The Cipher Of Chivalry: Violence as Courtly Play in the World of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Chivalry allowed aristocratic brutality to assume rarified forms (honor, prowess, fealty), and the man-at-arms sublimated the horrors of physical destruction, especially the mutilation and ruin in combat of the human body. Here, Martin focuses on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a Middle English romance that outlines the grotesque physical breaking and disfigurement of one knight by another. Immune to decapitation's worst effects, the Green Knight only exaggerates how late-medieval warrior-nobles, English and French, could conceptualize and experience chivalric violence as courtly play. The Green Knight seeks no unmitigated violence, dismissing the suggestion that he would want to contend against the "berdlez chylder" before him. Then, even after he has clarified his purpose--to give his opponent his ax and stonde hym a strok, stif on pis flet, on condition that he will have the same opportunity a year later--none steps forward.