We have here again half a ballad, in seven fragments, but the essentials of the story, which is well known from other versions, happen to be preserved, or may he inferred: Arthur, apparently some day after Christmas, had been encountered at Tarn Wadling, in the forest of Inglewood, by a bold baron armed with a club, who offered him the choice of fighting or ransoming himself by coming back on New Year's day and bringing word what women most desire. Arthur puts this question in all quarters, and having collected many answers, in which, possibly, he had little confidence, he rides to keep his day. On the way he meets a frightfully ugly woman; she intimates that she can help him. Arthur promises her Gawain in marriage, if she will, and she imparts to him the right answer. Arthur finds the baron waiting for him at the tarn, and presents first the answers which he had collected and written down. These are contemptuously rejected. Arthur then says that he had met a lady on a moor, who had told him that a woman would have her will. The baron says that the misshapen lady on the moor was his sister, and he will burn her if he can get hold of her. Upon Arthur's return he tells his knights that he has a wife for one of them. When they see the bride they decline the match in vehement terms, all but Gawain, who is somehow led to waive "a little foul sight and misliking." He takes her in all her repulsiveness, and she turns to a beautiful young woman. She asks Gawain whether he will have her in this likeness by night only or only by day. Gawain leaves the choice to her, and this is all that is needed to keep her perpetually beautiful. For a stepmother had bewitched her to go on the wild moor in that fiendly shape until she should meet some knight who would let her have all her will. Her brother, under a like spell, was to challenge men either to fight with him at odds or to answer his hard questions.
These incidents, with the variation that Arthur waits for Gawain's consent before he promises him in marriage, are found in a romance, probably of the fifteenth century, printed in Madden's Syr Gawayne, and somewhat hastily pronounced by the editor to be "unquestionably the original of the mutilated poem in the Percy folio." Gower (Confessio Amantis, Book i, vv. 1407 ff.) and Chaucer (Wife of Bath's Tale) both have this tale, though with a different setting, and with the variation, beyond doubt original in the story, that the man whose life is saved by rightly answering the question has himself to marry the monstrous woman in return for her prompting him. The ballad of 'The Knight and Shepherd's Daughter' (No. 110) has much in common with The Wife of Bath's Tale and should also be compared. The incident of a hag turned into a beautiful woman after a man has bedded with her occurs several times in ancient Irish story, one text being found in the Book of Leinster, a twelfth-century manuscript. For a full discussion of the whole cycle of tales see Maynadier, The Wife of Bath's Tale, its Sources and Analogues, 1901.
This page most recently updated on 05-Dec-2010, 15:20:04. Return to main index
