The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle

The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle (The Weddynge of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell) is a 15th-century English poem, one of several versions of the "loathly lady" story popular during the Middle Ages. An earlier version of the story appears as "The Wyfe of Bayths Tale" ("The Wife of Bath's Tale") in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and the later ballad "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is essentially a retelling, though its relationship to the medieval poem is uncertain. The author's name is not known, but similarities to Le Morte d'Arthur have led to the suggestion that the poem may have been written by Sir Thomas Malory.

Stories about the Arthurian court were popular in medieval England, and the worn condition of some of the manuscripts suggests that they were well read. The Ragnelle narrative may have been intended for a festive or less than serious audience. Thomas Garbaty sees the poem as a humorous parody of the Arthurian legend, where Arthur is cowed by both the challenging knight and Ragnelle, "passing the buck" to Gawain.The Wedding of Sir Gawain survives in a poorly copied 16th-century manuscript located in the Bodleian Library (Bodleian 11951, formerly Rawlinson C.86) though it was probably written in the 15th century.

The story begins when the mystical knight Sir Gromer Somer Joure challenges King Arthur to discover what women desire the most, or face dire consequences. This encounter takes place following the stalking of a deer by the king in Inglewood Forest, a setting that in other Middle English Arthurian poems such as The Awntyrs off Arthure and Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, is a haunted forest and a place where the Otherworld is near at hand. The king, on his own instructions, becomes separated from the rest of his hunting party, follows the deer, kills it and is then surprised by the arrival of an armed knight, Sir Gromer Somer Joure, whose lands, this knight claims, have been seized from him by Sir Gawain. King Arthur is alone and unarmed and Sir Gromer's arrival poses a real threat to him. Sir Gromer tells the king that he must return in exactly one year's time, alone and dressed as he is now, and give him the answer to a question he will ask. If the king fails to give a satisfactory answer, Sir Gromer will cut off his head. The question is this: what is it that women most desire?

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