second and third divisions) of the temptation of Sir Gawain at the castle. These two adventures are found separately in other romances, in forms recognizably similar; they exist in the combined form only in Sir Gawain and two later English poems which are closely related to it. Both adventures derive ultimately from Celtic legend.
The Celtic form of the adventure of the challenge is exemplified in The Champion’s Bargain, an episode in the Middle Irish romance Bricriu’s Feast,[1] preserved in a manuscript dating from about 1100. The story itself must be at least a century older. In the Irish version the challenge has already a developed literary form and contains all the essential details of the later versions. An interesting feature which only the Irish story and Sir Gawain have in common is that three blows are aimed at the hero when it is the challenger’s turn to strike.
From a Celtic version of the story of the challenge passed into French, but through what channel is impossible to discover. There is nothing to show whether the immediate Celtic source was Welsh, Cornish, or Breton.[2]
- ↑ Fled Bricrend, ed. with translation by G. Henderson, Irish Text Society, 1899.
- ↑ According to Miss Weston (in her Legend of Sir Perceval, Vol. I, chap. 12, II, p. 25), the chief source of Gawain legend in French was a lost Geste de Gauvain composed by the Welsh romancer Bleddri, who is quoted as an authority who ’knew all the gestes and tales of the British kings and nobles’ in several French romances. Even greater importance is claimed for Bleddri as a source of Arthurian romance in France by Loomis, Mod. Lang. Notes, XXXIX. 319. For an identification of this shadowy romancer (whose works do not exist) see Revue Celtique, xxxii. 5. There is no evidence to connect the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with Bleddri. One French version of the challenge, Le Livre de Caradoc, forms part of a work which quotes Bleheris as authority, but the Caradoc episode is almost certainly not from the same source as the rest of the romance.
