We chose to research the differences in Gawain’s characterization in Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. We wanted to discover how Gawain differed when written by different authors and if there were any aspects of his character that remain constant throughout both works. To do so, we found the sections of Gawain and Le Morte that featured the most descriptions of Gawain and his actions. For Gawain we identified verses that specifically described Gawain and seemed indicative of his character. For Le Morte we isolated five words before and after each mention of Gawain’s name. Our goal was to figure out which nouns, adjectives, and adverbs appeared the most in descriptions of Gawain across both works and see how they lined up. We asked our computer science team members, Vanessa Friedman and Amelia Harper, to compile all of the words used in the chosen sections of both works into an Excel file and order them by frequency. We then made tables containing the top twenty relevant words from each text, eliminating filler words such as and, said, the, etc..
