As a proper ballad, Marriage maintains the fundamental simplicity of the plot. There are none of the literary touches that Gower adds, or the learned allusions to Ovid, Dante, and Boethius of Chaucer's version. Likewise, Marriage forgoes the narrative replications and the thematic and verbal repetitions that mark Ragnelle as a popular romance and complicate its possible meanings. The interlocking sets of masculine social relations held in place through Ragnelle's plot do not surface in Marriage; indeed, the nameless antagonist calls his nameless sister "a misshappen hore" and promises to burn her "in a fyer" if he catches her. The lady's plight, whereby like a witch she "looked soe foule and . . . was wont / On the wild more to goe" (lines 184-85), comes about through a bad marriage: her father, an "old knight . . . marryed a younge lady" who in fairy-tale fashion proceeded to turn her competition (or her children's competition for inheritance) into a creature "most like a feend of hell" (line 182). The wicked stepmother appears also in Ragnelle and in Gower's version.
Like the majority of Gawain romances, Marriage places Arthur's court at Carlisle (line 1), and sets its action in Inglewood Forest, and specifically at the Tarn Wathelene (lines 32, 51). Arthur is presumably hunting when he encounters the "bold barron," as are the main characters in Ragnelle, Carlisle, Awntyrs, and several others in this group of romances. These linkages of plot and detail do not, however, demonstrate that Marriage is a popular refashioning of an earlier written or literary narrative. The Percy Folio poem may well be the record of one more retelling of a story that had been popular at least from the time of King Edward I, and that, in addition to giving rise to a group of literary renditions, must have circulated widely in oral performances throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. As such, it bears witness to Gawain's huge celebrity with an astonishing variety of audiences, and across centuries of enormous cultural change. The social milieu and the precise nature of the performance represented by Marriage are vividly defined in the fictional portrayal that Howard Pyle inserts into his Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883); in this children's narrative, Robin's first adventure is a meeting in a tavern with a Tinker-minstrel, who sings "an ancient ballad of the time of good King Arthur, called the Marriage of Sir Gawaine, which you may some time read, yourself, in stout English of early times" (New York: Dover, 1968, p. 19). Pyle's portrayal of this impromptu performance before a tavern audience at the edge of Sherwood Forest likely corresponds to the sort of setting in which the compiler of the Percy Folio Manuscript heard the version of Marriage that he wrote down.
Like Cornwall, Marriage is composed in ballad meter, namely four-line stanzas rhyming xaxa. The lines tend not to fall into regular metrical feet; instead they alternate, with four-stress unrhymed lines followed by three-stress lines containing the rhyming final word. As the oral sources of the meter would suggest, the poetry is most effective when read aloud; lines that "sound" clumsy when not vocalized take on life in spoken form.
Text
The Marriage of Sir Gawain survives, though mutilated, in the Percy Folio Manuscript, pp. 46-52 (described in the introductory material to The Greene Knight). In transcribing the cramped and fading hand, I have been aided by the editions of Madden, Furnivall and Hales, and Child, and I have sometimes followed their readings and reconstructions for letters and words that now appear indistinct or indecipherable. I have regularized orthography, so that u/v and i/j appear according to modern usage; abbreviations have been silently expanded, numerals spelled out, and modern punctuation and capitalization added.