Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is about a story that include a beheading game. Sir Gawain is Arthur’s knight and he accepts the challenge from the Green Knight for an exchange of blows. Gawain can strike him with his axe if he is prepared to accept a blow in return in one year’s time.
Gawain strikes off the Green Knight’s head, but in true fairy-tale fashion, the Green Knight picks up his head and, before he leaves, reminds Gawain to remember the appointment. Through symbol on the one hand and structure on the other, the poem dramatizes Gawain’s journey and the choices he must make en route. The idea of death, in fact, becomes a metaphor. “Death” in the poem involves a loss, but not a physical loss.
It is a dying to one kind of life (material), and the rebirth to another (spiritual). Consequently, within the poem, one never expects a “physical” death. Nevertheless, one does anticipate a loss which is somehow reated to the concept of the game . Since Gawain is the chief player, he is the one who loses something. The idea of losing one’s life to find it is, in a religious sense, the main theme cf Christianity.
