Green cloth binding with gilt on the spine.

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Please view our photographs. This 1968 Oxford University Press printing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edited by J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, is an early reprint of the Second Edition (which was originally revised by Norman Davis in 1967). In Very Good condition, comparable late-1960s copies of this edition are currently listed by rare and secondhand booksellers for roughly £65 to £135 depending on binding and dust jacket presence.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English chivalric romance about Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table, who accepts a deadly challenge from a mysterious, giant green warrior. Written by an anonymous author known as the Gawain Poet (or Pearl Poet), the story tests the boundaries of knightly honour, loyalty, and human honesty.

Part 1: The Beheading Game

• The Challenge. During a New Year’s feast at Camelot, a colossal knight dressed entirely in green—with green skin and hair—rides into the hall carrying a holly bob and a massive battle-axe. He proposes a game where any knight may strike him once with the axe, provided the Green Knight can return the blow a year and a day later.

• Gawain’s Strike. When King Arthur steps forward to accept, his young nephew Sir Gawain asks to take his place to spare the king. Gawain decapitates the Green Knight in one clean stroke, but the giant calmly picks up his severed head, reminds Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel next New Year’s Day, and rides out of the hall.

Part 2: The Journey and the Castle

• The Quest. As autumn fades into winter, Gawain sets out in full armour to keep his word and find the Green Chapel. After battling harsh weather and wild beasts through the wilderness of North Wales, he prays for shelter on Christmas Eve and suddenly discovers a magnificent castle.

• Bertilak’s Bargain. The castle’s jovial host, Lord Bertilak de Hautdesert, welcomes Gawain warmly and assures him the Green Chapel is nearby. Bertilak proposes a playful game for the next three days: he will go out hunting while Gawain rests at the castle, and each evening they will exchange whatever they have won during the day.

Part 3: The Three Temptations

• The Bedroom Tests. While Bertilak hunts deer, a boar, and a fox, his beautiful wife visits Gawain in his bedchamber each morning to seduce him. Bound by chivalry, Gawain politely resists her advances, accepting only kisses so as not to offend her.

• The Secret Girdle. On the first two evenings, Gawain honours the bargain by giving Bertilak the kisses he received in exchange for the hunted game. On the third day, however, the lady offers him a green silk girdle that supposedly protects the wearer from being killed, and Gawain accepts it in secret without giving it to Bertilak that night.

Part 4: The Green Chapel

• The Return Blow. On New Year’s Day, Gawain rides to the Green Chapel—an eerie, hollow mound—where the Green Knight is sharpening a new axe. Gawain flinches before the first swing, endures a second feigned strike without moving, and receives only a slight nick on the neck from the third blow.

• The Revelation. The Green Knight reveals himself to be Lord Bertilak, transformed by the sorceress Morgan le Fay to test the pride of Arthur’s court. Bertilak explains that the two harmless swings were for Gawain’s honesty on the first two days, while the minor cut was punishment for secretly keeping the green girdle to save his own life.

• The Return to Camelot. Ashamed of his cowardice and deceit, Gawain wears the green girdle back to Camelot as a permanent badge of his human frailty. Rather than shaming him, King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table adopt green sashes of their own to honour Gawain’s courage and humility.