It may chance that I may resolve thy doubts, though I be not fair of aspect.”  “If thou wilt do so,” said King Arthur, “choose what reward thou wilt, thou grim lady, and it shall be given thee.”  “Swear me this upon thy faith,” she said, and Arthur swore it.  Then the lady told him the secret, and demanded her reward, which was that the king should find some fair and courtly knight to be her husband.

King Arthur hastened to the grim baron’s castle and told him one by one all the answers which he had received from his various advisers, except the last, and not one was admitted as the true one.  “Now yield thee, Arthur,” the giant said, “for thou hast not paid thy ransom, and thou and thy lands are forfeited to me.”  Then King Arthur said: 

    “Yet hold thy hand, thou proud baron,
      I pray thee hold thy hand,
    And give me leave to speak once more,
      In rescue of my land. 
    This morn as I came over a moor,
      I saw a lady set,
    Between an oak and a green holly,
      All clad in red scarlett. 
    She says all women would have their will,
      This is their chief desire;
    Now yield, as thou art a baron true,
      That I have paid my hire.”

“It was my sister that told thee this,” the churlish baron exclaimed.  “Vengeance light on her!  I will some time or other do her as ill a turn.”

King Arthur rode homeward, but not light of heart, for he remembered the promise he was under to the loathly lady to—­give her one of his young and gallant knights for a husband.  He told his grief to Sir Gawain, his nephew, and he replied, “Be not sad, my lord, for I will marry the loathly lady.”  King Arthur replied: 

    “Now nay, now nay, good Sir Gawaine,
      My sister’s son ye be;
    The loathly lady’s all too grim,
      And all too foule for thee.”

But Gawain persisted, and the king at last, with sorrow of heart, consented that Gawain should be his ransom.  So one day the king and his knights rode to the forest, met the loathly lady, and brought her to the court.  Sir Gawain stood the scoffs and jeers of his companions as he best might, and the marriage was solemnized, but not with the usual festivities.  Chaucer tells us: 

“...  There was no joye ne feste at alle; There n’ as but hevinesse and mochel sorwe, For prively he wed her on the morwe, And all day after hid him as an owle, So wo was him his wife loked so foule!”

[Footnote:  N’AS is not was, contracted; in modern phrase, there was not.  Mochel sorwe is much sorrow; morwe is morrow.]

When night came, and they were alone together, Sir Gawain could not conceal his aversion; and the lady asked him why he sighed so heavily, and turned away his face.  He candidly confessed it was on account of three things, her age, her ugliness, and her low degree.  The lady, not at all offended, replied with excellent arguments to all his objections.  She showed him that with age is discretion, with ugliness security from rivals, and that all true gentility depends, not upon the accident of birth, but upon the character of the individual.