Sir Gawain And The Green Knight Stroke Analysis

An Analysis of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”
I. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. I
Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 2006. 162-213. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a romantic poem from the Middles Ages. It is the story of one of King Arthur’s knights, Sir Gawain, who enters a game with the mysterious Green Knight. The game is an exchange of strokes with an axe, but the Green Knight states that a “twelvemonth and a day shall pass” (line 297) between the first stroke and the second stroke. The Green Knight states that “I shall bide the first blow” (290), therefore allowing Sir Gawain the first stroke. Sir Gawain strikes the Green Knight’s neck, beheading
Gawain and the Green Knight pick up where they left off on the game from a year ago. Gawain gets himself ready to be stricken, but when the Green Knight is preparing to strike, Gawain flinches. The Green Knight taunts him by saying “I moved not a muscle when you made to strike” (2274). Gawain prepares himself for a second strike, but the Green Knight stops himself short because this time Gawain does not flinch. The Green Knight takes his final stroke and only nicks Gawain on the neck. The game is over and the Green Knight reveals to Gawain why he did not cut his head off. The Green Knight is Bertilak, and he tested Gawain twice, once with the beheading game and a second time with the exchange of winnings game. The first strike he left Gawain untouched because Gawain returned the kiss Bertilak’s queen gave Gawain. The second time he left him alone because Gawain returned both kisses from the queen. The third stroke Bertilak nicked Gawain, because Gawain did not give Bertilak the sash his wife gave Gawain. Gawain feels embarrassed and disgraced by his actions, but because of Gawain’s confession, Bertilak hold him guiltless by saying “I hold you polished as a pearl, as pure and as bright / As you lived free of fault since first you were born” (2393-94). Gawain leaves the Green Knight and returns to Camelot where he tells
Derrickson says that critics have already tied together the link with the pentangle and its references to “the conceptual issues that they symbol helps to structure, such as the balance it fixes between the values of Christian and “courtly” love, values to which knights of the romances are supposed to adhere and for which the hero of the poem undergoes testing,” (10) but no one, including critics, have tied the pentangle to being specifically written in for “the narrative design” (10) of the poem. Derrickson is basically saying, that yea, the pentangle represents all these knightly things, but Gawain’s emblem before was different and in this poem, the pentangle is probably specifically written to go with the flow of the