Dame Ragnelle and the sovereignty riddle

Arthur, hunting alone, is cornered by an armed knight called Sir Gromer Somer Joure who has a grievance about land. Unarmed, the king cannot fight. Gromer offers him a bargain instead: his life, in exchange for the answer to a question, brought back in twelve months. What do women most desire?

Arthur and Gawain ride the country separately collecting answers and fill a book with them — beauty, flattery, wealth, a good bed, a young husband — and none of them is right, and both men know it.

Then Arthur meets a woman on the road so hideous that the poem devotes a long, gleeful passage to describing her. She is Dame Ragnelle. She knows the answer, and will give it for one price: marriage to Gawain.

Arthur says he cannot promise another man's hand. Gawain, when he hears, agrees at once and without conditions, and says he would marry her if she were a fiend, to save his king.

So she gives it: We desiren of men, above alle maner thyng, to have the soveraynté, withoute lesyng, of alle, bothe hyghe and lowe.

Sovereignty. The word that governs the whole tradition — who rules, by what right, and over whom — turns out to be what women want, and it is a loathly lady on a roadside who says so, in a poem that is played for comedy.

There is a wedding, and it is a public humiliation, and Ragnelle eats enormously in front of the whole court. And in the bedchamber she turns beautiful, and offers Gawain a choice: fair by day and foul by night, or foul by day and fair by night.

He gives the choice back to her. He says the decision is hers.

That is the right answer — it is the same answer as the riddle — and it breaks the enchantment entirely.