Page [28], lines 785-790—'Purslain and lettuce.' The dish was apparently a kind of salad. Wolfram makes an ingenious use of the mention of vinegar to impress upon his readers the folly of speaking untruly, and incidentally shows that the use of rouge was not unknown in his day.
[Gawain's adventures with the Proud Lady (Orgelusé) and at the Castle of Wonders form, perhaps, the most confused and perplexing portion of the poem, while they also bear obvious marks of age and of freedom from the Christian symbolism which has so profoundly affected the 'Grail' legend as a whole. 'The Proud Lady' seems to be a composite creation; the characteristics of a courtly lady of the day having been grafted on to an originally supernatural conception. According to this latter, she was a water-fairy (note that Gawain meets her by the side of a spring, Book X. p. 6), mistress of a magic garden, in which are held captive the mortals whom she incites to a perilous venture, i.e. the crossing of the stream which separates this from the other world, and the bringing thence a branch plucked from a tree growing there. This adventure is of course only to be achieved by the best knight in the world, the hero, namely, of the episode, and to urge him to it she uses every species of raillery. When the hero has performed the task she gladly yields herself his. This incident, in itself a straightforward and intelligible one to which many parallels might easily be adduced from romantic and heroic literature, is, however, crossed and blended with another adventure of the same hero, the achieving the feats of the Wonder Castle, and thereby overcoming its magician builder.
The two episodes, originally told each for itself, coalesced owing to the personages in each being the same; for the Proud Lady is, I believe, far more intimately connected with the Wonder Castle than appears from Wolfram's poem; I suspect her, indeed, of being the magician's daughter. That the wedding of Gawain with Orgelusé should take place in the Château Merveil is at present almost the only trace remaining of the original connection, but that is decisive. For, as will be pointed out in Note to Book XI., the episode of the Wonder Castle must originally have ended in the hero's remaining there; he has won to the other world whence he cannot return, but over which he rules, in company with its fair mistress. As it is, the reader cannot but feel that the winning of the Branch is an anti-climax after the achievement of the Castle of Wonders.
The true significance of the Proud Lady's garden has also been obscured in our poem; it may possibly at one time have been confused with the Wonder Castle, and might then be compared with the Garden of Joy which Merlin created for Ninian; there is indeed a strong temptation to compare Merlin and Ninian with Klingsor and Orgelusé, wide as the difference is between the two stories. But it is more probable that the Magic Garden belongs wholly to the Winning of the Branch feat, and that, like the remainder of this episode, it has suffered from contamination with the Wonder Castle story. (In connection with this it may be noted that in Chrêtien, Gawain, after crossing the Perilous Ford, is not to pluck the branch of any one special tree, but to gather the flowers which he sees, 'A ces arbres et á ces prés.' The idea of a garden seems to have been better preserved in the French than in the German poem.)
Another portion of the original story, the flyting of hero and heroine, has been completely remodelled by the twelfth century poets, in order to afford an exemplification of the current ideal of courtly love and lady-service; hence the complex character of the heroine, and the confused nature of the episode as related by Wolfram. It would be useless to seek in pre-twelfth century literature for an exact parallel to a situation so manifestly coloured to suit the prevailing social ideas of the time; but the episode must have some root in preceding literature, the special form of the social relation of man to woman which is the most marked feature of twelfth century literary art must stand in some relation to the past; and it is in the Irish heroic literature of the seventh to the eleventh centuries that we must seek for the origin of this feature.
In this literature we find a remarkable parallel to the whole Gawain-Orgelusé episode. 'The Wooing of Emer' by Cuchulainn is one of the most famous stories about the greatest Irish hero. Emer was the daughter of Forgall the Wily, the chief maiden of Ireland in all virtues and qualities, and therefore the only one whom Cuchulainn deemed worthy of him. But she is by no means minded to take him at his own estimation; when he recounts his achievements, 'these are goodly fights of a tender boy,' says she, nor will she consent to see him until he perform certain definite feats. Moreover, her father is by no means anxious that she should marry, and to get rid of the wooer has him sent off with two companions on a perilous expedition to Skye. The first danger he encountered (I quote textually from the oldest version of the story, ascribed by the editor, Professor Kuno Meyer, to the eighth century) is 'some dreadful beast like a lion, which fought with him, but did him no harm, and the foul play of the youths who laughed at him' (Revue Celtique, vol. X. 44). Afterwards he has to make his way across the 'plain of ill-luck' on which men freeze, and by a narrow path over a glen, and a 'terrible stony height.' Cuchulainn of course comes safely through all these and other ventures, and carries off Emer, whom he weds. Here, then, we have the contemptuous attitude of the wooed maiden, her indication of feats to be performed before she can be won; and before the final marriage a series of incidents bearing no small resemblance to those which befall Gawain at the Wonder Castle.—Alfred Nutt.]
BOOK XI
TRADITIONAL EVENTS
| Gawain, against the advice of the Boatman, visits Château Merveil, seats himself on the magic couch, and is assailed, first by unseen adversaries, then by a lion which he kills and ends the enchantments of the Castle. | Chrêtien gives the incidents in the same order, but with some difference in details, |