The best proof for the lasting popularity of this story is by far the present poem, called The Greene Knight in order both to connect it and distinguish it from its illustrious predecessor. Certainly some of the central motifs of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, like the beheading game in Turke, distantly reflect its plot, and there are echoes of its language and phrasing in other poems, like Awntyrs. The kernel story, of a monstrous Green Knight who visits Arthur's court and tests Sir Gawain as the pearl of chivalry, seems to have been popular before its absorption into Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and there is every reason to think it would have continued as a great favorite in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Even if it did find readers, however, this profoundly literate text exercised little influence over the popular Gawain narratives represented in this volume. Yet there exists little evidence of its being read from the time of its composition in the later fourteenth century until the edition produced by Madden in 1839. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is by acclamation the most subtle, learned, and enjoyable of poems about this chivalric hero, as well as one of the great narrative achievements in the English language.
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