The Green Knight's Axe
The enormous green-steel axe carried by the Green Knight into King Arthur's hall at Camelot on New Year's Eve in the fourteenth-century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The weapon, described as an unwieldy blade of enormous size, is the instrument of the beheading game: Gawain strikes off the Knight's head with it, and the Knight calmly picks up the severed head, which reminds Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year and a day. The axe thus becomes the token of the exchange-of-blows bargain that drives the poem's testing of Gawain's honour. When Gawain flinches at the