Green Knight of the story turns him green. He tests Moses three times by doing seemingly evil acts, which are eventually revealed to be noble deeds to prevent greater evils or reveal great goods. Both the Arthurian Green Knight and Al-Khidr serve as teachers to holy and upright men (Gawain/Moses), who thrice tested their faith and obedience. It has been suggested that the character of the Green Knight may be a literary descendant of Al-Khidr, brought to Europe with the Crusaders and blended with Celtic and Arthurian imagery. The beheading game appears in a number of tales, the earliest being the Middle
Treason in Arthurian legend of true nobility and manhood. Therefore, knights who committed treasonous crimes threatened to undermine the sanctity of the order as a whole, and all that it stood for. Thus, punishments for knights and nobles deemed traitors typically involved some kind of process in which their identities as both knights, and men, were stripped away. Executions of treasonous knights included a process of removing the physical representations of their titles, such as “breaking of the traitor’s sword and striking of his spurs, removing his sword belt, and publicly stripping him of the rich clothing that visually communicated his status.” Punishments could