Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the most immediately attractive work
by the Gawain-poet. The substantial body of criticism which the poem
has inspired reveals something about its richness. In a single chapter I
cannot fully cover the poem, and I have not attempted to do so. Instead
I shall begin with some factual observations about the poem's genre, its
sources and literary affinities, its relation to contemporary texts, and its
thematic interests. These preliminary observations will serve to highlight
two distinctive qualities of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The first is
its curious blend of realism and moral seriousness on the one hand, and
marvel and fantasy on the other; the second its irresistible momentum
towards the ending of the hero's ordeal at the Green Chapel, which is
deceptively presented as the climax of the story, but which, in the end,
unexpectedly reduces itself to a statement about an earlier episode in the
poem. The following two sections explore these two distinctive qualities
of the poem in depth. The sustained argument developed in these sec-
tions cannot pretend to comprehensiveness in the way a line-by-line
analysis of the poem might, but since the sections focus on aspects that
are unique and central to the poem, they can perhaps more consistently
address the question of what makes reading Gawain a different and more
engrossing experience than reading any other medieval romance.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight belongs to the genre of Arthurian
romance, which, by the time Gawain was composed (c. 1390), was the
most popular literature of entertainment for the higher strata of society.
The libraries of those English men and women who could afford manu-
script-books were well stocked with romances about Arthur and his
Round Table knights in Old French ( Strohm 1986). The interest in
Arthurian literature was not, however, simply bookish. English craftsmen,

-38-