Student Question
The Green Knight is a very ambiguous character. When he shows up at Arthur's hall, he is a forbidding figure. His size, strength, and obvious wealth are a challenge to Arthur's prestige. His challenge, which is not to fight but to endure a single blow, is also a comment on "knightly play" and the effectiveness of Arthur's knights. The Green Knight comes off as arrogant and superior. When Gawain decapitates him but he does not die, the Green Knight transforms into a supernatural figure. He seems to be invulnerable.
These aspects suggest that the Green Knight represents a power that is outside and greater than Arthur's, one that serves as a check on Arthur's hubris . In fact, readers often associate the Green Knight with some sort of nature god, seeing his decapitation and renewal as emblematic of the seasons. In this sense, he represents a kind of competing belief...
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system to Christianity.
Gawain may be the purest and best of Arthur's knights, but he knows he is no match for the Green Knight. His quest to honor his pledge and seek the Green Knight to take a return blow is a test of his virtue. This is borne out by Gawain's experience with Bertilak and his wife: the real test for Gawain is his ability to maintain his knightly virtue in the face of temptation. In that sense, we can see the Green Knight/Bertilak as a kind of trickster or, even, a figuration of Satan, since, like Satan, he tempts the Christlike Gawain. Unlike Satan, however, the Green Knight does not take advantage of his power to kill Gawain; his test has been to confirm Gawain's purity and integrity, not undermine it. So, in that sense, he is a "good" character.
Is the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight meant to be seen as evil?
No, I don't think that the Green Knight was intended to represent evil. He doesn't function as a figure of evil in the poem. On the contrary, anything that happens to Gawain is ultimately a result of his own decisions. The Green Knight's machinations help Gawain to discover something important about himself and thus become a better man and knight. The Green Knight tests both the chivalric code and Gawain's personal chivalry and helps to improve both.
The fact that he is green—and defined by his greenness—does certainly suggest that the Green Knight is symbolic, but modern scholars have been unable to agree on what exactly he symbolizes. His greenness has been thought by some to represent the Green Man: a figure of pre-Christian British Celtic belief who has come to be a folkloric representation of nature and the land. If this is true, then the knight might represent the realities of daily life and the tests of time. Green is sometimes associated with devils and witchcraft (women were supposed not to wear green as it was the color of the witch), but this was largely because green itself was such a powerful color in the pagan, pre-Christian belief system. Distancing oneself from wearing green represented embracing Christianity. So this really supports, rather than works against, the supposition that the Green Knight symbolizes—in a post-pagan, British folkloric sense—the environment in which Gawain and other knights must live their lives. That environment is not always compatible with textbook chivalry.