ABSTRACT
The anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green K night knew how the story would end, both the story of Arthurian history and the story of his own romance. In the end is the beginning, because the end of Arthurian legend in the collapse of the Round Table accounts for the beginning of this poem, for its motivation, its selected and selective emphases, and its design. W ith a knowledge of the end, the rom ance focuses on the beginning and on one adventure of one young knight, for this is essentially a poem about beginnings: about the New Year and the first youth of King Arthur; about the young court's solidarity and the first assumption of the pentangle by Gawain.1 Through its emphasis on beginnings, Sir Gawain and the Green K night, as I will argue in this essay, tries to revise Arthurian history in order to make it come out right. The purpose of this revisionary agenda is nothing less than to demonstrate how the Round Table might have averted its own destruction by adhering to the expectations of masculine behavior inherent in Christian chivalry.
