SOURCE: Sadowski, Piotr. “The Greenness of the Green Knight” and “The Head and the Loss Thereof: Gawain's Final Adoubment.” In The Knight on His Quest: Symbolic Patterns of Transition in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” pp. 78-108 and 184-222. Newark, Del..: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

In the following essays, Sadowski examines the significance of the color green to medieval readers and discusses the ideas of ritual beheading and psychological death.

The Greenness of the Green Knight

The problem raised in the title of this … [essay] belongs to those obvious and self-imposing critical issues that arise for anyone who has even once read Sir Gawain, as indeed are most of the problems that constitute the subject matter of this book. The Green Knight's color and its meaning first became an issue for the early scholars of Sir Gawain,¹ and the matter is now considered more or less resolved...