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Article: Hiding the harm: revisionism and marvel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.(Report)
- Article from:
- Papers on Language & Literature
- Article date:
- March 22, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Southern Illinois University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A scandalous, but rarely discussed, element of the Christmas "gomen" the Green Knight proposes at Camelot is its openness with regard to the kind of blow that initially can be inflicted and even the implement that can be employed to inflict this blow. Gaston Paris in 1888 was the first to note that the intruder's challenge is only to exchange blows of an unspecified nature. For Paris, the structure of the Green Knight's proposal in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight pointed to a lost French source for the poem. Nearly a hundred years later, in 1976, Victoria Weiss became the first critic to incorporate this unexpected narrative element into a reading of the text, in the ...