that with this God-given ability of choice, both stories could end in tragedy, such as Paradise Lost, or in...
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...Through the major female influence present in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Pearl Poet establishes women as powerful and essential. Lady Bercilak serves as a major plot component. In part four of the narrative, her husband tells Gawain “that belt you’re wearing… my wife gave it to you” (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 2358-2359). While revealing his elaborate trick to Sir Gawain, Bercilak states that his wife gifted the green belt to Gawain. When he did not return the belt to Bercilak at the end of the third day, Lady Bercilak had succeeded in her job of tempting Gawain into choosing his own life over his code of chivalry. This revelation shows the cunning nature of Lady Bercilak. Although it seemed as though the lady had been simply...
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...values and actions of Sir Gawain and the other characters in the poem. Throughout the poem, Gawain’s main focus is staying true to the chivalric code, even if it means he will die honoring it. Christian beliefs also have a significant impact on knightly conduct, and they are both brought together in Gawain’s symbolic shield. Gawain’s chivalry is constantly tested throughout the entire poem, and overall he does a pretty good job of staying loyal to the code. Although he does fail at one point in the poem, it only reveals his imperfect human nature. When reading “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, one should keep in mind the various moral aspects of chivalry in order to acquire a better understanding of the text. Loyalty, courage, honesty, honor, and courtesy are all some of the traits that a knight of chivalry embraces. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” tells the story of Gawain’s test of his chivalric attributes. The test administrator in the poem is the Green Knight. He wants to test the courage and integrity of Arthur and his court. When Gawain, the only knight who steps up to the Green Knight, accepts the challenge, he displays great courage and loyalty to his king. After Gawain strikes his blow unto the Green Knight, this is when the true test begins. To maintain his honor, Gawain will have to journey to the Green Chapel and fulfill his end of the agreement. In order to not be deemed a failure, he will have to endure a blow from the Green Knight in a year and a day’s...
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...Truth Behind the Knight: The Presence of Archetypes in Sir Gawain & the Green Knight In the medieval story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we are introduced to a young man, who, like many of young men, is trying to discover himself and travel through his rite of passage. He is trying to figure out who he is in life, and while in his journey, passes through many phases that mold him into one of the great Knights of the Round Table that old King Arthur wanted to serve with him. These phases affect everyone at some point in their lives. Whether it causes someone to take an iconoclastic stand against a certain more or folkway or if it enables a person to give serious thought to what life could mean, archetypes enable any protagonist in any story to take a journey to find the treasure of their true self. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain was willing to take on the heroic quest and say yes to himself and, in doing so, became more fully alive and more effective to the knightly community and, inadvertently, the literary world. The purpose of the heroic quest is to find the gift retrieved from the journey and give the gift to help transform the kingdom, and in the process, the hero himself. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, three archetypes are present that displays the qualities of a heroic quest that leads Gawain to become a true knight in shining armor. The Innocent Hero Archetype, the Seeker Archetype, and the Lover Archetype forms the mold that Sir Gawain conforms to...
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...Presence of Deceptions The act of deception is a unique piece. It twists an individual’s entire psyche of comprehending things. It twists a situation and makes something appealing that wouldn’t always be appealing. In Paradise Lost and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there are two characters who stick out with that fall in this category. Eve and Sir Gawain in their respective works of literature fall to deception. They both let their emotions be altered which ultimately led to their downfall. Sir Gawain had a vision in mind but it was hindered by how his pride ended up being a form of deception. Eve was giving specific orders not to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree and would have abided by this until the devil came and deceived her by preying on her gullibility. Paradise Lost gives us a unique perspective of Eve. In the story Eve was created after Adam in order to complement and help him rule over the land that God gave them. God gave them freedom to have anything they want in the land but told them specifically that there was one tree in particular that they could not eat from. Eve was much different from Adam because she was a female and her entire mannerisms were different. God specifically made Eve to be different. She was more in tuned with her feelings. She was emotional and was beautiful in her physical features. Eve fed off of that and embraced the fact that she was beautiful, which later had a role in her downfall. Compared to Adam she is a bit...
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...Don Quuixote Don Quixote is a middle-aged gentleman from the region of La Mancha in central Spain. Obsessed with the chivalrous ideals touted in books he has read, he decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. After a first failed adventure, he sets out on a second one with a somewhat befuddled laborer named Sancho Panza, whom he has persuaded to accompany him as his faithful squire. In return for Sancho’s services, Don Quixote promises to make Sancho the wealthy governor of an isle. On his horse, Rocinante, a barn nag well past his prime, Don Quixote rides the roads of Spain in search of glory and grand adventure. He gives up food, shelter, and comfort, all in the name of a peasant woman, Dulcinea del Toboso, whom he envisions as a princess. On his second expedition, Don Quixote becomes more of a bandit than a savior, stealing from and hurting baffled and justifiably angry citizens while acting out against what he perceives as threats to his knighthood or to the world. Don Quixote abandons a boy, leaving him in the hands of an evil farmer simply because the farmer swears an oath that he will not harm the boy. He steals a barber’s basin that he believes to be the mythic Mambrino’s helmet, and he becomes convinced of the healing powers of the Balsam of Fierbras, an elixir that makes him so ill that, by comparison, he later feels healed. Sancho stands by Don Quixote, often bearing the brunt of the punishments that arise from Don Quixote’s...
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...Knights were an integral part in the medieval society. They are said to be brave and skilled in battle, but merciful to their opponents once they are vanquished. Much is written about medieval knights with the most famous tales about Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. However, as a matter of fact, knights in the Arthurian legend are brutal and their actions are not justified. Brutality and inappropriate behavior of knights are demonstrated through jousting tournaments. In The Once And Future King by T.H. White, King Pellinore and Sir Grummore joust, and their savagery natures as knights are revealed: “With a blood-curdling beat of iron hoofs the mighty equestrians came together. Their spears wavered for a moment within a few inches...
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...This is largely attributable to the fact that The Odyssey was composed approximately eight hundred years prior to Jesus’ death and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was composed another thirteen hundred years thereafter. In the case of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight we see many of the earlier cultural overtones of the noble warrior and the divine nature of nobility now mixing with the encroaching ideals of Christianity. One of the most important of those ideals is the afterlife and that is going to be a focal point, because of its direct negation of the fifth thesis. It does not, however; negate the thesis in its entirety, because we still see elements that are off limits under the influence of Christianity. Whereas death is now less of an issue because he was with “and [had] been on God's side .. [Otherwise] He had met with many mishaps and mortal harms” (Harrison). One could imagine any sort of wild and otherwise adverse explorative missions as being benign or even heroic with the promise of salvation or the furtherance of the “kingdom of god.” I cannot presume to know what was implied by his sacrifice or the sacrifice of others in his position, but it is not hard to imagine that where Odysseus faced a rather perilous outcome in some scenarios – even the worst of outcomes were tempered by the underlying promise of salvation for Sir Gawain. This meant that an otherwise insane journey to have your...
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...Beowulf/SGGN Essay Beowulf, a strong and courageous king, willing to defend his people and his honor at any given moment, was the definition of an epic Anglo-Saxon hero. He conquered his enemies with strength and power and ruled over his people with wisdom. From the 7th century, in which Beowulf was written, to the late 14th century there was an evolution in the type of heroic characters that were portrayed in epic stories. You can see this change in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Gawain, a noble knight of king Arthur, was humble and full of integrity. Although claiming to be the least of Arthur’s knights he was well respected across the land. He was a man of his word and a true representation of a chivalric hero. Both characters in these stories were brave and daring and shared some heroic qualities but they held individual traits as well that made them distinct and one of a kind. Beowulf is depicted in the self titled poem to be adventurous, brave, strong, determined, and willing to take any challenge. The poem focuses on three main battles that help the audience determine his character; his fight against Grendel, his victory over Grendel’s mother, and his defeat with the fire breathing dragon. In these confrontations you can understand that he was a hero, a guardian, and a protector. He rescued those in need by conquering whatever was threatening them. One example is shown when Beowulf is introducing himself to King Hrothgar. He says, “ I battled...
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...paganism, between virtue and sin, between light and utter darkness. An Era portraying a country trying to adapt to drastic changes brought on by the Norman Conquest of 1066, a country fighting to establish its own history in order to gain independence. A Period of knights and ladies, of valour and good faith, which gives life to some of the highest ideals mankind has ever known. It has introduced us to concepts such as chivalry and courtly love, pure expressions of spiritual essence. Of these ideals poets and authors wrote with lively passion, embroidering them in poems such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or The Wife of Bath. Although its poet remains unknown, the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight remains instilled in our minds as one of the prime examples of chivalry, Gawain representing the chivalrous ideal of the period. His story begins at New Year, in a court filled with joy and happiness, during a banquet thrown by the legendary King Arthur. In the midst of the merriment, the King expresses his desire to behold a marvel, refusing to eat until he had done so. His desire is soon to be fulfilled, as a mysterious creature of the purest green strides in the castle atop his steed, which was also green. This creature exudes of beauty and power, inspiring...
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...To Be a Human- Then and Now Throughout the span of time humankind has asked the question: What does it mean to be human? Some of the world’s greatest men have contemplated over this question and there are a vast number of theories on what makes a human. A scientist might take a more literal opinion of the question, thinking that we are human because we are higher on the evolutionary chain; we are physically, emotionally and mentally complex. While others might take a more philosophical position on the matter, like René Descartes who originally spoke the famous phrase: “I think, therefore I am”. A philosopher would value the fact that humans can intelligently communicate their thoughts, and these thoughts can change the very existence of man as a whole through invention and innovation. Religious groups would base their opinion of humans on their faith; we are human simply because we are not God. At times science, philosophy and religion can confuse a person opinion on what it actually means to be human. Maybe the concept of being human is much simpler then some may think. Being human could simply mean that we as a collective race are imperfect. The idea of human imperfection is not easily explained by science, philosophy or religion. They can all sometimes be too complex to understand. Science exemplifies the human race as a species, philosophy praises human race as thinkers and religion looks at the human race as sinners and how we all must be perfect to please God...
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