Part II
Why I hate Lady Ragnell
by Alan Irvine

ne good story follows another as the swap session flows along. And then it happens. Someone stands up and announces that they will now tell a "King Arthur story." I stifle a groan and look for the nearest exit. I calculate the least obtrusive route out of the room and flee as quick as possible.

It is not that I dislike King Arthur. Quite the contrary, I have loved the Arthurian tales as long as I can remember, have savored the great renditions of the story, spent entrancing hours with the powerful Middle English epics. I think the Arthurian cycle constitutes one of our greatest cycle of stories, containing a wealth of moving, inspiring, and powerful stories. Unfortunately, nobody tells any of those stories. Whenever a storyteller stands up to tell a "King Arthur story," they always tell the same story. It goes by many names: The Lady Ragnell, The Dame Ragnell, The Hag Ragnell, Sir Gawaine and the Loathly Lady, Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight (which is an error - that title belongs to a completely different tale, generally regarded as one of the masterpieces of Middle English poetry) and even The Wife of Bath’s Tale, although many storytellers downplay or even deny the connection to Chaucer’s famous version. But whatever the name, the story remains the same. (A synopsis follows this article.)

And in all those endless tellings lies the problem. This story, quite frankly, is told too much.

Of course, simple quantity of tellings is not necessarily a problem. We have many stories that we continually tell and retell. For example, I have heard "Just Enough For a Story" (sometimes called "The Tailor," "The Tailor’s Button," or some other variation) more times than I care to recall. I have long since lost any interest in this story, but I do not object to sitting through it once again, and I can appreciate why it keeps popping up over and over again. This story is usually told by beginning storytellers, often as the first or second story they learn to tell, and for good reason. With a simple, straightforward plot, a beginner can easily learn it. Furthermore, this story is about storytelling and the process of finding and fashioning a story, concerns of obvious interest to the beginner. These elements make the story a natural first story, so I do not begrudge the tellers for trotting out this old story time and again. I doubt these tellers, being new to the art, even realize how often this story has been told already, how many times their audience has heard it in the past.

Not so with the tellers of Lady Ragnell. Ragnell is not a beginner’s tale, which is not to say that a beginner could not tell it. (The story itself is not particularly difficult, although it presents more complications than most tellers realize, as we shall see.) However, most people who tell this tale are experienced enough to know how often it does get told. Indeed, most people discover Lady Ragnell by hearing someone else tell it, enjoying it, and deciding to tell it themselves. And once again, this is not a problem in of itself. After all, this is how an oral tradition stays alive. The problem comes with what happens next; or rather, with what does not happen next.

After hearing the tale, virtually every teller proceeds to tell more or less exactly the same version they have just heard. They may change a few minor details here and there, but usually no more than that. Tellers rarely shape this story to fit their own style, outlook, or vision. If ten tellers tell Lady Ragnell, we hear ten repetitions of the same, generic version, not ten unique versions. Why bother? Why expend the effort to simply repeat what another teller has already told and the audience has already heard? Surely storytelling should serve a more lofty function that merely that of an oral copy machine.

One of the elements that attracts us to storytelling is the chance to enter into someone else’s world, to experience through someone else’s eyes and ears. We listen to a story because the teller has found something interesting, even fascinating within it, because the teller wants to share that discovery with us. In many cases, the story itself - the events and characters and settings - provides enough of a discovery. With the millions of stories out there, none of us have heard even a small fraction of the possible tales. A new story is a discovery in of itself, a chance to explore a brand, new world, to discover why someone finds that world of interest. But with a tale told as frequently as Lady Ragnell, the events, characters, settings present no discovery by themselves. We already know them intimately well. We want, we need, the storyteller to show us something new and interesting in the story, something we have not encountered many times before. Something unique to their version and their vision of the tale. Something that tells us that this is, in fact, a new world, with new discoveries within. How disappointing then to discover the same old world. How disappointing to discover a mere copy of someone else’s vision, to hear the same, generic Lady Ragnell over and over and over again, teller after teller.

Again and again we urge each other to research the stories we tell, to seek out the variant versions, to see what elements reappear and which are unique to a specific telling. We urge each other not to simply repeat the Grimm brothers’ version of a tale, for example, but to create our own version. The same imperative applies to living, current versions of stories. We should not merely repeat Teller X’s version, but come up with our own.

Over the years, I have found one version of Lady Ragnell that I like: Ed Stivender’s "Sir Gawaine and Lady Ragnell" (which can be found on Stivender’s Yankee Come Home.) Stivender does not repeat the standard version of the tale. Instead, he changes it dramatically. His version is half the usual length, delivered with a rapid pace. He fills the tale with wry comedy, witty lines, and offbeat observations, often looking back at and commenting upon this medieval world from a modern view point. In short, he tells Ed Stivender’s Lady Ragnell, not the generic version, and his version proves delightful fun, an entertaining journey into Ed Stivender’s world, filled with entertaining discoveries.

When storytellers neglect to consider and rework Lady Ragnell, they not only cheat their audience of the chance to explore an intriguing world, they also invariably walk right into the story’s other major problem: it is a bad story. More accurately, it is a flawed story, poorly constructed. The Black Knight’s question to Arthur, "what do women want?" defines the theme of this tale, sets out what the story is all about. (And "want" is crucial here, since the word "want" means not only "desire," but also "lack." The Black Knight’s question, and the story itself, concerns both senses of "want." No other word will work as well in its place.) The rest of the story proceeds to address that question, with the answer forming the climax, the punchline of the story, the line that pulls everything in the tale together and "punches" the meaning home to the audience. But the story gives the punchline away in the middle! Halfway through the story, Lady Ragnell simply tells Arthur the answer to the riddle, which Arthur then repeats to the Black Knight, just in case the audience missed it the first time. With this, we reach the climax of the story, the question is answered, the theme resolved. We still have half the story left to go, but we have robbed it of any further point. The rest of the story, devoted to answering the same riddle all over again, is now redundant. And yet, this second half of the story, in which Gawaine - and through him the audience - must discover the answer to the question for him(them)self is vastly superior to the first half in which Lady Ragnell simply tells Arthur - and the audience - the answer. Instead of challenging the audience to work out the answer for themselves, the story simply hands it over early on. The story’s own structure drains the second half, and consequently the entire tale, of dramatic tension.

With a little work, however, a teller can easily mend this flaw, preserving the audience’s interest in the central question throughout. While Arthur needs to hear the answer to the question early on, the audience does not. All the audience needs to know is that Arthur does, indeed, successfully answer the Black Knight. For example, "...Arthur came close, and Lady Ragnell whispered the answer in his ear. As soon as he heard it, Arthur knew in his heart that this was, indeed, the answer he had sought. Emboldened by this knowledge, he pressed on to his meeting with the Black Knight. ‘Have you the answer to my riddle?’ the Knight demanded. ‘Can you tell me what it is that women want?’ ‘I can,’ said Arthur, and repeated what Lady Ragnell had whispered in his ear. On hearing Arthur’s answer, the Black Knight howled in rage, for he knew Arthur had answered true..." The audience hears the important plot information—that Lady Ragnell’s answer saved Arthur’s life, and so he must now make good on his promise to reward her—but they do not hear that actual answer. The audience continues to attend to the story, waiting for the still to-be-revealed answer; the story continues forward with its central theme still unfolding.

The story benefits from the change in another fashion as well. In the original version, once Lady Ragnell, then Arthur, have delivered the punchline, the audience can safely assume that the story is done; after all, stories usually end with their punchline. Gawaine’s story thus shrinks into a rather long and complicated epilogue to Arthur’s—an impression further enhanced by calling this a "King Arthur story," designating Arthur as the most important figure in it. In the revised version, however, the unanswered riddle draws the two halves of the story together. Since stories do not usually leave their central threads hanging unresolved, their key question unanswered, the audience rightly assumes that the tale must continue on, that the events concerning Gawaine will be integral to answering the riddle.

I do not mean to suggest that this example is the only solution to the story’s critical flaw. I can, in fact, think of several other ways of mending the flaw. The exact solution a teller employs is less important than the fact that the teller does, somehow, attempt to mend the flaw. The crucial first step in doing so consists in thinking about the story, working with it and on it and not simply repeating what someone else has told.

Neither of these problems—the lack of unique vision nor the failure to consider how the story’s structure does, or does not, work—are unique to Lady Ragnell. If they were, they would hardly be worth worrying about; Lady Ragnell would be just one overtold, but failed story among thousands of better ones. Unfortunately, a large number of frequently told stories suffer from one or both of these weaknesses. ("Wiley and the Hairy Man" comes immediately to mind.) Few tellers, if any, set out to deliberately tell weak stories or copy other people’s errors. Hopefully, we all want to tell, and hear, the best, the most effective stories possible. To do so, for every story we tell, we should ask the questions I have tried to raise here: What do I find in this story; why am I telling it? How does this story work; how can I structure it to its best effect? What flaws might this version of the story contain; what aspects of the story might weaken it in the telling? Finding the answers to these questions can be hard work at times, but essential and worthwhile work as well. For after all the work, you end up with a story that your audience will want to listen to, no matter how many other versions of it they have already sat through.

on to Part III
Conversation Concerning Our Favorite Hag: A Rebuttal

Back to top.