to his wife, the Lady of the Castle, who is a beautiful young woman; and to her companion, who is old and ugly. The Lady flirts with Sir Gawain in the absence of her husband on his hunting trips, and gives him a green belt to guard against being killed.
At the end of the poem, a few mysteries are solved. It seems that the castle is actually the sought-for Green Chapel, and the Lord of the Castle is the Green Knight himself. Sir Gawain, who had been made a fool of over the green belt and his flirting with the Lady, is courteously sent home, unharmed.
II. Sir Gawain
The figure of Sir Gawain is crucial for the story, as no other knight would have gone through the improbable task demanded by the Green Knight. Who was he, then, to take such a prominent part in Arthur’s court? In a genealogical table from a site about the figures featuring the Arthurian legends (s. link below), it can be learned that Gawain has been seen by some scholars as the representative of the Solar God.
In the Welsh legend, Gawain was known as Gwalchmei or the “Hawk of May”. Gwalchmei appeared not only as a hero and a nephew of Arthur, he was also son of the goddess Gwyar. In his seasonal interpretation of Celtic myths, presented in his book The White Goddess, Robert Graves sees the life of the Hero as symbolizing the course of the sun through one year. That heroic divinity was born at Christmas (25 December), soon after the birth of the sun at the shortest day of the year (21 December); in the spring month of May, when the sun has climbed higher in the sky and gained enough strength, the young Hero flies up to the sky in the shape of a hawk.
Gwalchmei had also been compared to the