By doing so, Sir Gawain ultimately fulfils his English Arthurian role of bringing the strange and unfamiliar into the ambit of King Arthur's realm,[6] and by defeating the enchantment of the castle, in a beheading scene in the Carle of Carlisle, the story told in this Arthurian romance has much in common with that told in the 14th-century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
[8] The youngest of the two copies that survive, in a manuscript dating to the 17th century, is post-medieval in composition and testifies to "the continuing appeal of chivalric plots among popular audiences" at that time.
The story, as told in a tail-rhyme romance of 660 lines dating to about 1400, is found in National Library of Wales, Porkington MS 10.
The story found as a 'minstrel piece' in British Library Additional MS 27879, the Percy Folio, consists of 501 lines in rhyming couplets and is sometimes known as The Carle of Carlisle.
[11] (This plot summary is based upon the tail-rhyme version of the story found in National Library of Wales, Porkington MS 10.)
And so, as in the broadly contemporary Middle English story The Awntyrs off Arthure,[12] the tale begins with the king and all his retinue riding out into the forest to hunt.
Fionn mac Cumhail, however, in the legends and tales of ancient Ireland, which have many similarities with the very earliest (8th–12th century) Welsh fragments of stories of Arthur,[18] is often beset by distortions in space and time and is often led by a deer towards a magical encounter with the Sidhe, the fairy folk, the inhabitants of the Otherworld, and it is certainly something of this sort that these two Arthurian knights and a bishop now experience.
The Green Knight who enters King Arthur's court on New Year's Day in the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is something of a giant: "... his lyndes and his lymes so longe and so grete, half etayn in erde I hope that he were – his sides and his limbs so long and so large, that I believe he may have been half giant..."[20] And like that story, in which Sir Gawain, having beheaded this Otherworldly knight at King Arthur's feast on New Year's Day, has himself to receive a stroke of the axe exactly a year later, this tale of Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle involves receiving what has already been given to another.
Sir Kay goes out to see to his horse and puts the Carle's own colt out into the rain with a slap on its backside.
As the others sit at the table, tucking into their food without a second thought, Sir Gawain stands on the floor of the hall, waiting courteously to be invited to the meal.
In the morning, the Carle shows Sir Gawain the bones of all the knights he has killed, upholding the custom that requires every guest who arrives at his castle, upon pain of death, to do everything he asks of them.
Sir Gawain, by courteously complying with the Carle's every request, has broken the spell and ended the dreadful custom of killing.
[21] The late-medieval Middle English story Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle has similarities with a number of tales and legends from Ireland and Wales that predate it, some by many centuries.
[22] From the evidence of medieval Welsh writings, some dating back possibly to before the first documents laying claim to any historical King Arthur in the 9th century,[23] and from Welsh folk legend, Arthur is 'the leader of a band of heroes who live outside society, whose main world is one of magical animals, giants and other wonderful happenings, located in the wild parts of the landscape.
[26] It concerns a cousin of King Arthur's who has been urged (probably maliciously) by his stepmother to go and seek the hand in marriage of Olwen, daughter of Chief Giant Ysbaddeden.
[27] Cú Roi mac Dáire, ostensibly a king of Munster, in southwest Ireland, features significantly in a number of Irish legendary stories and is often depicted as a shape-changer and a giant.
In order to resolve this violent dispute, the three claimants are sent around Ireland in a number of attempts to test their courage and skill-at-arms, in what is intended to be independent arbitration.
[32] Cú Roí mac Dáire is depicted as a shape-changer in Irish mythology and often takes on the form of a giant churl, as in his second appearance in Bricriu's Feast.
But from other tales, of course, it is seen that Cú Roi is able to pick up his severed head and live to fight another day; just as the Carle of Carlisle is able to survive the spear, and in one instance a stroke of his own sword, discard his giant churlish nature and emerge, as though released from his Otherworld castle and its enchantments, as Sir Carlisle, a knight of the Round Table.
He swam for two days until making it to a shore, slept for a night and the following morning "a great giant came out of the wood, picked Egil up and tucked him under his arm.
Sir Gawain's nephews have been captured by a giant: 'If you want your sons back,' he cried, 'then deliver to me your daughter so that I can give her to my foulest sex-starved scullions to do with as they want.
Sir Gawain sets off, traverses a forest full of wild animals that all bow to the mule, comes to a perilous bridge, crosses it and is immediately confronted by a mysterious castle.
Perhaps the most widely respected Arthurian poem in Middle English is that found in British Library MS Cotton Nero A x., alongside Pearl and Cleanness, and known as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
[46] In this story, King Arthur's Christmas feast is interrupted by the arrival of a huge man on horseback holding a holly branch in one hand and an axe in the other.
[47] Sir Gawain waits on the top of this mound, in the snow, and suddenly hears the sound of an axe being sharpened.
More than any of the romances from the continent during the medieval period, the Middle English Arthurian poems in which Sir Gawain is the hero, portray him as a supreme and unequalled warrior and as a knight who is wholly honourable and an exemplary practitioner of courtesy.
It is courtesy that impels him to comply with the terms of Sir Bertilak's Christmas game, to give a pretence of enjoying himself when his death seems imminent, and to politely and honourably rebuff the sexual advances of his host's wife when it might be his last opportunity for pleasure.
And when he has offered to marry a hideous hag in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, in order to save King Arthur's life, it is through courtesy that he lets his new wife decide the terms of their marital relationship, so breaking the magic spell and turning her into a beautiful young lady.
And in the end, the humour of courteously complying with his host's every instruction in his castle, even when this requires throwing a spear at him and sleeping with his wife and daughter, releases the Carle from a horrific spell and allows Sir Gawain to bring the strange, threatening and mysterious, benignly back into King Arthur's realm, as is his role.
As related by Flora Annie Steel, in her English Fairy-tales published in 1918,[52] it tells the tale of a boy, a farmer's son named Jack who, by using the same ingenuity that Sigurd used to slay the dragon Fafnir, kills a giant that had been plaguing Cornwall and takes all his gold.