It is Christmas in Camelot and a truly royal feast has been laid out for King Arthur and his Knights. And though there is plenty of good cheer to go around, the festivities hardly begin before a monstrous, axe-wielding, green-skinned Knight barges in. He has come to see the famous Knights of the Round Table and offer them a simple but deadly challenge -a challenge taken on by the brave Sir Gawain -a challenge that will force him to chose between his honor and his life Written by a fourteenth-century poet whose name is unknown, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is recognized as an equal of Chaucer's masterworks and of the great Old English poems, including Beowulf. Translator and editor Burton Raffel writes that "The Gawain-poet can do an incredible number of things in brilliant style. He can draw characters so vividly that they breathe, he can paint pictures so vitally that one sees them, almost feels them; he can be passionately moral; he can be wickedly comicGawain is great poetry, it is unqualifiedly a masterpiece."