he poem) mingles Christian with certain pagan elements; the Green Man figures in primitive fertility cults and some anthropologists regard Gawain himself as a remote descendant of the sun-god (Quennell 20-21).
The "Christian" in that description is an adjective to the noun "knight," making clear that if the code were in conflict with the Christianity, the knight would select the code. How Christian is it, after all, to behead a man simply because he throws a challenge to the knight? Is such an act an example of turning the other cheek? Although the knight resists the temptation of the chatelaine, it is more as a result of his faithfulness to the code
than of his Christian conscience. At the crucial moment of temptation, it is not his Christian conscience which stops him at the last moment, but his practice and discipline and even purity as a knight which prevents him from even serio
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