The Green Knight: History, Myth, and Modern Shame -- A Historian's View
Historiansplaining: A historian tells you why everything you know is wrong
The Green Knight and the Poem
The stakes of the challenge here are tremendous. They are both personal and political. The shame that camelot will suffer if they fail to meet the green knight's challenge are one simple humiliation, the emotional loss of pride, and also the potential degradation and breakdown of their power. Once one weakness like this is exposed, then more challengers are sure to come forward, until the whole system unravels. And again, the audience in the middle ages would have known how important those stakes were because they know that eventually camelot does collapse. It is not failure on the battlefield, or failure military prowess, but failure of character that eventually brings them down.
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