Related The Green Knight is a retelling of the poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” famously translated from Middle English by J.R.R. Tolkien in the 1920s. Based on the trailer, Lowery’s film seems to be a faithful, but creepy adaptation. The original story follows Sir Gawain (Dev Patel), the youngest member of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table and his misadventures on a quest to honor a bargain he struck with a giant treelike knight (Ralph Ineson). In the trailer we see Gawain’s initial meeting with the Green Knight, in which the being offers him a beautiful axe. But there’s a catch: Sir Gawain will strike the giant once with the axe to keep it, but one year from that day, Gawain must meet the Green Knight at a chapel to receive one blow in return.