Green Knight

The Green Knight originates in late-medieval Arthurian literature. In the fourteenth-century Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight he appears at King Arthur's Christmas feast as a mysterious green figure who issues a beheading challenge; that poem later reveals his human identity as Bertilak de Hautdesert and attributes his green form to enchantment by Morgan le Fay. Variant medieval texts (The Greene Knight; the ballad King Arthur and King Cornwall) present related figures named Bredbeddle or similar and ascribe the transformation or instigation to different female enchanters or relatives of Bertilak’s wife. These are literary narrative origins rather than prescriptions from a popular ritual tradition.

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight he is described as green in skin and clothing with a very large, bush-like beard and a size described as around 'half-giant.' At Arthur’s feast he bears a holly bough and a battle-axe. In The Greene Knight variants he is described primarily as clothed in green rather than literally green-skinned; the precise description varies across texts.

The primary supernatural trait in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is extraordinary resilience: after being decapitated he retrieves and reattaches his head and survives to keep the terms of his challenge. He functions as a tester and judge, arranging narrative situations (the beheading challenge; the exchange game at Bertilak’s castle; the host’s wife’s temptations) to probe courtesy, courage, chastity, and honesty. In the ballad King Arthur and King Cornwall (Bredbeddle variant) he additionally displays an ability to master or compel a hostile sprite by means of a 'sacred text,' indicating a Christian-tinged authority over certain supernatural beings in that tradition. The figure commonly operates at the liminal boundary between courtly society and the otherworld rather than as an ordinary human knight.