SOURCE: Spearing, A. C. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” In The Gawain-Poet, pp. 171-91. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

In the following excerpt, Spearing contends that three plot-elements—the Beheading Game, the Temptation, and the Exchange of Winnings—are fundamental to understanding the meaning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Story

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Gawain-poet's best known and most admired work, differs from his other three poems in being more essentially a narrative than they are. It is not an exemplum set in a homily, or a vision with explicit and detailed doctrine at its heart, but a story. Like Patience and Pearl, it has its tail in its mouth; but what it emerges from and returns to is not a moral truth but the process of legendary British history, that larger tale of alternating ‘blysse and blunder’ (18) in which it...