The Green Knight (, , ) is a character from the 14th-century Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the related medieval work The Greene Knight. His true name is revealed to be Bertilak de Hautdesert (an alternative spelling in some translations is "Bercilak" or "Bernlak") in Sir Gawain, while The Greene Knight names him "Bredbeddle". The Green Knight later features as one of Arthur's greatest champions in the fragmentary ballad "King Arthur and King Cornwall", again with the name "Bredbeddle". In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Bertilak is transformed into the Green Knight by Morgan le Fay, a traditional adversary of King Arthur, in order to test his court. However, in The Greene Knight, he is transformed by a different woman for the same purpose. In both stories, he sends his wife to seduce Gawain as a further test. "King Arthur and King Cornwall" portrays him as an exorcist and one of the most powerful knights of Arthur's court. In Sir Gawain, the Green Knight is so called because his skin and clothes are green. The meaning of his greenness has puzzled scholars since the discovery of the poem. Some identify him as the Green Man, a vegetation being of medieval art; others as a recollection of a figure from Celtic mythology; a pagan Christian symbol – the personified Devil. The medievalist C. S. Lewis said the character was "as vivid and concrete as any image in literature." J. R. R. Tolkien called him the "most difficult character" to interpret in the introduction to his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His major role in Arthurian literature includes being a judge and tester of knights, and as such, the other characters consider him as friendly but terrifying and somewhat mysterious. Historical context The earliest appearance of the Green Knight is in the late 14th-century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which survives in only one manuscript along with other poems by the same author, the so-called Pearl Poet. This poet was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, writer of The Canterbury Tales, although the two wrote in different parts of England. The later poem, The Greene Knight, is a late medieval rhyming romance that likely predates its only surviving copy: the 17th-century Percy Folio. The other work featuring the Green Knight, the later ballad "King Arthur and King Cornwall", also survives only in