Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
In the medieval time period literature was considered a form of entertainment. The most popular type of literature as entertainment was poetry. Poetry is a way in which language is used. Language has two uses, which are to please and to teach. A poet uses language to shape it to make a form of fiction. In the poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" the unknown author uses language to create a fabulous piece of work. The story is well told but more importantly well crafted. One may look at the poem, as entertainment but the most important aspects of the poem are in its artistic designs. The three artistic designs are prosodic, narrative, and thematic. The artistic designs of the poem give it a structure and a sense of cohesiveness.
Prosodic design is the study of meter. The poem is organized in a way that all the lines contain the same structure. Meaning each line contains four stressed syllables, of the four; three begin with the same sound. According to Webster the repetition of sounds in two or more neighboring syllables is alliteration...
Games can cause you to lose your idea of reality and create a sense of disillusionment. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, games are immensely significant throughout the story. Mental games tear at a Gawain's perception of what's going on, deceiving him to the truth of his situation. Sir Gawain knows this all too well from his experience with the Green Knight. The Green Knight creates a challenge for someone to cut his head off and in twelve months seeks him out to return the favor. Physical games can be as impacting as mental ones; Lady Bertilak attempting to seduce Sir Gawain. This temptation that generates a rift between what his mind knows and what it wants to do leads to more confusion within him She basically throws herself upon him yet he stays strong to his morals. These games within the novel create copious amounts of irony during Sir Gawain's quest. He gets caught up within all these games only to find out later that it was all a hoax. His year long quest is an ironic journey that was produced entirely by the Green Knight. Games hold tremendous value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the games cause Sir Gawain to lose his sense of reality. Through the Green Knight's games, Sir Gawain's word is truly tested.
In literature, insights into characters, places, and events are often communicated to the reader by symbolic references within the text. This is the case in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In this Medieval romance, the colors and textures of fabrics and jewelry are used heavily by the poet not only as a descriptive tool, but also to give the reader information about the characters’ personalities and roles within the story.
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a stranger rides into King Arthur's court with a challenge. This stranger, green in color from head to toe, proposes to play a game with a member of King Arthur's court. This game will be played by each participant taking a blow from a weapon at the hands of the opponent. The person that dies from the hit is obviously the loser. On top of this, the Green Knight offers to let his opponent take the first swing. This sets up the action in the passage beginning with line 366 and ending with line 443.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a fourteenth-century tale written by an anonymous poet, chronicles how Sir Gawain of King Arthur’s Round Table finds his virtue compromised. A noble and truthful knight, Gawain accepts the Green Knight’s challenge at Arthur’s New Years feast. On his way to the Green Chapel, Gawain takes shelter from the cold winter at Lord Bercilak’s castle. The lord makes an agreement with Gawain to exchange what they have at the end of the day. During the three days that the lord is out hunting, his wife attempts to seduce Gawain.
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is a poem written by a poet (name unknown) approximately 6000 years ago in the late 1300's in the medieval times. This story was originally written in medieval literature with a real unique rhyme scheme, but was translated later in time to regular English for high school students and researchers to study and read.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – A Test of Chivalry Essay with Outline: Loyalty, courage, honor, purity, and courtesy are all attributes of a knight that displays chivalry. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is truly a story of the test of these attributes. In order to have a true test of these attributes, there must first be a knight worthy of being tested, meaning that the knight must possess chivalric attributes to begin with. Sir Gawain is admittedly not the best knight around. He says "I am the weakest, well I know, and of wit feeblest; / and the loss of my life [will] be the least of any" (Sir Gawain, l. 354-355).
Through jest of a game the Green knight enlightens Gawain the short sights of chivalry. He comes to realize within himself that the system which bore him values appearance over truth. Ultimately he understands that chivalry provides a valuable set of ideals toward which to strive, but a person must retain consciousness of his or her own mortality and weakness in order to live deeply. While it is chivalrous notions, which kept him, alive throughout the test of the Green Knight, only through acute awareness of the physical world surrounding him was he able to develop himself and understand the Knights message. From the onset of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the author relies intensely upon descriptive language to create ambiance and tonality, but it is only later in the work, upon Sir Gawain’s development, that like Gawain, the reader is able to derive meaning from the descriptive physicality and understand the symbiotic relationship of nature and society.
“Culture does not make people. People make culture” said Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian writer and educator, in a presentation on feminism in a TedTalk. The culture in which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written was misogynistic and it shows in the writing of the poem. Medieval cultural misogyny manifests itself in multiple ways in SGGK. This paper will examine the negative relationships between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and gender by discussing: the representation of female characters, gendered violence, and Christianity in the Middle Ages.
Tragic and hero may not be words that easily reveal a relationship, but throughout literature the two have been linked to create an enthralling read. The emergence of the tragic hero seemed to take shape in ancient Greece where such works as Oedipus and Antigone were popular among all classes of people. Aristotle defined a tragedy as "the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself. It incorporates incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions." Though Greece may be credited with the creation of tragic heroes, the theme is seen in literary works across many different cultures, including England. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one such English work where the development of the main character, Gawain, follows the pattern of the classical tragic hero. In this paper, we will explore the characteristics of the tragic hero and show how these traits are demonstrated in Gawain.
A metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction; contradistinguished from prose; as, the poems of Homer or of Milton. This is but one of Webster 's definitions of a poem. Using this definition of “poem,” this paper will compare and contrast three different poems written by three different poets; William Shakespeare 's Sonnets 116, George Herbert’s Easter Wings and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Whoso List to Hunt.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a medieval poem by an unknown author, written in Middle English in the 14th century. This poem is uncanny to most poems about heroism and knightly quests as it doesn’t follow the complete circle seen in other heroism tales. This poem is different to all the rest as it shows human weaknesses as well as strengths which disturbs the myth of the perfect knight, or the faultless hero. The author uses symbolism as a literary device in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to give the plot a deeper and more significant meaning. Symbolism is used to emphasise the difference of this heroism story against others and therefore symbolism is of great importance in this poem. The importance of the following symbols will be discussed in this paper; the pentangle, the colour green, the Green Knight, the exchange of winnings game, the axe and the scar. This paper argues the significance of the use of symbolism as a literary device in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written in the fourteenth century by an anonymous poet who was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. The story was originally written in a Northern dialect. It tells the story of Sir Gawain's first adventure as a knight.
Excellence has always been a virtue revered by society. Writers throughout the ages have tried to capture the essence of excellence in their works, often in the form of a title character, who is the embodiment of perfection, encapsulating all the ideal traits necessary for one to be considered an excellent member of society. However, the standards for excellence are not universally agreed upon. On the contrary, one man's idea of excellence may very well be another's idea of mediocrity. Yet, human nature is constant enough that by analyzing different literary "heroes", one can discover the standards of excellence that are common to different peoples.
There are many parallels that can be drawn from the three temptations and hunting scenes and the three blows exchanged by the Green Knight. All of these scenes are interlocked together in the way that Gawain's quest is told and his trails he endures leading up to his meeting with the Green Knight to fulfill his promise made the year before.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem which tells the tale of a knight who undergoes trials-testing the attributes of knighthood-in order to prove the strength and courage of himself, while representing the Knights of the Round Table. One of King Arthurs most noblest and bravest of knights, Sir Gawain, is taken on an adventure when he steps up to behead a mysterious green visitor on Christmas Day-with the green mans’ permission of course. Many would state that this tale of valor would be within the romance genre. To the modern person this would be a strange category to place the poem in due to the question of ‘where is the actual romance, where is the love and woe?’ However, unlike most romances nowadays, within medieval literature there are many defining features and characteristics of a romance-them rarely ever really involving love itself. Within medieval literature the elements of a romance are usually enshrouded in magic, the fantastic and an adventure. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight follows Sir Gawain over the course of one year, from one New Years to the next, as was the deal he and Bertilak, the green knight, struck.