Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle is a Middle English tail-rhyme romance of 660 lines, composed in about 1400.Ousby, Ian. 1996. Cambridge paperback guide to literature in English. Cambridge University Press, p 362. 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.
Tail-rhyme and couplet versions There are two versions of this romance and neither is directly related to the other, which suggests the former existence of a lost, perhaps 14th-century manuscript version. 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.
Manuscripts The story of Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle is found in two manuscript versions, one dating to around 1400 and another, the Percy Folio, dating to c. 1650. There are no known printed versions prior to 19th and 20th-century transcriptions of the manuscript texts.
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. This manuscript was copied, possibly in Shropshire, England, in "about 1460 or a little later" and the version of Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle it preserves was probably written in the northwest of England. 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.
Plot (This plot summary is based upon the tail-rhyme version of the story found in National Library of Wales, Porkington MS 10.) King Arthur is in Cardiff with all his noblemen, looking forward to some fine hunting. The deer in the forest are fat and ready to unleash the dogs at. And so, as in the broadly contemporary Middle English story The Awntyrs off Arthure, the tale begins with the king and all his retinue riding out into the forest to hunt. Unlike the Awntyrs off Arthure, however, the scene is not Inglewood Forest; although curiously, it soon will be.
Deer are slaughtered in their hundreds and Sir Gawain is soon riding with Sir Kay and Bishop Baldwin (these three figure in another late-14th-century Middle English Arthurian poem set, like the Awntyrs off Arthure, in Inglewood Forest: The Avowyng of Arthur, in which Sir Gawain undergoes a vigil at the haunted Tarn Wathenene: For the nature of Tarn Wathelene, or Lake Wathelene, see the note to line 132 of "The Avowyng of Arthur" in this edition, which suggests: "Gawain's vow to [carry out a vigil] at the Tarn implies a willingnes to encounter supernatural forces."). They are riding after a very fit deer that leads them tirelessly through the forests around Cardiff, over moors and by late afternoon, rather strangely, through a mist and into Inglewood Forest. As daylight begins to fail and the weather closes in, the three of them arrive at the gates of a castle belonging to the Carle of Carlisle.
Inglewood forest, near Carlisle, on the English borders with Scotland, lies about three hundred miles from Cardiff. This may possibly be a confusion on the part of the anonymous author of this tale. A principal city called Carduel is, after all, mentioned by Robert de Boron in his Arthurian tale of Perceval (the Didot Perceval)Bryant, Nigel. 2001, reprinted 2005. Merlin and the Grail: Josepth of Arimathea · Merlin · Perceval. The trilogy of Arthurian Romances attributed to Robert de Boron. D S Brewer. See, amongst others, page 121. and by Paien de Maisières in his early-13th-century Arthurian poem La Mule sans frein, The Mule Without a Bridle.Way, G L (translator), 1815. Fabliaux or Tales, abridged from French Manuscripts of the XIIth and XIIIth centuries by M Le Grand. The Mule without a Bridle, line 3 in the Way edition. Perhaps Cardiff and Carlisle have become conflated. 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,Green, Thomas. 2007. Concepts of Arthur. Tempus Publishing. 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.
Bishop Baldwin knows this habitation. The Carle of Carlisle has the custom of killing all those who spend the night in his castle. But it is raining, the wind is picking up and the brash Sir Kay has already rejected Sir Gawain's suggestion that they spend the night in the forest. He knocks on the gate with such force that the knocker nearly falls off and following an ominous warning by the gatekeeper, they are allowed entry.
They are led into a hall where four wild animals are sitting beside a central hearth. A bull, a boar, a lion, and a bear. These animals approach the guests menacingly, but are shouted at so fiercely by their master that they crawl away beneath a table in terror. A giant rises from his chair and comes over to his guests, welcomes them, offers them wine, which they accept. He is brought a four-gallon goblet for himself and sends it back, demanding one that holds nine gallons of wine instead. He is twenty-seven feet tall.
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 sides and his limbs so long and so large, that I believe he may have been half giant".Anderson, J J (Ed). 1996. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience. J M Dent. The Everyman Library. p 173. 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. The Carle immediately sends Sir Kay flying to the ground with a slap of his own. Sir Gawain, however, is kind to the colt and receives kindness in return from the Carle.
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. The giant asks him to go over to the buttery door, to select a spear and throw it at his face. Sir Gawain complies and, as the giant leans down towards the knight invitingly, Sir Gawain casts the spear. It clatters against the wall behind the Carle, sending sparks "as though from a flint". Whether it has passed straight through the Carle's head or whether Sir Gawain has (uncharacteristically) missed, the listener is not told; although in the 17th-century version, the Carle ducks.
Seemingly uninjured by this spear, the Carle and his guests finish their meal; although Sir Gawain has become enamoured of the Carle's beautiful wife and eats little. Following a dinner in which the Carle appears to demonstrate an ability to read his guests’ thoughts, and then a recital upon the harp by the Carle's beautiful daughter, they all retire to bed. Sir Gawain is invited to spend the night in the Carle's own chamber. Here, a bed is prepared for him and the Carle's beautiful wife is soon lying in it. The Carle invites Sir Gawain to do as he wishes with her and Sir Gawain courteously complies. When their lovemaking is threatening to become rather too serious, however, the Carle steps in and offers Sir Gawain his daughter for the night instead. Sir Gawain spends the night with the Carle's beautiful daughter.
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. (In the 17th-century version of this tale, the Carle now leads Sir Gawain to a chamber where two swords hang. He invites Sir Gawain to cut off his head, which although at first reluctant to do, Sir Gawain does. Following this stroke, the giant becomes a man of normal size.)
Sir Gawain, by courteously complying with the Carle's every request, has broken the spell and ended the dreadful custom of killing. Sir Gawain and his companions ride to King Arthur with an invitation from the Carle for the king to visit his castle. King Arthur makes the journey and he is welcomed with the finest feast imaginable.
The Carle of Carlisle is made a knight, Sir Gawain marries Sir Carlisle's daughter and Sir Carlisle arranges for a church to be built, in which services can be sung for the souls of all those knights whom he has so unjustly slain, until Doomsday. That church, the listener is told at the very end of this tale, is now Carlisle Cathedral.
Parallels in Celtic mythology 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.: See particularly chapters X and XIII.
British folk-tradition 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, 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.'Padel, O J. 1994. The Nature of Arthur. Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 27 (Summer), 1–31.
Welsh legends Culhwch and Olwen