to test him, and that it has proved him the most faultless knight on earth. He gives him the girdle as a present and tells him, further, that the whole adventure from beginning to end was the wicked work of the enchantress, Morgan la Fay, who hates Guinevere and the Round Table. So Gawain rides again to Camelot and is welcomed by Arthur and his knights. (Fit IV .)
It is an excellent story, quite outside the regular Arthurian cycle, and the reader will naturally ask where it has come from. The two incidents of which it is composed, the Beheading and the Wooing, are nowhere else found in combination, but there are extant in various languages romances in which one or the other is described separately; romances of which Gawain is the hero. The temptation theme, indeed, is a fairly common one and need not be further discussed. The beheading theme, with differences, is found in at least two Gawain romances, one French, “ La Mule sans Frein ,” the other German, Diu Krone . The oldest example of it, however, is in the Irish romance “ Fled Bricrend ” (“Bricriu’s Feast”), belonging to the Cuchulinn cycle. In this, three heroes at Conchobar’s court dispute about the chief place at the feast; Conchobar, refusing to decide the issue himself, sends them to submit their claims to a giant, Gath. After exacting from them a promise to undergo any form of trial which he may appoint, Uath prescribes a beheading test which consists of a blow by each of them at himself and a blow by him at each in return. Cuchulinn alone keeps to his agreement; after beheading the giant and submitting to nothing more than three feints in return, he is awarded the hero’s portion. Here there are obvious affinities with the story of the Green Knight: in both the proposer of the test is a giant, in both there are three blows at the hero, and in both the beheading is a test of courage. In folklore, and even in some of the romances, beheading is merely a means of disenchantment, not a test of courage. We must not, however, press such correspondences as have been mentioned too far. We are not dealing with folklore. Folklore is rigidly conservative, and in it incidents have a fixed, unalterable shape. When story has once emerged