During holiday celebrations, an enormous knight with green clothes and skin descends upon King Arthur's court. He presents a challenge: he will endure a blow of the axe to his neck without offering resistance, but whoever accepts this must promise to receive the same in exactly a year and a day's time. Young Sir Gawain quickly agrees, beginning a mysterious adventure whose outcome he could not have imagined. A Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate, W.S. Merwin's translation brings a new immediacy to this medieval classic.