[In the following essay, originally published in 1960, Friedman examines Morgan le Fay's role in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, presenting a comparative analysis of various critical interpretations of her importance in the story.]

“Le joyau de la littérature anglaise du moyen âge,” as Gaston Paris called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,¹ is obviously flawed in one crucial passage. When the giant has brought his ax down for the third time and cut a token gash in Gawain's neck, the hero bounds away from the block, and, after his temper has cooled, hears in astonished relief the Green Knight's explanation of why he had come to court to challenge Arthur's knights. The ancient lady of the castle, now revealed to be Morgan le Fay, was behind the whole adventure. She it was who had sent the Green Knight (in human guise, Bercilak the Hautdesert) to Arthur's court, her purpose being to test the renown of the Round Table and to frighten Guinevere to death. “Every reader,” says Kittredge, “finds [the object assigned for Bercilak's visit to court] unsatisfactory. It is the one weak spot in the superb English romance.”² For so elaborate an adventure, the initiating motive does indeed seem surprisingly slight and vague. In the result, Guinevere was not fatally shocked and Morgan did not succeed in humiliating Arthur by proving that his leading knight lacked the virtues of knighthood. Though Morgan's evil plans were defeated, her discomfiture is neither dramatized nor even made explicit. Once the reader has entered into the spirit of the fairy tale machinery and accepted with credulity the monstrous challenger who demonstrates his supernatural powers by speaking from his severed head, the remaining events follow conventionally. Kittredge calls Morgan “the moving cause … of the entire plot,”³ but here he is deferring tentatively to the Green Knight's statement. After considering her role more closely, Kittredge describes her rather as an intrusion, an attempt by the English poet to draw his story more solidly into the Arthurian tradition. Hulbert, whose analysis of the sources of the legend differs so widely from Kittredge's, also holds that Morgan is a substitution and excrescent.⁴

Recently the question of Morgan le Fay's function in the poem has been revived by Professor Denver E. Baughan, who argues that her role has been completely misunderstood.⁵ The Green Knight's explanation of the dynamics of the adventure is altogether valid. According to Professor Baughan, Morgan's plan to humiliate the Round Table and frighten Guinevere does in fact succeed. A high purpose of hers has been realized in Gawain's lapse from strict virtue. Indeed, she had foreseen the outcome. More important: Morgan's presence in the poem, far from being unnecessary or imperfectly worked into the narrative fabric, as Kittredge and many of the older commentators believed, is actually an ingenious device for giving thematic integrity to the poem. In support of these views, Professor Baughan has shown dangerous unfamiliarity with romance conventions in general and Arthurian romance in particular and has badly misinterpreted the poem. In this essay I shall combat his reading of Sir Gawain and his analysis of Morgan's part in it and then proceed to sketch what seems to me a far more tenable explanation for the poet's introduction of Morgan.

I

Arthur's humiliation, for Baughan, occurs in the first episode of the poem, the New Year's banquet at Camelot. Upon this splendid scene bursts the monstrous Green Knight and asks for the ruler of the company, all the while scanning the banqueters to see “quo walt þer most renoun.”⁶ The intent of this examination, says Baughan, is to embarrass Arthur, “for while the knights were turning their eyes toward” the king, “Bercilak's eyes were turning everywhere except toward Arthur” (p. 244). “Powerless to resist Bercilak's insults to the king, the knights become more and more afraid” (p. 244). The poet, however, less sensitive about Arthur's honor, does not feel that insults have been passed. He attributes the court's speechless fright to their absorption in the appearance of the monster; furthermore he excuses the knights' silence by saying it was not entirely fear that kept them silent but politeness somewhat: protocol demanded that only the king answer. Arthur welcomes the Green Knight, introduces himself, and hearing that the visitor wants to indulge in some game, assures him that he will not be disappointed if he craves battle. To Baughan Arthur's proposal is petulantly bellicose and inept: “Since the knights had been wondering how any man could survive the blows of such a giant and why he had not equipped himself for battle, the poet seems to have intended the beheading episode as an antidote to the follies of knight-errantry” (p. 245). To imply that our poet, for all his moral earnestness, could find anything foolish in the casual challenges and joustings, which are among the chief happenings in romances, is to foist upon him an Ariosto-like attitude that would have disqualified him from writing this poem. In a later passage, when Gawain is setting out from Camelot for the Green Chapel, the poet shows us courtiers of little faith lamenting the hopelessness of Gawain's undertaking by way of dramatizing its perils and Gawain's bravery, and it is clear that he regards such low-minded folk with disdain.

The Green Knight now divulges his peaceful Yule sport: he offers to allow any one of the knights present—not specifically Arthur—to chop off his head with the ax he carries, providing the knight will contract to seek him out a year hence to receive the same blow in return. The assemblage after hearing this proposal is depressed into even deeper gloom than before. The silence is broken by the Green Knight's taunts:

“What, is þis Arþureȝ hous,” quoþ þe haþel þenne, “Þat al þe rous rennes of þurȝ ryalmes so mony? Where is now your sourquydrye and your conquestes, Your gryndellayk and your greme, and your grete wordes? Now is þe reuel and þe renoun of þe Rounde Table Ouerwalt wyth a worde of on wyȝes speche, For al dares for drede withoute dynt schewed!” (ll. 309 ff.)

These words fire the king with shame and anger, but it is not the helpless shame he might feel if he were conceding the truth of the Green Knight's remarks, but rather angry shame that the court's momentary fright could discredit its long-standing reputation. Here called “dauntless by nature” and earlier “never afraid” (l. 251), Arthur steps from the dais and takes up the ax. His opponent has meanwhile alighted.

Now hatȝ Arthure his axe, and þe halme grypeȝ, And sturnely stureȝ hit aboute, þat stryke wyth hit þoȝt. Þe stif mon hym bifore stod vpon hyȝt. Herre þen ani in þe hous by þe hede and more. Wyth sturne schere þer he stod he stoked his berde, And wyth a countenaunce dryȝe he droȝ doun his cote, No more mate ne dismayd for hys mayn dinteȝ Þen any burne vpon bench hade broȝt hym to drynk of wyne (ll. 330 ff.).

According to Baughan's understanding of this passage, Arthur actually strikes the Green Knight two or more “great blows,” though they fail to make an impression on the giant. Gawain interrupts the proceedings to beg that the contest may be his, a request to which Arthur, with the advice of his nobles, consents. Gawain's blow of course severs the Green Knight's head from his trunk and sends it rolling along the floor.

The crux of the passage is whether Arthur in fact struck the blows. Baughan insists that he did:

In order to make assurance doubly sure regarding the second half of Morgan le Fay's plan, Arthur had to strike. Yet, through respect for the divinity that hedges a king, even a debased one (as Arthur was at this time), the poet gave to the account something of Morgan's magic so that it seems almost as if Arthur did not strike. Thus because of the deceptive wording (particularly þat stryke wyth hit poȝt), Tolkien and Gordon, Hulbert and Kittredge undoubtedly read mayn dinteȝ as “threats” or “threatened blows.” On the other hand, G. H. Gerould and B. J. Whiting both read the two words in question according to the definitions set down in [the dictionaries] and (curiously enough) Tolkien and Gordon's gloss, i.e., as “great blows” or the equivalent (p. 246).

Citing the Green Knight's comment on Morgan's power late in the poem, he asks:

What would have been the point then of having Arthur merely prepare to strike? To achieve her purpose not only did the so-called greatest of all the knights have to strike with great strokes, but his great strokes had to avail him nothing. On the other hand, his nephew's one stroke had to do the task with what seems perfect justice (p. 247).

But Arthur did not strike.

For the meaning of mayn dinteȝ, one need not ransack the dictionaries: the phrase means simply “great blows.” The authorities read “threats” or “threatened blows” because they are, with sound instinct, carrying forward the hypothetical overtones which reverberate from the poet's earlier þat stryke wyth hit poȝt. Gollancz's edition suggests that the mayn dinteȝ were blows that Arthur was “about to give.”⁷ If Baughan thinks that Gerould or Whiting stand with him, he is deceived. Gerould renders mayn dinteȝ as “strokes,” and his phrasing has the force of qualifying the dinteȝ into feints;⁸ and Whiting, who translates “great blows,” to be sure,⁹ has told me that if he had thought anyone could possibly have squeezed the meaning from his translation that Baughan has, he would have forestalled the error with an emphatic note.

Clearly—but apparently not so—the poet is saying that Arthur brandished the ax, making several test blows with it in the air to get the “feel” of the massive weapon. There are, further, overwhelming dramatic and semantic reasons for ruling out Baughan's interpretations. For one thing dinteȝ is plural: the contract called for a single blow. Would Arthur cheat? And in the presence of the whole court? Secondly, if one reads the lines carefully, he will observe that the Green Knight started pulling down his coat to receive the proffered blow after Arthur had made the troublesome mayn dinteȝ. Moreover, to have Arthur literally strike the Green Knight is dramatically impossible. Arthur's unavailing blow would have thrown the banqueters into another fit of amazement, which does not occur; and surely if the poet had intended to contrast the impotence of the physical Arthur with the efficacy of the spiritual Gawain, he would have spared at least a few lines (remembering the eighty lines on the Green Knight and his equipage) to point up the contrast and not fumble it away in a phrase. One must add that Arthur's granting the contest to Gawain is not to be taken as a sign of surrender or cowardice. He has demonstrated his bravery by his willingness to undertake the adventure; kings in romances were expected as a matter of course to delegate such tasks to their henchmen. Indeed, in one of the earliest analogues of this story, the king is expressly excepted from those allowed to take up the challenge.¹⁰

Another part of Morgan's plan was to “frighten Guinevere to death.” Guinevere does not die, but perhaps Bercilak is being hyperbolic. Did the monster even frighten Guinevere in any significant way? Baughan takes strong exception to Kittredge's observation that “there is no indication, in our author's own description of the scene at court, that Guinevere showed any particular alarm.”¹¹ True, Arthur turns to comfort his queen once the Green Knight has withdrawn, gory head in hand, but he takes the time to frame his words elegantly, and from the cheerful style he adopts, it is plain that he is not dealing with a woman in a state of shock. In the Vulgate Lancelot there is a scene roughly similar to the beheading episode. A damsel sent by Morgan falsely announces Lancelot's death and says that he confessed before dying to adulterous relations with the queen. As a token of her veracity, the damsel tosses in Guinevere's lap Lancelot's ring—“cest anel par cui vous donastes a lui vostre cuer & vostre amour”—at which the queen shows great distress, swoons away, and is only with difficulty recalled to her senses.¹² Our passage has nothing comparable, though Morgan supposedly intended Guinevere's fright to be fatal.

“Arthur's attempt to console Guinevere in her fear and his attempt and failure to behead Bercilak” impress Baughan as “two important pieces of internal evidence” that Morgan's plans for the beheading episode were successful (p. 248). I trust I have demonstrated that both these items of evidence are based on misreading of the text.

II

We now come to Baughan's major proposition: that Morgan's plan and its alleged success contribute vitally to the thematic integrity of Sir Gawain. If her plan, he insists, is to be “artistically successful,” that virtue which allows Gawain to succeed in beheading the Green Knight after Arthur failed must be the same as that he exhibits in the Temptation scenes. The unifying virtue, therefore, is chastity, and to accept chastity as the theme of romance, opens the way to understanding its moral content and the role of Morgan le Fay:

In a court where even the king himself, as portrayed in the secular romances, was guilty of moral looseness, the opportunity for the poet to capitalize on Gawain's essential goodness in this virtue, even at the expense of the king's humiliation, was without parallel. … In connection with [Morgan], this “only begetter” of the entire plot, as Kittredge calls her, it is inconceivable that the poet should have viewed her as a cheap enchantress. Except for her enmity toward Guinevere her plan and her fame as a healer are in the best traditions of the theurgic art as opposed to the goetic practices of that time. As Arthur would one day “fare to Avalun, to the fairest of all maidens, to Argante [Morgan] the queen, an elf most fair …” who would make his wounds all sound, so here that same Morgan would send Bercilak to purge and heal the court of its moral corruptness. … Thus through Morgan le Fay's plan the beheading episode is no less an apotheosization of chastity than are the other parts of the romance (p. 251).

A number of wonderful assertions are embedded in this statement. For convenience, I shall divide Baughan's remarks into two major sets of ideas and discuss each set separately. The first may be fairly summarized as follows: In the beheading episode Gawain succeeded where Arthur failed because Gawain represents the knight of chastity, but Arthur was guilty of moral looseness, specifically adultery. Arthur's failure was personally humiliating and shameful to his court.

Our analysis of the beheading episode revealed that the contest between Arthur and Gawain staged there by Baughan did not take place. There was no test for Arthur to fail and consequently no shame in his non-failure. But for purposes of argument, let us put this objection aside and also temporarily go along with the notion that the Gawain poet—like Spenser for each book of The Faerie Queene—intended the adventure he was narrating to illustrate the practical and moral force of a particular knightly virtue—chastity. How well actually does the Gollancz epithet “knight of chastity” apply to Sir Gawain?

For Tennyson, whose Gawain is a “light-of-love,” the faithless libertine who betrayed Pelleas, it would not do at all, and Tennyson's portrait is not far out of line with Malory's Gawain and completely in accord with the thirteenth-century French romances of the Round Table, especially the interminable Vulgate prose versions. In certain of them, as Whiting has fully shown, our hero is “painstakingly vilified,” and not least for suave amorousness.¹³ He is in and out of bed with so many complaisant damsels—not to mention his fairy mistresses—that it is surprising that more of his bastards, among whom are the hero of Wigalois and Gingelein of Libeaus Desconsus, do not turn up. One good mark in Gawain's favor is that, unlike Lancelot and Tristram, he does not participate in sustained adulterous connections, though Whiting finds it hazardous to say that he was never guilty of adultery “in view of the number of women with whom Gawain is intimate” (p. 203). That Gawain may well have had a reputation as a lecher in fourteenth-century England is suggested by the Wife of Bath's Tale, for pieces like the analogous romance of the Weddynge of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell and the ballad of “The Marriage of Sir Gawain” (Child No. 31) imply that the “lusty bacheler” of Arthur's court who took the maiden “by verray force” was probably the degenerate Gawain, although Chaucer of course does not name him.

But whether or not Gawain's reputation was already besmirched in English romance or in popular story when the Sir Gawain poet wrote, he could not have been unacquainted with the Gawain of the French romances. Kittredge indeed assures us that he was thoroughly familiar with the “ins and outs” of the Arthurian saga (p. 132). It would be foolish of course to assert that the poet was required to reproduce the portrait of Gawain which tradition gave him, but it would be equally foolish of course to deny that the poet's invention was to some extent inhibited by the associations with which he knew his readers' minds to be furnished. Obviously the Gawain in our poem is not a “light-of-love,” yet it is still hard to see him as the champion of chastity. And surely it would have been perverse of our poet to select as his “knight of chastity” that one of the principal knights of Arthur's who was notoriously the least chaste!

If chastity is important anywhere in the poem, it is in the Temptation scenes, and it is extremely doubtful that chastity is being tested even there. Thanks to the poet's skill in reporting during the bedroom conversations not only the speeches of Gawain and the lady but also his thoughts and dreams, we come to know Gawain's processes of mind intimately, and for that reason can decide definitely what is at stake in the Temptation. The preservation of his chastity is clearly only a secondary concern to Gawain, if present in his mind at all. Hardly for a moment does he feel himself drawn toward his temptress in a passionate way. He kisses her with no greater fervor than he renders up the kisses to her husband in the evening. Under pressure he has acquiesced in becoming the lady's courtly servant, but it is only after the lady has appealed to his duty as her newly contracted knight and to his reputation as a past master of courtesy that he can be prevailed upon to bestow even perfunctory kisses. And though compelled to dally, he is scarcely in the mood for dalliance. As we are reminded at crucial points by the poet, Gawain's anxiety as to the outcome of the ordeal he must shortly undergo deprives him of all pleasure in the lady's flirtatious banter:

“Þaȝ I were burde bryȝtest,” þe burde in mynde hade, “Þe lasse luf in his lode”—for lur þat he soȝt boute hone, Þe dunte þat schulde hym deue, And nedeȝ hit most be done (ll. 1283 ff.).

And as if Gawain's tension were not already sufficiently acute to prevent the lady's teasing from arousing an answering ardor in him, there is the additional inhibition of the bond Gawain has contracted with the host to yield up each evening his earnings of the day. Even supposing that Gawain entertained no fears about the appointment at the Green Chapel and had found himself susceptible to the erotic wiles of his temptress, he would still have been severely inhibited by his loyalty to his bond and his sense of honor from taking his hostess. If a test of chastity was the poet's purpose, he has certainly managed to drain it of any challenge, for Gawain's temptation is accompanied by circumstances which make it singularly untempting.

The girdle or lovelace the lady forces Gawain to accept at their last session would seem on the surface the key prop in a chastity drama, but one must remember that Gawain accepts it only because of its alleged magical properties and to be quit of the nagging importunities of his hostess. But though Gawain wants the girdle as an amulet, it is not simply because it is an amulet that he cannot yield it up to his host as their bond requires. The girdle is also, of course, a sexual trophy; the lord would surely draw damaging inferences (so Gawain would naturally think) from Gawain's possessing it. Thus it could be argued that the poet wanted us to understand that Gawain failed to carry out his pledge not only out of fear but also in order to spare his host unnecessary hurt and to protect the lady's reputation, which as her knight and a man of honor he had promised to do. In this conflict of duties, chastity has no part. [Note also that chastity is not specifically mentioned in the long passage (ll. 619-699) which discusses the symbolism of the pentangle.]

Mr. Baughan's second body of contentions is even more curious. Morgan le Fay, he claims, is no “cheap enchantress”—she is a goddess doing the holy work of healing. She sends the Green Knight to Camelot not out of petty envy for the renown of the Round Table but to “purge and heal the court of its moral corruptness.”

Sycorax and Prospero, goetic and theurgic magic, have been strangely confounded in this interpretation. It is true that the chroniclers, who were most concerned with the twilight of British rule, with Arthur's battles, mysterious demise and afterlife, picture Morgan waiting to heal her brother when he is finally wafted to Avalon. Such is her role in the Vita Merlini, her first appearance in literature. But “in all other episodes of the romances in which she is associated with [Arthur] … except in late sources, she is the perpetrator of some malign scheme against him.”¹⁴ As Malory puts it, extending Morgan's persistent hatred of Arthur, the “ruling motive of her career,” to Arthur's knights, “And ever as she myght she made warre on kynge Arthure, and all daungerous knyghtes she wytholdyth with her for to dystroy all those knyghtes that kynge Arthure lovyth.”¹⁵ That the Gawain poet sees Morgan in the same light should be sufficiently evident from his references to her envy of Arthur's court and her hatred of Guinevere. By speaking of her as a goddess, the poet deepens the sinister gloom about her: a pagan goddess becomes automatically a Christian demon. One also notes that Morgan was instructed in magic by Merlin during a love affair between them. Here the poet associates Morgan with Niniane/ Viviane, the mistress who wheedled Merlin's secrets out of him and then used them wickedly against her instructor.¹⁶ Further evidence that the poet intends Morgan to be fixed in our minds as an evil enchantress is his stress on the ancient dame's ugliness, cruelly particularized in the passage which ends with the ironical exclamation

A mensk lady on molde mon may hir calle, For Gode! (ll. 964-5).

Reminiscences of Morgan's earlier role as a beautiful fay skilled in the art of healing linger in the romances, for the romance writers cannot forget the part she is destined to play in the final act of Arthur's earthly career. Her beauty, however, is usually a guileful enticement to lust, and she uses her skill in medicine to drug inimical or unwilling knights or so to enflame the wounds of those she agrees to heal that they surrender to her to be spared further torment.¹⁷ Still the romance writers were troubled by the conflicting portraits of Morgan handed down by tradition: the beautiful healer, the beautiful witch, the ugly witch. The author of the Huth Merlin hit upon one explanation. When Morgan was a healing nurse she was beautiful, but as her knowledge of the wicked arts of sorcery grew, she became progressively uglier.¹⁸ From this we may reasonably infer that Morgan's ugliness in Sir Gawain is to be taken as an indication of her evil nature and sinful purposes.¹⁹

Granting for the moment that Arthur's court is sexually immoral or otherwise corrupt and in need of reform, is Morgan the proper agent for such a task? By nature fays are sexually insatiable, and Morgan is perhaps the most promiscuous lady, mortal or immortal, in all Arthurian romance. She is dimly identifiable in the deep backward of mythology as the fairy mistress of Arthur himself, which perhaps accounts for her unrelenting hatred of Guinevere, her supplanter in Arthur's affection.²⁰ Another explanation of the feud between these ladies has it that Morgan was frustrated by the new queen in her love affair with Guiamor (Guigamor in Chrétien's Erec), a cousin of Guinevere's.²¹ If Miss Paton and Loomis are correct in equating Benoit de Ste-Maure's Orva with Morgan, in the second literary reference to her she figured as the spurned mistress of Hector.²² She was also flouted by the unnamed lover, perhaps Guiamor, who became the initial bespelled inhabitant of the Val des Faux Amants (Val sanz Retor), and when Lancelot finally broke the spell of this valley, over which Morgan presided from “vn lit moult bel & moult rice de fust,” it was a numerous company of lovers that was released from disenchantment.²³ A liaison with Julius Caesar, chronicled in Huon de Bordeaux, produced Auberon; by Renoart of Bataille Loquifer Morgan has a son Corbon (“un vif diable, qui ne fist se mal non”); a son also resulted from her escapade with Guiamor.²⁴

Married to Urien, Morgan nonetheless carries on a passionate affair with Accalon de Gaul in the Huth Merlin that leads her to attempt the life of her husband.²⁵ Morgan's revenge pursues the hero through the pages of the prose Tristan for having slain her lover Huneson.²⁶ To Floriant of Floriant et Florete she is a benevolent fairy mistress; Ogier the Dane, cited as Morgan's lover in Brun de la Montaigne, spent 200 years under her amorous protection; in Les Prophécies de Merlin Morgan is the mundane mistress of the worst of knights, Bréhus (Brun, Breunys, Breuz) sanz Pitié.²⁷ At several points in the Vulgate Lancelot Morgan throws herself shamelessly at the hero, but she is no more successful in her attacks on him than she is in her pursuit of that minor Lancelot, Alisandre l'Orphelin, who protests that he would rather die than embrace the lustful harridan.²⁸ Our own poet's mention of Morgan's illicit “dalt drwry” (l. 2449) with Merlin shows us that his Morgan is just as remote from Geoffrey of Monmouth's regia virgo as that of his fellow romancers. How Baughan can cast a lady with this unsavory reputation as the reformer of sexual immorality at Arthur's court is baffling.

And where has the poet said or suggested that Camelot is in need of reform? Baughan's charge of “moral corruptness” seems to be based on nothing more substantial than the fact that some unspecified romance fathers a bastard (Mordred?) upon Arthur. One must grant that in the course of romance literature, Arthur becomes progressively a weaker and less dignified person, but there is nothing in our poem to warrant the belief that the poet is picturing for us a morally degenerate Arthur or that his praises of the Round Table are perfunctory or grudging.

If the poet had wished to suggest general or specific immorality at Arthur's court, the French romances of the Vulgate cycle, particularly those passages devoted to Lancelot's exploits would have afforded him suggestive material, for in them Guinevere's adultery, swathed to be sure in the glow of courtly love, is patent. Arthur himself is degraded by Lancelot's admirers in order to palliate the sins of Guinevere and their hero. One recalls that in the Vulgate Lancelot on the night that Guinevere and Lancelot consummate their liaison, in a nearby castle Arthur is enjoying the ultimate favors of a Saxon lady Camille.²⁹ In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, however, Lancelot is mentioned only once, and in an inconspicuous place in a catalog of knights (l. 553), no liaison with Guinevere is so much as hinted at, and the poet does not qualify his reverence for the king and queen in the slightest. But the coup de grâce to the reformation theory comes in the fact that neither Arthur nor his court show any change in character or behavior as a result of Gawain's adventure nor do they promise such a change in the future.

III

We open a more hopeful line of investigation, I think, by assuming that the explanation for Morgan's presence lurks somewhere in the toils of the plot. She bears all the signs and the numen of a dea ex machina, and in falling back upon such a device the poet betrays his difficulty in articulating the complex narrative framework of his poem.

From Kittredge's deliberate arranging and sifting of the analogues, it emerges that both the component tales, the Beheading Game or Challenge and the Temptation, at least in the forms that stand in the immediate background of the English poem, were disenchantment stories. In the developed version of the Beheading Game, the hero, after surviving the token return blow and thus proving his courage and fidelity, is asked by the giant challenger to strike off his head for the second time. The hero complies, and the giant by this act is unspelled, resuming his normal human size, appearance and disposition. The Temptation in the form the hypothetical Gawain[-poet] adopted was likewise a test to determine the worthiness of Gawain to be an agent of disenchantment. After the successful accomplishment of the last test, “the host bids Gawain cut off his head. He obeys reluctantly, and the enchantment is dissolved, the knight rising up in his true shape.”³⁰ With good reason Kittredge conjectures that it may have been the common disenchantment theme which prompted the combination of the two tales in the first place (p. 109).

But though itself the product of two disenchantment stories, Sir Gawain rejects the dénouement. What we should expect if the poet had followed through with the plot to his supposed source and the analogues offered him is that Gawain, having weathered the ordeal of the Green Chapel, would have been asked by the Green Knight to repeat his performance at Arthur's hall and decapitate him again, and when the knight had been unspelled and had explained to Gawain the reason for the strange events in which Gawain had figured, he would have returned with the hero to become a member of Arthur's band. Instead we have the Green Knight's good-humored explanation of the Challenge and Temptation, and the protagonists part with mutual blessings, Gawain for Camelot, Bercilak for his castle.

Why did the Gawain poet reject the conclusion indicated to him by his source and implicit in so many versions of the two stories he was running together? In deference to the poet's abilities, we must suppose that there was some artistic reason behind so important a decision. Perhaps he feared that after the beheading at Camelot and the interrupted beheading of Gawain at the Green Chapel, another beheading would be just enough to make the whole proceeding ludicrous. It seems to me far more likely that the poet's difficulty with the disenchantment action grew out of his major structural problem, the combination of the two stories into a single plot. In those analogues of the Beheading Game which end in disenchantment, the bespelled creature retains his unearthly stature until deflated to common humanity by beheading. Similarly not until the unspelling blow does the tester in the Temptation stories which imply or actually result in disenchantment, The Carl of Carlisle, for example, lose his monstrous appearance and imperious tone. In combining the two strands, the English poet—or his French predecessor—made one radical change. The tester in Sir Gawain is no longer a giant carl or ogre but a genial, urbane castellan. Bercilak assumes supernatural stature and powers only for the challenge at Camelot and the encounter at the Green Chapel; at his castle he appears in normal human form. His normal appearance at the castle was necessary in order that Gawain detect nothing unusual in his host's behavior, and so could be tested without himself or the reader suspecting that he was undergoing a test at all, and certainly not a test that related to his perilous mission. Thus, in the combined plot, the Green Knight becomes a shape-shifter, changing of his own will apparently from monstrous ogre to genial human host to monstrous ogre again. Presumably on his return from the Green Chapel, he changed once more and again resumed human form.

Kittredge was quite aware of how great an innovation the shape shifting of the Green Knight was, and he proceeds to justify the procedure of the French Gawain poet, who, he assumes, was the originator of the idea, by saying that since the gigantic axman of the Challenge was “manifestly a being with strange powers … shape shifting might readily be credited to him” (p. 108). Unfortunately, Kittredge overlooked the artistic repercussions of making the Green Knight a shape-shifter. The Green Knight's ability to assume human form for carrying out the Temptation takes away the uniqueness and the climactic value from that resumption of this human form which Gawain might have secured for him by a final decapitation. Nor does Kittredge's guess that at the end of the French poem Gawain managed to unspell the Green Knight by some more plausible mode than decapitation really affect the case because we are still left with Gawain undergoing a long and anxious trial to achieve a result which the Green Knight can perform for himself at will (if he is a bonafide shape-shifter) or at a word from his mistress (if he is the servant of an enchantress). The poet's only recourse if he wanted to preserve the human host of the castle test and the pervasive suspense achieved by such a brilliant design was to discard the disenchantment motive in the last section of the poem.

Dropping the disenchantment dénouement naturally entailed major readjustments in the plot. In the world of märchen and marvelous romances a bespelled person is privileged, and regularly exercises his privilege, to seek out the champion who is destined to become his unspeller and supervise the tests that will qualify the champion for unspelling. This principle would account for the Green Knight's journey to Camelot in the disenchantment versions of the Beheading Game. But if there is to be no enchantment, some other motive for the journey and the initial action is required. The poet's solution was to make the Green Knight the servant of an enchantress determined to undermine the reputation of Arthur's court, and Morgan for many reasons is the inevitable choice for the role of enchantress. Her hatred for Arthur and Guinevere was notorious. The woods of Arthurian romance are thick with Morguenetes and filleules de Morgain and fearsome knights on embassies to Arthur's hall to stir up trouble or to entice heroes on doubtful adventures. It is not only in the horn and mantle pieces that Morgan plays the goddess of discord. Since the poet was altering the conclusion that folklore and popular story had conditioned his readers to expect, it was wise that the substituted motive and character accorded so well with the related body of lore on which his story depended, the Arthurian legend. Indeed, Kittredge goes so far as to suggest that the English author's “distinct desire to attach his narrative to the orthodox Arthur saga” (as shown by the chronicle passages at beginning and end) may explain the loss of the disenchantment motive (p. 133). In my opinion, the line of cause and consequence moved in the opposite direction: the loss of disenchantment led to the introduction of Morgan, not vice versa. Hulbert's thesis that Sir Gawain is ultimately derived from a tale in which the hero is tested for his worthiness to become the lover of a fairy mistress was long ago overwhelmed by Kittredge's superior genealogizing, but it is possible that the English poet knew certain legends in which Morgan, Queen of Fairies, enticed Gawain to undergo such tests, and that the Temptation story in his source had brought these legends and Morgan to mind.³¹

IV

Kittredge's conception of how the plot of Sir Gawain evolved, on which the foregoing discussion is based, has been seriously questioned by the Loomis school of Celtic traditionalists. Miss Buchanan argues that The Carl of Carlisle, the text from which Kittredge deduced the form of the Temptation story taken over by the French Gawain poet, also embodies reminiscences of the Beheading Game.³² The two plots, according to Miss Buchanan, were combined thus long before the French romance writer took up the story. Her argument does not survive close examination, however. The Temptation, she holds, derives ultimately from a neglected episode of the Fled Bricrend which she labels “The Visit to Curoi's Castle.” But though Miss Buchanan has pointed out numerous resemblances between this episode and The Carl of Carlisle, it is precisely the Temptation scenes which are absent from “Curoi's Castle.” These she supplies by the liberal expansion of the Irish storyteller's bare remark that Curoi (Bercilak) “counselled his wife regarding the heroes” who were his guests and that “she acted according to his wish” (p. 326). Taken together with the fact that latterday folktales make Curoi's wife the mistress of Cuchulainn (Gawain's counterpart in the Irish saga), these phrases establish—for Miss Buchanan at least—that an amorous encounter occurred in some less inhibited Irish version of the story. The connection she draws between “The Champion's Bargain,” the ultimate source of the Beheading Game, and The Carl of Carlisle, is hardly less tenuous. In both stories the giant-host says, “Strike off my head or I'll strike off yours,” and in both “the giant is beheaded by his own weapon” (pp. 335-336). One scarcely needs remark that Miss Buchanan has read far too much significance into these two folktale commonplaces.

Professor Loomis supported his disciple's thesis in a lengthy and erudite article on “The Visit to the Perilous Castle,” parts of which, however, he has since conceded to be defective.³³ Here he attempted to prove by the traditionalist methodology that the numerous Arthurian versions of the story in which a hero is tested by the sister, daughter, wife, or female dependent of his host at the Perilous Castle are all cognates, going back to a root story which included in combination the two episodes from the Fled Bricrend discussed by Miss Buchanan. What makes Loomis' argument not entirely convincing is the elaborate hypothesizing he must use in order to find elements of the Beheading Game in these Temptation stories. In some instances (pp. 1016, 1022, 1025), the mere fact that an ax-bearer interrupts the hero's assignation with dame or damsel seems to him evidence that the Beheading Game has entered the narrative, even though he is dealing with romances written in the period when the hache and guisarme, rather than the knightly sword, were the standard weapons for household guards and foot soldiers.³⁴ But particularly in his ingenious reappraisal of the Guingambresil episode in Perceval and its German, French, and English relatives, Loomis has shown that Kittredge was much too summary in refusing these analogues a place in the Gawain story-complex.³⁵

More recently, Loomis has changed his ground somewhat and has brought forward an episode in the mabinogi of Pwyll as a source of the Sir Gawain story.³⁶ Since he employs this discovery to reinforce his argument that the combined plot had existed before Sir Gawain, as well as to offer a new explanation for Morgan's presence in the English romance, his discussion of the Welsh tale is doubly important to us. The Pwyll episode is summarized by Loomis as follows:

Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed (Southwestern Wales), met in a forest glade a huntsman, clad in gray wool, on an iron-gray horse. He revealed himself as Arawn, King of Annwn (the Other-World or Faerye), and admitted that he had suffered defeat at the hands of Hafgan (Summer White), a king from Annwn. When Pwyll agreed to fight Hafgan in Arawn's stead at the end of a year at a ford, Arawn sent Pwyll to his faery palace in his own form. There Pwyll dwelt for a year, sharing the same bed with Arawn's most beautiful wife, yet turning his face resolutely to the wall. At the year's end, Arawn fulfilled his bargain, met “Summer White” at the ford by night in the presence of all their nobles. It was proclaimed that none should intervene between the combatants. Pwyll dealt “Summer White” one fatal blow, and then departed to his own dominion (p. 171).

Now, despite superficial appearances and Loomis's extrapolation from them, there is really no Temptation in the Pwyll episode. Pwyll has been transformed into the appearance of Arawn. Neither Arawn's knights nor the servants at his castle are aware of the change. Pwyll sleeps in Arawn's marriage bed during his year of transformation in order to maintain the disguise. Though Loomis, by way of forcing the parallel with Sir Gawain, comments that Pwyll “spurns” the wife's embraces (p. 171), the Welsh says nothing about her offering embraces for him to spurn, unless her simple presence in the bed be so interpreted. Of key importance is the later conversation between Arawn and his wife on the first night he rejoins her, a passage which tells damagingly against Loomis's interpretation.³⁷ In this scene the wife expresses her astonishment at Arawn's marital activity after a year's indifference, a speech which shows that she did not know her bedmate for a year had not been her husband. There was, therefore, no collusion between the host and his wife, the chief requirement for a Temptation story. Not only was there no collusion, there was no test, collusive or otherwise, for it is from his wife's conversation that Arawn first learns (and only incidentally) of Pwyll's continence. Clearly Pwyll's behavior toward Arawn's wife was not a test and had no bearing on his success in combat. If it had been a test, Arawn would have known of Pwyll's continence from his triumph over Hafgan. Instead, Arawn seems surprised that Pwyll did not enjoy his wife—he had explicitly invited him to do so—and interprets the hero's behavior as a gratuitous act of friendship.

After establishing to his satisfaction the Pwyll-Gawain and Arawn-Bercilak relationship, Loomis proceeds by further extrapolation to cast Arawn as the legendary Wild Huntsman, whose traditional mistress in medieval and later folklore was Morgan le Fay (pp. 181 ff.). Morgan, then, if one accepts Loomis's deductions, may have played some role in the story-complex from which Sir Gawain derives, a suggestion offered on the basis of other texts by Miss Weston and Hulbert.³⁸ But to concede Loomis's point helps us only by suggesting yet another reason for the poet's hitting upon Morgan as a means to extricate himself from his plot difficulty; it does not cancel out the fact that in Sir Gawain she and her machinations, as Miss Buchanan admits (p. 330), are “feeble accretions.”

For though the poet, speaking through Bercilak, would clearly like us to think of Morgan as the “only begetter” of Gawain's adventure, effectually she is not. Her effective life in the poem is local, restricted to the few lines in which Bercilak tells us the reason for his journey to Camelot. If something had been said or insinuated about Morgan or an unnamed enchantress in the challenge scene or if the shriveled hag at the castle had acted in some sinister fashion, Bercilak's explanation might then have carried a measure of plausibility. As the poem stands, his words are inert. The old woman functions solely as a foil to enhance the beauty of Gawain's temptress; nothing of our image of her is altered by what Bercilak has said, no suspicions confirmed. It seems thus less than shrewd to speak seriously of Morgan as “the moving force … of the entire plot” when the plot has moved so sturdily to its conclusion without even an allusion to her.

Two lines of Bercilak's (2361-62) further badly undermine Morgan's right to be called the “only begetter” of Gawain's adventure: the speech in which he tells Gawain that he himself was solely responsible for the lady's testing of Gawain. The Temptation, thus, becomes Bercilak's private prank and is set apart from the Beheading Game inspired by Morgan. Presumably, even had Gawain succumbed to the lady's wiles, he would not have been fatally decapitated but would have only received a deeper wound, since Gawain's contract, so far as Morgan is concerned, is fulfilled when he fearlessly and bravely presents himself for the Green Knight's return blow. One would like to explain these lines away as the vestiges of a previous version of the story. They clearly belong to the new dispensation, however. They could not have come from a disenchantment story, for a bespelled creature would hardly jeopardize his chance for freedom by inventing gratuitous tests to hamper his prospective rescuer.

Try as we may to justify the poet's methods, we cannot get around the stubbornly solid impression that he fails to convince us that Morgan is organic to the poem. She is not, of course, the only thread imperfectly woven into the narrative. An overly literal-minded student may well be given even more trouble by the green lace which Bercilak's lady forces upon Gawain, for the possession of the amulet undoubtedly detracts from his display of courage. Fortunately these few loose threads do not vitiate the poet's achievement in any significant way. No sophisticated reader will be deeply disturbed to realize that Sir Gawain, like Gawain, is not quite perfection.

Notes

1. Histoire littéraire de la France, XXX (Paris, 1888), 73.

2. G. L. Kittredge, A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1916), p. 136.

3. Op. cit., p. 131.

4. J. R. Hulbert, “Syr Gawayn and the Grene Knyȝt,” Modern Philology, XIII (1915-16), 454, 462.

5. “The Role of Morgan le Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” ELH, XVII (1950), 241-251.

6. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, eds. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon (Oxford, 1936), l. 231. All quotations from Sir Gawain will be taken from this edition.

7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Sir Israel Gollancz, with introductory essays by Mabel Day and Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS, 210 (London, 1940), p. 102. Cp. G. J. Engelhardt, “The Predicament of Gawain,” Modern Language Quarterly, XVI (1955), 224 n.

8. Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, transl. G. H. Gerould (New York, 1935), p. 141.

9. The College Survey of English Literature, eds. B. J. Whiting et al. (New York, 1942), I, 118.

10. Fled Bricrend; see Kittredge, p. 12.

11. Baughan, p. 247; Kittredge, p. 132.

12. Vulgate Versions of Arthurian Romances, ed. H. O. Sommer (Washington, 1908-16), IV, 140 ff.

13. B. J. Whiting, “Gawain, His Reputation, His Courtesy and His Appearance in Chaucer's Squire's Tale,” Mediaeval Studies, IX (1947), 196 ff.

14. L. A. Paton. Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance (Boston, 1903), p. 13.

15. Works, ed. Eugène Vinaver (Oxford, 1947), II, 597 (Caxton, X, 17).

16. Lestoire del Saint Graal, Sommer, op. cit., I, 451-2; Livre d'Artus, Sommer, VII, 164; Paton, op. cit., pp. 62, 225 ff.; cp. Tolkien and Gordon, p. 115.

17. Les Prophécies de Merlin, ed. L. A. Paton (New York, 1926-7), I, 413-414; Le Roman en Prose de Tristan, ed. Eilert Löseth (Paris, 1891), p. 360; Malory, ed. Vinaver, II, 641-643 (Caxton, X, 37).

18. Merlin, eds. Gaston Paris and Jacob Ulrich, SATF (Paris, 1886), I, 166.

19. On evil significance of colors used to describe Morgan, see J. F. Eagan, “The Import of Color Symbolism in Sir Gawain,” Saint Louis University Studies, I (1949), 75-76.

20. Paton, Fairy Mythology, pp. 25 ff.

21. Ibid., pp. 60 ff.; cp. Livre d'Artus, Sommer VII, 135 f.

22. Roman de Troie, ed. Constans, SATF (Paris, 1904), I, 434 f., ll. 8023 ff. Cp. Paton, Fairy Mythology, p. 21 and R. S. Loomis, “Morgain la Fée and the Celtic Goddesses,” Speculum, XX (1945), 183-186, 202.

23. Sommer, IV, 117 ff.

24. Huon de Bordeaus, eds. F. Guessard and C. Grandmaison (Paris, 1860), ll. 9, 10, 379-380, 382; Paton, Fairy Mythology, pp. 50, 61, 124.

25. Merlin, eds. Paris and Ulrich, II, 189, 212-213; cp. Malory, ed. Vinaver, I, 149 f. (Caxton, IV, 13).

26. Löseth, Tristan, p. 137.

27. Brun de la Montaigne, ed. Paul Meyer, SATF (Paris, 1875), ll. 3253, 3399; Löseth, Tristan, pp. 96, 118; Paton, Fairy Mythology, pp. 17-18, 74 ff.

28. Löseth, Tristan, pp. 191 ff.; Les Prophécies de Merlin, ed. Paton, I, 414; cp. Malory, ed. Vinaver, II, 643 ff. (Caxton, X, 38).

29. Sommer, III, 409-411.

30. Kittredge, p. 106.

31. See J. L. Weston, The Legend of Sir Gawain (London, 1897), pp. 45 ff. and Hulbert, Modern Philology, XIII, 458 ff.

32. Alice Buchanan, “The Irish Framework of Gawain and the Green Knight,” PMLA, XLVII (1932), 315-338.

33. PMLA, XLVIII (1933), 1000-1035. Professor Loomis has generously written me that he now realizes that “the Temptation then in the various stories owed little to the role of Bláthnat [Curoi's wife] in ‘The Visit to Curoi's Castle’ and far more to the Welsh traditions of Pwyll and Arawn's wife and the Breton traditions of Morgain.” His 1943 article cited below marks the shift of opinion.

34. See Volkmar Bach, Die Angriffswaffen in der Altfranzösischen Artus- und Abenteuer-Romanen (Marburg, 1887), pp. 45-47, 127-130.

35. PMLA, XLVIII, 1024 ff. Cp. 1009 ff., Loomis' notes to Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, Lanzelet, trans. K. G. T. Webster (New York, 1951), pp. 171-173, and his Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (New York, 1949), pp. 417-420. The Guingambresil episode was put forward as the source of Sir Gawain by Miss M. C. Thomas, Syr Gawayne and the Green Knight (Zurich, 1883); Kittredge dismisses her work, p. 294.

36. “More Celtic Elements in Gawain and the Green Knight,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XLII (1943), 170 ff. Reptd. in Wales and the Arthurian Tradition (Cardiff, 1956), pp. 77 ff.

37. Mabinogion, trans. Gwyn and Thomas Jones (London, 1949), pp. 6-8.

38. See note 31.

Reprinted by Permission of the author and The Medieval Academy of America from Speculum, XXXV (1960), 260-74.