Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle

Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle is a Middle English tail-rhyme romance of 660 lines, composed in about 1400. A similar story is told in a 17th-century minstrel piece found in the Percy Folio and known as The Carle of Carlisle. These are two of a number of early English poems that feature the Arthurian hero Sir Gawain, the nephew of King Arthur, in his English role as a knight of the Round Table renowned for his valour and, particularly, for his courtesy.

This is taken to comic lengths when, during a hunting expedition, Sir Gawain arrives with his hunting companions Sir Kay and Bishop Baldwin, at a castle owned by the Carle of Carlisle. A carle - a variant of the Old Norse word for "free man", from which also the first name Carl is derived - was a rough, uncouth man in medieval England and to have him as the lord of a castle helps to create a sense of an entry into an Otherworld, as does the way Sir Gawain and his companions arrive. They have been pursuing a deer all afternoon, like the Irish mythological hero Fionn mac Cumhail, in a forest outside Cardiff, but arrive in the evening in the haunted Inglewood Forest, near Carlisle, in the north of England, a distance of about three hundred miles.

Forced to shelter from the rain in the Carle's castle overnight, Sir Gawain courteously complies with all of the Carle's instructions whilst a guest in his castle, even when this involves going to bed with the Carle's wife and throwing a spear at his face. 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, 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.

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