‘Sir Gawain and the Lady of Lys’ and ‘Castle Orguellous’

The tale of Gawain and the Lady of Lys and the story of the adventures at Castle Orguellous are two episodes from the much longer First Continuation of Chrétien de Troyes’s Percival. The former episode tells of Gawain’s encounter with the family of a woman with whom he has slept and had a child and his battle with her brother Bran de Lis. As they fight, Gawain gets the upper hand, and the Lady of Lys tells the child sired by Gawain to plead with him to spare her brother. When the child is endangered by the clashing swords, the onlookers ask Arthur to stop the combat. He does so and makes peace between Gawain and Bran.

These events stem from Gawain’s liaison with the Lady of Lys; and they call attention to what is sometimes a feature of Gawain’s character. In some tales, he is said to be a champion of women. At the end of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, for example, when the ghost of Gawain returns to warn Arthur, he is accompanied by the spirits of ladies for whom he fought in righteous quarrels. Gawain is also depicted as something of a ladies’ man. There are a number of medieval works in which he fathers children, as in the Lady of Lys episode, or in which events leading to his marriage are recounted. The comment of Bernlak’s wife in SGGK that the Gawain she has heard of would not have spent time with a lady without asking for a kiss is a reflection of how his relationship to women is perceived.

The Lady of Lys episode is also interesting to students of English literature because a fifteenth-century stanzaic romance called The Jeaste of Sir Gawain has its source in this scene from the First Continuation. The author of the Jeaste narrates Gawain’s defeat of the father of the lady and two of her brothers. Brandles, the third and oldest brother, challenges Gawain, and they fight a fierce battle that must be postponed because of darkness. The two swear to fight to the death when next they encounter each other, but they never meet again. Gawain returns to court without having won a victory over the fiercest of the brothers and without even protecting his mistress from Brandles, who calls his sister a ‘harlot’ and beats her, after which she leaves and is never seen again. Gawain thus seems, in this work, less than perfect both in valour and in love, and less courteous and courtly than he is portrayed in most other works.

Another parallel to an English work is found in a scene prior to the combat of Gawain and Bran. When Arthur and his knights set out for Castle Orguellous, Kay attempts to obtain food from a castle on their route by rudely demanding it, and he is rebuffed and humiliated by the castle’s lord. Gawain then approaches the lord courteously and acquires the needed provisions. The same scenario is played out in the alliterative romance Golagros and Gawain. The echoes of the French text in two very different English works suggest some of the ways in which literary texts could be adapted and repurposed by medieval authors.