![]() The Knight shows up, lays down his challenge, and after some prodding and King Arthur nearly taking this challenge for himself, Sir Gawain accepts the challenge instead, saying that he is “weakest of (Arthur’s) warriors and feeblest of wit loss of my life would be least lamented.” (Lines 354-355) This distinction between the Knight’s superhuman nature and Sir Gawain being portrayed as a modest, heroic knight sets up the conflict of this story. At this point he is the most interesting character in the poem, by virtue of being a hulking man who just seems to show up out of the blue, or green, as it seems, and basically hijacking the narrative flow to be all about him for a significant time. This description both makes the knight larger than life, both physically and as an enemy for Sir Gawain to confront, and also makes him strangely alluring as a character. ![]() By the time the author stops describing the knight his description is a quarter of the poem written so far. This character is “a mountain of a man, immeasurably high/a hulk of a human from head to hips/so long and thick in his loins and his limbs/I should genuinely judge him to be a half giant.” Ignoring the low-hanging fruit about a rather muscular man’s loins we have here, the description of every single garment on this knight and how beautiful of a man he is goes on for over a page. The next major character introduced in the poem is the eponymous Green Knight, and if one thought they were safe from homoerotic overtones since this character is the enemy, they would be sadly mistaken. This by itself would by no means be shocking, as Arthur is a mythical hero in British history, but his description being the sole character description given two full pages into the poem is interesting to say the least. According to the poem, Arthur brims “with ebullience, being almost boyish in his love of life.” (Lines 86-87) King Arthur is described as charming, handsome, and generally a pretty nice guy to be around. We can compare this to the full description completely following it, that of King Arthur. In fact, portraying her eyes as quartz, rather than a more suitable gem such as emerald or sapphire, gives Guinevere an almost alien, otherworldly feeling. The poem opens with a description of a lavish Christmas party with the legendary Knights of the Round Table the narrator takes great pains to describe the setting, and states that the Queen Guinevere was “studded with stones and stunning gems beyond pocket or purse… but not one stone outshone the quartz of the queen’s eyes.” (Lines 78-82) While this romantic description of Guinevere is breathtaking to think about, it has very little to do with her beauty. Making women feel marginalized through silence in a male-dominated society during Medieval times. Women’s roles in the poem unfortunately appear as sexualized objects to men as Guinevere seems to be objectified as an ideal woman through her appearance instead of other human qualities. Even though today’s generation now see women as equals to men, these viewpoints were not always expressed that way. Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight offered an allusion to the women who were seen as objects to a man. These social constructs were noted in the beginning of the poem at a Christmas festival in King Arthur’s court. ![]() In the poem, women like Guinevere were seen as social constructs of what an ideal woman should be in male-dominated society. Women in the Anglo-Saxon poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, were often seen as lesser than men in a Medieval time setting. ![]()
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