1
There
hurtles in at the hall-door an unknown rider,
One
the greatest on ground in growth of his frame:
From
broad neck to buttocks so bulky and thick,
And
his loins and his legs so long and so great,
Half
a giant on earth I hold him to be,
But believe
him no less than the largest of men,
And the
seemliest in his stature to see, as he rides,
For
in back and in breast though his body was grim,
His
waist in its width was worthily small,
And
formed with every feature in fair accord
was
he.
Great wonder grew in hall
At
his hue most strange to see,
For man and
gear and all
Were green as green could
be.
(136–150)
This quotation from Part 1 describes
the Green Knight’s first appearance in Arthur’s court, and it serves
as our introduction to the mysterious character as well. The Gawain-poet’s
description employs hyperbole, as in the superlatives “greatest,”
“largest,” and “seemliest.” The poet’s repetition of the word “so,”
and his insistence that the knight stretches the limits of ordinary
reality—he is “[h]alf a giant on earth”—reinforce this hyperbole
and contribute to our sense that the Green Knight is larger than
life. The poet’s comparison of the Green Knight to a half-giant
may be an allusion to a passage in Genesis just before the story
of Noah that claims that fallen angels and human women mated together
to produce superhuman, wicked children, precipitating God’s punishment
in the form of the flood (Gen. 6:1–4).
After claiming that the Green Knight looks like a giant,
the poet goes on to reassure his audience that the Green Knight
is in fact a human being, even an extremely good-looking one. With
fair features and a form composed of clean lines (broad shoulders
tapering into a thin waist), the Green Knight cuts a beautiful figure.
The description builds up to the bob—“was he”—with increasing suspense,
and not until the wheel do we learn that the beautiful knight is
green. In this passage, the poet uses the bob and wheel as a tension-creating
device, snaking us through a lengthy description before we get to
the important revelation of the knight’s green color in the last
quatrain. This style also lends a sense of foreboding to the Green
Knight, who looks almost human, but whose gigantic stature and green
complexion seem to associate him with the supernatural—and, worse
still, with some kind of primitive evil.
