Sir Kay
'He was nine tailor's yards in height and his legs were proportionately long and powerful – otherwise he would have looked ridiculous! There was not a pillar in the hall whose circumference exceeded that of his thighs.' The Green Knight who enters King Arthur's court on New Year's Day in the story of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is something of a giant: "... his lyndes and his lymes so longe and so grete, half etayn in erde I hope that he were – his sides and his limbs so long and so large, that I believe he may have been half giant..." And like that story, in which Sir Gawain, having beheaded this Otherworldly knight at King Arthur's feast on New Year's Day, has himself to receive a stroke of the axe exactly a year later, this tale of "Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle" involves receiving what has already been given to another. Sir Kay goes out to see to his horse and puts the Carle's own colt out into the rain with a slap on its backside. The Carle immediately sends Sir Kay flying to the ground with a slap of his own. Sir Gawain, however, is kind to the colt and receives kindness in return from the Carle.