his knights has the courage to accept this strange bargain, King Arthur himself agrees to these terms. Sir Gawain, however, steps in, decapitates the 'Knight of the Green Chapel' and a year later finds himself in a forest awaiting the return blow, on a hollow mound like an ancient long barrow; the Green Chapel which Sir Gawain has spent the last two months desperately trying to seek out. The Knight of the Green Chapel was able to pick up his head and ride away from King Arthur's hall the previous Christmas. And for the week leading up to this return encounter, Sir Gawain has been staying at a castle owned by Sir Bertilak. This name is derived from the Irish bachlach, churl or herdsman, and is a name given in the ancient Irish legends to Cú Roi mac Dáire. Sir Gawain waits on the top of this mound, in the snow, and suddenly hears the sound of an axe being sharpened. From out of a cave emerges the Knight of the Green Chapel, brandishing the axe which will deliver the return blow. This Knight of the Green Chapel is none other than Sir Bertilak, who has appeared to him up until now in the form of an ordinary man. Sir Gawain has been innocently flirting with Sir Bertilak's wife (although she would have preferred it to have been less innocent) and for a kiss that he stole, and for the gift of a girdle that he did not give, in turn, to his host, Sir Gawain receives a superficial neck wound. The girdle that Sir Gawain wears, a gift from Sir Bertilak's wife, prevents him, while he wears it, from ever being killed. English Sir Gawain More than any of the romances from the continent during the medieval period, the Middle English Arthurian poems in which Sir Gawain is the hero, portray him as a supreme and unequalled warrior and as a knight who is wholly honourable and an exemplary practitioner of courtesy. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it is a sense of honour that leads Sir Gawain desperately to seek the Green Chapel through the mud and ice of a northern English winter, when most would rather have sought to avoid it. It is courtesy that impels him to comply with the terms of Sir Bertilak's Christmas game, to give a pretence of enjoying himself when his