A To Z Blogging Challenge 2020: R Is For... Dame Ragnell!

R is for Dame Ragnell, the wife of Sir Gawain and the only woman he ever loved. Their story is told in a couple of poems, The Marriage Of Sir Gawain and The Wedding of  Gawain and Ragnell. There is at least one Arthurian telemovie that features the story, Merlin And The Sword. 

Gawain and the Loathly Lady. Public Domain

The Loathly Lady - which Ragnell is - is a motif in Stith Thompson’s motif index. She turns up in one of the Child ballads, King Henry, sung here beautifully by Steeleye Span.

Basically, she is a terribly ugly woman under a spell until a man marries her despite her ugliness - a bit like a reverse Beauty And The Beast. She turns up in a lot of different folklores, including Irish and Norse. I have a soft spot for King Henry, by the way, because this particular Loathly Lady turns up in a story by the wonderful Lois McMaster Bujold, Labyrinth. In the ballad, young King Henry is hunting and stops for the night at a “haunted hall” where a ferocious female monster demands of him food(his horse, hounds and hawks) drink and finally himself as a husband. In the morning, the spell is broken and she is a beautiful girl. 

In the Bujold story, her hero Miles Vorkosigan finds himself locked up with a young woman who is a genetically engineered super soldier, from an experiment that failed. She is very tall and has fangs. She demands of him food, drink and himself (to prove he considers her human). He gives her a ration bar in his pocket, all he has, finds water for her from a pipe above their prison, and makes love to her, with sympathy and kindness, not because he has no choice. They escape together and he recruits her for his mercenary fleet. She never turns magically into a regular looking human, but cleans up well in her own way. See? If this wasn’t based on King Henry, it should be! 

So, Ragnell. She is a woman under a spell. King Arthur is hunting,  when he meets a terrible knight who demands, in exchange for his life, that he answers the question, “What do women really want most?”  His nephew helps him do the research and finally, they find an ugly, ugly hag who says she can answer the question - in exchange for Gawain as a husband. Gawain agrees. The answer turns out to be that what women want most is sovereignty, to have their own way. Nobody can argue with that. Why shouldn’t you? 

So, he marries her. They are in the bedroom. She offers him the choice - beautiful by day, ugly by night, or the other way around? And Gawain gives her the choice; after all, she is the one who will suffer if he makes the wrong choice. Boom! The spell is broken. A beautiful girl is before him and she announces that she will be beautiful by day and night. 

If you’ve read Chaucer, you might find this story familiar. That’s because it’s in the Wife Of Bath’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales, except it’s not Gawain, it’s an unnamed knight who is in trouble for rape. Fortunately for him, he is the pet of the ladies of Camelot, so he gets time to find out the answer. On the wedding night, he cringes at his wife, who offers him the choice between ugly and faithful or beautiful and adulterous. Meekly, he lets her choose and once it’s clear who gets to make the decisions in that family, she says she  will be beautiful and faithful. 

This was written before the story of Gawain and Ragnell and there is a theory that the Gawain story might have been inspired by it and been tongue in cheek. The later tale might even have been written by Malory! 

Personally, I think the Gawain version shows us a Gawain like the decent young man of Gawain And The Green Knight, but if it was written by Malory, you can completely understand that the man who wrote such enthusiastic sports stories about Lancelot, Tristram and the others might well have thought a story about love was hilarious. (Maybe a mediaeval rom com?)

The story shown in Merlin And The Sword is rather sweet. Gawain has met the cursed young woman before, and had help from her in a quest. Really, she just has a pig’s snout, nothing else, not a hag. But he approaches the King and Queen to announce he wants to marry Ragnell. They are shocked, ask him if he needs help, is there a reason he has to marry her.  No, he says, he just loves her. He wants to marry her. And they go down the aisle and when he kisses her, the curse is broken. She is beautiful! Even if she wasn’t, they would still have been happy, because, like Beauty in Beauty And The Beast, he loves her for who she is, not her looks. Mind you, I do wonder what would have happened if she had been a hag. 

Not a very good film, though it had a fine cast(Malcolm McDowell as Arthur, Rupert Everett as Lancelot, Edward Woodward as Merlin), but I liked that it included this story. 

Ragnell does  appear in modern fiction, but I can’t remember where I have read about her outside of mediaeval literature. I just have. 

She appears in my as-yet-unpublished novella A Matter Of Honour, some years after the Green Knight adventure. If you want to find out more, I’m still offering a free copy of the story in ebook till I find a market for it. Email me. Contact details are on this site. 

Tomorrow, Sagramore, Safir and Segwarides. The last two are the brothers of Palomides. 

See you then!