Similarities Between Sir Gawain And The Green Knight And Beowulf

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The stories of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are both tales of heroes who go out on fantastic quests to uphold and forge their honor. These stories mean to inspire the reader to be like their corresponding hero, and thus provide an outline of what honor means in the culture in which it was written. Through identifying the heroes’ characteristics, one can draw conclusions of what qualities the everyday person needed to have in order for others to think of as honorable.
In both stories, the hero has a community for which they go out on quests. This signifies that it was important in both the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman cultures to have a community to which you belonged and to go out and do something for that community, which would give you honorable status. Beowulf always had a hall for which he went out and fought monsters. For the fight with Grendel he had Heorot, and for the dragon he had the hall in which he ruled over Geatland. Likewise, Sir Gawain had Camelot to go out and face the Green Knight’s challenge for.
Also in both stories, strength is very important. Being strong would be virtue worthy of honor in which both cultures the text was written. Even though the degree of strength varies between the two heroes, their quests each require a great deal of it in order to complete. Sir Gawain had to …show more content…

These two versions of what a hero should be, reflect the beliefs of the two cultures. In the Anglo-Saxon culture, there were heavy influences from Norse paganism. In that religion the focus were various Gods who, like Beowulf, go out and embark on superhuman quests. Then later on in Anglo-Norman culture there were influences from Christianity, especially Christ’s crucifixion, which is seen as a more humanly capable act. This aspect is reflected in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through Gawain’s human

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