![]() A year and a day from this moment, Gawain is told by the Knight that he will repay the beheading. Gawain decapitates the Knight, however the Knight unexpectedly retrieves his head as it rolls before him, turning to Gawain with the line “on the New Year’s morn’ I pledge me to repay”. Sir Gawain seizes the opportunity to prove his worth and accepts the Knight’s challenge. He comes with a challenge for Arthur and his knights: a beheading game. Tall, lean and muscular in stature and obscurely, “overall was green”. This intruder - the Green Knight - is a warrior. In a moment of high drama, an uninvited guest bursts into the hall, a “champion, fierce and fell” holding an axe. As the feast is laid out Arthur refuses to be seated until someone can entertain him with a tale: a “marvel”, setting the precedent for the narrative to unfurl. The scene opens at Christmas, the most celebrated Christian festival in the Late Middle Ages, and King Arthur is feasting with his court on New Year’s Eve and hearing carols with his famous knights at the Round Table. Right glorious was the glee that rang in riotous wise (Verse III, IX- X) With all the meat and mirth that men might well devise King Arthur is a key character in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the story begins at Camelot with a scene of feasting, dancing, ladies, wealth and luxury, a common trope in medieval courtly love prose: The figure Edward personally sought to emulate was Arthur, even modelling Windsor Castle, his favourite home, on the mystical Camelot, investing heavily in its renovation which included founding Saint George’s Chapel. Part of this propagandist programme was adopting popular national figures from myth: virtuous warriors who fought with courage and honour, the legendary King Arthur and the pious but mighty warrior Saint George. In a similar manner to the nationalist, patriotic posters of the First and Second World War eras – Your Country Needs You! – Edward III adopted chivalry and honour to propagandise his war of succession in France. In the 14th century, chivalry was popularised, aggrandised and performed with ceremony.Īt the height of Edward III’s reign, in the 1340s–60s, during the peak of the first stage of the Hundred Years’ War, chivalry was adopted by Edward III not only as a moral code he expected his knights to stand by, but as propaganda: to unify of Englishmen under one cause - war. Chivalry was the ‘ethical’ component of war, a pious code that would meet the approval of God, demanding honour, valour, courtesy, mercy and piety, coupled with an almighty set of skills on the battlefield. ![]() Honour was an integral part of chivalry: an art form, and moral code of conduct for an aristocrat and a warrior. That is why a knight does what he does,” Honour is a pervading theme throughout Gawain, but it was also imbued within both courtly and martial spaces in the 14th century. ![]() In the script of the 2021 movie, Gawain confesses to Bertilak de Hautdesert: “Honour.
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