How green is the Green Knight?

The article examines the tendency of some twentieth-century scholars to see the Green Knight in the fourteenth-century Middle English romance 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' as a manifestation of what the folklorist Lady Raglan called 'the Green Man', arguing that it involves, for various reasons, an 'invention of tradition', idealizing an imagined past more closely in touch with nature, and reading the courtly figure of the Green Knight as a representative of nature rather than civilization