The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell
King Arthur and his knights are hunting in a forest when Arthur separates himself from the crowd. He kills an animal and a knight appears and challenges Arthur to a fight where the unarmed Arthur begs for his life. The knight is angry with Arthur because Arthur has given the knight’s land to Sir Gawain. The knight spares his life on the condition that they meet again, a year later, with Arthur knowing the answer to a question or else he forfeit his life. Arthur agrees and they part.
“What do women truly love best?”
Arthur, tormented by the question all men wonder, arouses the attention of his nephew, Gawain. Arthur relates his story to Gawain and the two agree to leave the castle in search for the answer. With only about a month left before he has to report back to the knight, Arthur meets an ugly old hag who promises to provide the answer in return for Gawain’s hand in marriage. Arthur waits for Gawain’s consent and Dame Ragnelle, the old hag, tells Arthur that women love sovereignty.
The two men compare answers to find that they do not have two identical answers, but return to the knight where they share all the answers they have collected throughout the land. Finally, after all the other answers failed to release Arthur from his promise, they share Dame Ragnelle’s answer. As it turns out, Dame Ragnelle is the knight’s sister and he wishes her ill will for helping Arthur.
Dame Ragnelle, Arthur, and Gawain return to the castle where the wedding takes place. She is dressed beautifully, but she is still ugly. That night she asks for a kiss to which he is willing to comply, but where the old hag should be sits a beautiful woman. She asks him if he’d rather have her beautiful by day or by night. He allows her to chose which lifts the spell and allows her to be beautiful all the time. His gift of choice was the choice that women crave and the disenchantment of the spell that her stepmother cast over her. They lived happily for five years until she died.
Although there is no information about the author, it was obtained by Richard Rawlinson.Richard Rawlinson was born on January 3, 1690 and spend his life continuing his father’s work as a collector of manuscripts he found all over the European region.Richard Rawlinson’s brother also collected manuscripts that he willed to his brother upon his death. Upon his death he donated them to Oxford Bodleian Library.
The original manuscript of this poem is in the Oxford Bodleian Library listed as Manuscript 11951.The first translation comes from Sir Frederic Madden (1801-1873).The manuscript was written illegibly causing confusion between the i’s and y’s along with the writing that makes it difficult to tell if a word ends in an –e or if it is simply a flourish of the hand.Various editions play with different interpretations of authorial intent in regard to these debatable problems.The manuscript has not stanza breaks and has significant individual lines thus throwing off the stanza divisions.There is also evidence of at least one page missing which causes problems in the plot.Madden’s translation is one of the most accepted version.The newest version is published by the TEAMS project and is accessible on Amazon and local bookstores and is translated by Thomas Hahn.
Geoffrey Chaucer creates a similar tale but instead of Gawain being the knight and Arthur dishonoring a knight, it is a young knight that dishonors a maiden.The public is outraged at this knight and demands justice from Arthur.Arthur sentences the knight to death but the queen and her maidens convince Arthur to entrust the knight to them to dispose of.They ask the knight the question, he goes on a conquest for the answer, and comes across some maidens dancing.When he approaches them they disappear and he is greeted only by a hag who promises to tell him the answer if she can name her reward.He agrees and goes back to the queen with the hag in tow and the hag tells the queen the answer.Since the hag was correct she chooses to have the knight in wedlock.He tries to persuade her to take another prize, but eventually consents.That night he tosses and turns and the hag scolds him for being a bad husband and offers him the choice to have a faithful hag as a wife or an unfaithful beauty.He allows her to choose and he is granted a beautiful and faithful wife in return.
In both The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle and the Wife of Bath tale, the men have one year to find the answer and in both cases the knight is reliant on a hag for salvation but in Chaucer’s version the man is never trusted with the answer and the hag follows the knight to the queen and only reveals it in the queen’s presence.Both have the reward of a beautiful wife but the choice slightly varies.In The Wedding, the choice is between beauty by day or night and in The Wife of Bath the choice is between faithless beauty and faithful ugliness.Another significant difference is that in The Wife of Bath the queen is granted the power over the knight’s life whereas in The Wedding, a male knight is granted the power.
The hag character is a common archetype in legends and lore. Usually she is evil and conniving, but in this tale she is a beautiful woman masked as an ugly woman who only becomes uglier on her wedding day.In other stories she is the messenger, the witch, the one who casts a spell, or an unimportant nuisance.In this story, she is the link between the knight, Arthur’s life, and Gawain.She has the power of knowledge and the power over the men, but only to a degree.She must rely on a man’s chivalry in order to gain her freedom from a spell.Both males and females are prisoners of a sort and must rely on each other in order to gain freedom, be it from a spell or a promise.She symbolizes the idea that women of this period did not have sovereignty.She shows readers that when women are granted power over themselves, they are indeed beautiful creatures.Something also needs to be said about Gawain’s willingness to marry her and consummate the marriage regardless of the fact that she is ugly, eats enough food to feed six men, and is generally the outsider in the community.His promise to help Arthur overpowers his personal gain and he is rewarded in the end.
This story can be tied to the Irish story The Adventure of Daire’s Sons where five sons all aspire to be the king after their father’s passing.After asking a Druid priest for the answer, the sons set out to kill a stag that promises to be the determining factor in who will be the next king.When a storm hits, each son approaches a hag’s house for shelter but four of them refuse to lie with her in exchange for her assistance.The last son complies and since he gave her the sovereignty she required, she grants him sovereignty over the land of Erin.
The differences here are that the Irish tale speaks of the sovereignty over the land whereas the English version relies on a man’s submission to his wife.
This is a ballad that has many more humorous aspects but changes the story slightly.It has Arthur defending his life and seeking the answer to the question by himself.When he crosses the path of the hag he quickly agrees to have Gawain marry her for the answer.His life is spared.The hag is the sister of the knight that wants to kill Arthur as in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, but when Gawain is given the choice of when his ugly wife will be fair he actually provides and answer in this ballad.It is only when she cries about not being able to dine at night with the ladies that he offers her the choice.
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/ragnfrm.htm Online copy of the poem complete with editors notes. This is the most widely academically accepted version of the story and is edited by Thomas Hahn.
http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/middleages/topic_2/wedding.htm This is the Norton Anthology version complete with introduction.
http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/gaw/gawain-toc.htm Another version of the online poem.This is the same version printed by Thomas Hahn that appears in the first Webliography.
Secondary Sources:
This is a connection to the Literary Resource Center where this article comments on the problems with the many translations of the text and the minimal criticism that results from a widely available text.
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/marintro.htm This is an online version of The Marriage of Sir Gawain which is a slightly different story and not to be confused with the Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle.
http://www.delanohighschool.org/BillBaugher/stories/storyReader$1103 Online web source of information about this tale and many other mythological aspects of both Arthurian Legends and beyond.
http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/gaw/marriage.htm An additional online version of The Marriage of Sir Gawain.
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/ragnfrm.htm
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/0212raw.html This site provides information about the works collected by Rawlinson.
Sumner, Laura.The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell. Pennsylvania: Folcroft Press, 1924.
Copied from the TEAMS project website
Original Manuscript : Oxford, Bodleian Library MS 11951.
Madden, Frederic. 1839. See Bibliography of Editions and Works Cited.
Sumner, Laura, ed. The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell. Smith College Studies in Modern Language 5, no. 4. Northhampton, Massachusetts: Smith College Departments of Modern Languages, 1924.
Saul, G. B. The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1934. [Modernization with Introduction.]
Whiting, Bartlett J. The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell. In Sources and Analogues in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster. New York: Humanities Press, 1958. Pp. 242-64. [Reprint of Summer's edition with "a few trifling misprints" corrected.]
Sands, Donald B. 1966.
Hartwell, David Geddes. The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell: An Edition. Columbia University Dissertation, 1973. Dissertation Abstracts International, 34:3343A.
Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady. Retold by Selina Hastings. Illustrations by Juan Wijngaard. London: Methuen, 1981; Walker, 1988. New York: Lothrop, 1981; Lee and Shepard, 1985. [Children's version.]
Shibata, Yoshitaka. "The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell." Tohoku Gakuin University Review: Essays and Studies in English Language and Literature (Tohoku Gakuin Daigaku Ronshu, Eigo-Eibungaku) 72 (1982), 374-82. [Japanese translation.]
Garbáty, Thomas J., ed. Medieval English Literature. Boston: Heath, 1984. [Contains an edition of Ragnelle (pp. 418-39), based apparently on the published text of Whiting.]
Wilhelm, James J., ed. Romance of Arthur III: Works from Russia to Spain, Norway to Italy. New York: Garland, 1988. [Contains an edition of Ragnelle (pp. 99-116), apparently reprinted from Garbáty's text of Whiting.]
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell. Ed. J. Withrington. Lancaster Modern Spelling Text 2. Lancaster: Department of English, Lancaster University, 1991.
Shepherd, Stephen H. A., ed. Middle English Romances. New York: Norton, 1995. Pp. 243-67.
The following publication did not appear on the TEAMS website.
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. Ed. Thomas Hahn.Originally Published in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995.[This is the most widely accepted version used in universities and scholarship today].
Created by: Sharon Thornton Garvar
California State University, Northridge