also feature knights struggling to stave off the advances of voluptuous women, including Yder, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, Hunbaut, and The Knight of the Sword. The Green Knight parallel in these stories is a King testing a knight as to whether or not he will remain chaste in extreme circumstances. The woman he sends is sometimes his wife (as in Yder), if he knows that she is unfaithful and will tempt other men; in The Knight of the Sword the king sends his beautiful daughter. All characters playing the Green Knight's role kill unfaithful knights who fail their tests. Significance of the colour green In English folklore and literature, green has traditionally been used to symbolise nature and its embodied attributes, namely those of fertility and rebirth. Critics have claimed that the Green Knight's role emphasises the environment outside of human habitation. With his alternate identity as Bertilak, the Green Knight can also be seen as a compromise between both humanity and the environment as opposed to Gawain's representation of human civilisation. Oftentimes, it is used to embody the supernatural or spiritual other world. In British folklore, the devil was sometimes considered to be green which may or may not play into the concept of the Green Man/ Wild Man dichotomy of the Green Knight. Stories of the medieval period also portray the colour as representing love and the amorous in life, and the base, natural desires of man. Green is also known to have signified witchcraft, devilry and evil for its association with the fairies and spirits of early English folklore and for its association with decay and toxicity. The colour, when combined with gold, is sometimes seen as representing the fading of youth. In the Celtic tradition, green was avoided in clothing for its superstitious association with misfortune and death. Green can be considered in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as signifying a transformation from good to evil and back again; displaying both the spoiling and regenerative connotations of the colour. Given these varied and even contradictory interpretations of the colour green, its precise meaning in the poem remains ambiguous. Interpretations Of the many characters similar to him, the Green Knight of Sir Gawain is the first to be green. Because of his strange colour, some scholars believe him to be a manifestation of the Green Man figure of medieval art, or as a representation of both the