Sir Gawain and St Winifred: hagiography and miracle in West Mercia

Abstract

From the earliest serious scholarship of the mediaeval romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, seekers of source and editors alike have been teased by the problem of a possible earlier analogue posited by the here-joined but otherwise separate motifs of beheading and of the restoration of life, alongside that of the temptation of a knight. G.L. Kittredge found his answer to this linking by postulating for such an antecedent version an otherwise unknown author, "the genial Frenchman who made the plot of Gawain and the Green Knight by combining two entirely independent stories, the Challenge and the Temptation". This explanation had the poem preceded by such a lost French original, and it was accepted in total by J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon in their 1925 edition of the work, although N. Davis, in his revised second edition of their text, is very much more cautious, and states that "though elements of the two adventures, and others in some ways like them... (are) scattered fairly widely in Arthurian story... they are nowhere organically linked as in Gawain". Professor Davis came to the issue of sources more circumspectly than the earlier Oxford editors and found "incidents resembling both the adventures... separately in other romances earlier than Gawain", but he agreed with them that, "the theme of the beheading match occurs first in a Middle Irish prose narrative called Fled Bricrend, 'Bricriu's Feast', the earliest manuscript (of which) dates from about 1100".