"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a Medieval English romance in the Arthurian tradition. The text is thought to have been composed in the mid- to late fourteenth century. The only extant manuscript, MS. Cotton Nero A.X. in the British Library, is itself a copy of an earlier original, and dates from around 1400. The anonymous author is today called alternately 'The Pearl Poet,' after the poem Pearl in the same manuscript, or 'The Gawain Poet.' The same author is also thought to have composed the other two poems in the manuscript, Cleanness and Patience. Nothing conclusive is known of the author's identity or biography.
"Gawain is a verse romance. Romance takes its name from the French Roman, a moniker used originally for any secular work written in one of the Romance languages; i.e., languages related to the Roman tongue of Latin—Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese—the "vulgar tongues" (languages of the people, non-Latin). More particularly, the term Roman came to be associated with tales of chivalry and courtoisie, such as the Arthurian tales. While the epic hero still coexisted for some time with the new romantic hero, the changes in society afforded more popularity for the romance. Epic literature was the national or tribal literature of a given people, the epic hero the defender, the fight being for the survival of the tribe or nation. With the rise of the feudal system and the relative prosperity of the upper classes, there arose a leisure class who did not have to go out to fight monsters to the death to save their villages—this audience was a courtly one, with time for niceties, and it wanted heroes who faced fantastical challenges out of choice, not out of a survival instinct. The romantic, or chivalric, hero often is out to find adventure, he is fighting for an idea, and his demise or potential failure will not result in the demise of a whole nation. So Gawain sets out to find the Green Knight, and undergoes many trials to his ideals and virtue, as compared with Beowulf who has to fight Grendel and his dam to save his people." Source
"Gawain is a verse romance. Romance takes its name from the French Roman, a moniker used originally for any secular work written in one of the Romance languages; i.e., languages related to the Roman tongue of Latin—Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese—the "vulgar tongues" (languages of the people, non-Latin). More particularly, the term Roman came to be associated with tales of chivalry and courtoisie, such as the Arthurian tales. While the epic hero still coexisted for some time with the new romantic hero, the changes in society afforded more popularity for the romance. Epic literature was the national or tribal literature of a given people, the epic hero the defender, the fight being for the survival of the tribe or nation. With the rise of the feudal system and the relative prosperity of the upper classes, there arose a leisure class who did not have to go out to fight monsters to the death to save their villages—this audience was a courtly one, with time for niceties, and it wanted heroes who faced fantastical challenges out of choice, not out of a survival instinct. The romantic, or chivalric, hero often is out to find adventure, he is fighting for an idea, and his demise or potential failure will not result in the demise of a whole nation. So Gawain sets out to find the Green Knight, and undergoes many trials to his ideals and virtue, as compared with Beowulf who has to fight Grendel and his dam to save his people." Source