The Dichotomous Nature Of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight

1. The dichotomous Nature of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The topic of spirituality, divinity and otherworldly phenomena is quite common in medieval literature and there is a multitude of contexts, in which these topics are addressed. The protagonists of those texts find themselves in a balancing act between the secular world and a supernatural world, where they need to overcome struggles to master the difficulties of their worlds’ dualisms. Be it an otherworld of fairies or the christian hereafter, those worlds and the mundane conduct often influence each other reciprocally in the stories of medieval literature.

This is also the case in the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight by an unknown author, in this poem, Sir Gawain represents an outstanding example of Christian knighthood and has to withstand worldly temptations to prove his faith in God, which he fails in the end. While researching about this topic, I found several examples of texts concerning with the religious symbolism in this poem. However, most of those articles I found were either quite long and encompassing, which gave them a lack of clarity (see Coe, for example), or they were focusing on a single aspect of Christian symbolism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and looking at recurrences in other literature. As the poem is riddled with references to Christianity, I wanted to clarify the coherency and recurring nature of one theme in particular, which the Gawain poet elucidates throughout the