Essay On Chivalry In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a story that seems to be made more in comedy than the others. Usually chivalry wasn’t comedic, unless it was a form of postwar merriment.

Sir Gawain, nephew of King Arthur, accepts the challenge of an inexplicably green wandering knight on the condition that he return the favor in a year’s time. The green knight’s challenge involved taking a whack at his bare neck with an axe. Gawain decapitates him, as any rational man would think that would be the end of it, yet then the knight picked his head up off the floor, made the promise of recompense, and took his leave. Events transpire and in trying to find the green knight he happens upon a castle with a lord (who turns out to be the Green Knight) and lady. The

Gallantry being rooted in pious notions borrows much of it’s rules from the bible, such as “Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie one to another.”(King James Bible, Lev. 19.11) Now Gawain explicitly violates this rule in an attempt to save his life, but then the Green Knight informs Gawain he was aware he stole the girdle and was just messing with him all along: “True men pay what they owe;/No danger then in sight./You failed at the third throw,/So take my tap, sir Knight.) (182) Gawain immediately spills the beans: “I confess, knight, in this place,/Most dire is my misdeed;/Let me gain back your good grace,/And thereafter I shall take heed.”(183) Yet the Knight is so taken by his apology that he wipes Gawain’s slate clean: “You are so fully confessed, your failings made known,/And bear the plain penance of the point of my blade,/I hold you polished as a pearl, as pure and as bright/As you had lived free of fault since first you were born.” (183) Gawain is courageous in showing humility for his misdeed, and the experience ends up bettering his character.

The final authority to look to when examining the honor of darker times is that of Sir Thomas Malory, a scholar of Arthurian lore who took it upon himself in the fifteenth century to compile much of King Arthur’s story together in a text entitled Morte d’Arthur, or The Death of Arthur. This chosen passage, being the end of the tale, details how Sir Mordred(Arthur’s bastard/product

It is about bravery, sacrifice, temperament, loyalty, honor and piety. These tenants had no doubt inspired both murder and mercy, the ruinous and the robust: Richard the Lionheart and Joan of Arc could be cited as examples of this honor and good nature in action (more the latter than the former.) Like any code of ethics, while speaking for the collective, it does fall to the wisdom of an individual’s interpretive skills when calling into question it’s effectiveness. How often living knights adhered to these rules is debatable, yet it cannot be excluded that there may well have been that happy few, who forewent physicality and saw the good that could be done if only someone would look past their eyes and give a