The Beheading Game

The beheading challenge in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight presents the immediate and obvious problem that the Green Knight should not have survived Gawain's blow. It seems both cruel for Gawain to accept and silly not to - after a single strike he will have won. He will have secured his reputation as being up for any challenge, and he will have expelled that creepy green fellow from the court.

And yet there is a hovering what if. What if the Green Knight survives to strike a return blow in a year's time? Aside from common knowledge asserting that the Green Knight will die... what about his personage suggests that he won't survive? He's part giant, perhaps a bit elvish in appearance, and as such is massive. He comes shoeless, without armor and bearing a holly bough, asserting peace, but also carrying the axe for his own beheading. Even disregarding the fact that he's green, I don't think this stranger ought to be trusted and he certainly does not come across as the kind of idiot who would get himself killed. In fact, I should think that in all cases of beheading challenges, the challenged party would get a little suspicious that the knight offering up his own neck would have something up his sleeve.

Given this reasonable mistrust, I am not at all surprised that Gawain flinched while receiving his own blow. Why would this enchanted Green Knight magick his way out of his own beheading only to teach Gawain a lesson? So of course Gawain fully expected to die... And of course the poet needed him to flinch in order to further teach the lesson that he should have faced his own death bravely.

I have to wonder though, if the Green Knight (and his enchantress backer who will remain unnamed lest I spoil the end) has such magic that he can survive his own beheading, would he have been able to make Gawain survive a beheading as well? Would living through what he expected to be his death be a much more effective method of teaching bravery? Or would subjecting Gawain to such a supernatural experience take away from his (more or less) untainted perfection of chivalry?