A Critical Look at Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
             From the first time I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I have been troubled by the question of whether Sir Gawain was right or wrong in lying in order to keep the girdle and save his life. He was torn between the preciousness of his own life, and the sanctity of chivalry and its codes. He was forced to ask himself what he valued more: his reputation or his life? Many scholars have struggled with this question for centuries, as well as the questions of how guilty he really felt for his actions, and what the poet is trying to tell the reader through Gawain's ordeal.
             There is another side to the question about Sir Gawain's decision to use the green girdle. While honesty should be highly valued, it may be unwise to undervalue life itself. In almost every culture, as well as Sir Gawain's, death is recognized "as a terrifying thing which men and animals alike try to escape by every device in their power, regardless of dignity or duty" (Burrow, "The Third Fit" 37). It may be even more difficult to place an overriding significance on the value of honesty in light of life's alternative. "...images of death permeate the medieval world" (Clein, 55). A modern reader of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight should gain an understanding of what death meant within the cultural milieu, which surrounded the Gawain writer. In her book, Concepts of Chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Wendy Clein describes the chivalric approach to death as an uncomfortable and awkward marriage between the warrior's code on one side and Christianity of the antithetical side. The warrior code calls for the knight to "defy death in acts of heroism and thereby gain worldly fame" (55). However, the Christian doctrine demands that the knight surrender worldly fame and accept death as a "passage from this imperfect world to eternity" (55). If a knight is to gain fame and fulfill the warrior code that...