In their introduction to the book Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, Laurie A Finke
and Martin B Shichtman write that Contemporary readers never experience medieval texts directly,
unambiguously, or ahistorically. Their reading is always mediated in highly complex ways
the editions, glosses, textual notes, manuscript facsimiles, transcriptions,
and translations through which medieval literature is filtered and transmitted.
But personally, I d add another item to their list of forms through which modern
readers experience medieval texts animated Dreamworks movies about Scottish Ogres
Welcome back to Older Than You Think, the series where I make MY literature degrees YOUR problem.
And today I m going to tell you all about how the story of the film Shrek may have
roots which reach far further back in time than you might have known. And to illustrate that,
I d like to whisk you away to 15th century England, and introduce you to a romance poem named
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle . I ll just note here, that, when we re talking
about romance in the medieval sense, it doesn t necessarily refer to the sort of love
stories that we d call romance today. The term in the medieval sense derives from the latin-derived
romance languages these adventure stories were written in, such as French, or Occitan and while
we ll be discussing an English example of the genre today,
and English isn t strictly a romance language, we d still do well to remember that romance
means something very different in this context. But yeah, back to the poem. Here s a quick summary
of what goes down. King Arthur s out hunting in the forest, and he leaves his hunting party to
chase after a runaway deer. He gets the deer, but is then accosted in the middle of the wilderness
by a big funny looking night called Sir Gromer Somer Joure. I m not joking, that s his name.
Gomer isn t happy he claims that his lands have been seized from him by one of Arthur s knights,
Sir Gawain. Gromer threatens Arthur, but tells him he ll spare his life if he comes back,
one year later, with an answer to a question Gromer has. If Gromer doesn t like his answer,
though, he ll chop off Arthur s head. And the question is what is it that women most desire?
Well, Arthur s a man, and a medieval one at that, so naturally he s got no idea,
and is convinced that, come next year, he ll be a corpse. But when he s back at the castle,
moping around, his nephew Sir Gawain notices yes, the Sir Gawain mentioned earlier and figures out
what s wrong. Gawain suggests that both men ride around the country, asking women what they want,
so the fellas do this, but they don t get any solid answers. Desperate, Arthur returns
to the forest where he d bet Gromer, and he bumps into a truly repulsive hag of a woman,
by the name of Dame Ragnelle. She says she has the answer, but will only reveal it if she s allowed
to marry Sir Gawain. Arthur goes and tells his nephew this, and ever the chivalric knight, Gawain
agrees to marry the hag to save his king. Ragnelle reveals the answer what women want is sovereignty.
So Arthur beats Gromer s riddle, and his life is saved but the marriage of his nephew to the hag
Ragnelle still goes ahead, much to the chagrin of Arthur s court. After the wedding, Gawain and
Ragnelle go to bed, with Gawain less than excited about the, uh, consummation. But when they get to
bed, Ragnelle has changed form appearing as a beautiful young maiden instead of a loathsome
old lady. She explains that she was the victim of a curse fated to remain an ugly hag until
she could marry a worthy knight. And now that she has, the curse is, essentially, halved. She tells
Gawain that she can either appear beautiful during the day, when she and Gawain will be in public,
or she can be beautiful at night when the newlyweds will be together by themselves. Gawain,
though, remembers Ragnelle s earlier words that all women want sovereignty and tells Ragnelle that
the choice is hers. And, as it turns out, this answer lifts the curse entirely, Ragnelle regains
her beauty, and the two live happily ever after. This story is an example of the loathly lady trope
which often features women cursed to become hags, who must then undergo a transformation to regain
their true form. And there s a few other, older stories I could have told you about instead of
this one like Geoffrey Chaucer s Wife of Bath s Tale, or even some ancient Irish legends. But
there s a couple reasons I chose the story of Dame Ragnelle to dive into here. First,
this version of the story focuses a little more on the Loathly Lady s curse and the way it changes
her from day to night. Second, the language in this version of the story really exaggerates the
Lady s grotesque appearance. The Ragnelle poet s description of her initial repulsiveness is one of
the highlights of the romance; over twenty lines of what literary critic Sandy Feinstein calls
burlesque exaggeration such as the following lines for which I ll use a modernised pronunciation:
Her face was red, her nose snotyd withalle, Her mowithe wyde, her tethe yalowe overe alle
In the sholders she was a yard brode. Hangyng pappys to be an hors lode,
And lyke a barelle she was made. And to reherse the fowlnesse of that Lady,
Ther is no tung may telle, securly; Of lothynesse inowghe she had
Thus Ragnelle seems to be more than just a loathly lady. She seems almost ogre like.
With this in mind, let s jump forward a few centuries, and walk through the plot of Shrek,
paying attention to certain elements of the later text which now seem somewhat familiar.
Shrek is an ogre, whose isolated life of wild solitude is disrupted as the men of the feudal
authority Lord Farquaad sweep through the forest, and the forest s inhabitants seek refuge in Shrek
s swamp. Shrek isn t best pleased by this he sees it as his land being encroached upon
So he sets out to Duloc, to petition the feudal lord to resolve this land dispute. And the
solution to this dispute turns out to be a quest the conclusion of which sees a beautiful princess
turned loathly lady - brought back to the castle to be married into court.
And, after an unexpected twist, in which the princess is presented with the power of choice,
previously denied to her, the curse is lifted. That s the bare bones of the plot. Here s the
thing, ogres are like onions they have layers. But there s another onionesque quality to the Shrek
because if you peel back the superficial pop culture references, the way Farquaad was based
on Michael Eisner, and the rest of the fairytale characters, we see that the core of this film
is a modern twist on a centuries old story. The fairytale creatures in Shrek, which flee to Shrek,
fulfil the role of the fleeing deer in Ragnelle. Gromer s land dispute with Arthur is the template
for Shrek s confrontation with Farquaad in both cases the actions of the court have resulted
in the outsider s land being taken, and in both cases, the solution to this dispute takes the form
of a far-reaching quest. And Fiona is the cursed Ragnelle, hoping to lift her curse via marriage,
or true love. But, as I m sure some of you will be realising, the fit isn t 1:1.
There s a number of reversals from the romance s narrative, some of which are pretty major
the biggest being that, when the curse is lifted, Shrek s loathly lady stays loathly.
The thing is, though, this isn t just changing the story for the sake of it,
and it s not random either. I want to argue that this change the Ogre fate of Fiona in Shrek one
is actually a pretty radical and timely update to the medieval trope of the loathly lady at
the heart of both Shrek itself and earlier poems such as Ragnelle. You see, there s a paradox in
the medieval version of the Shrek tale, and it lies in the way that the cursed female actually
possesses more agency, more sovereignty, before sovereignty is granted by the male knight. Or,
put simply: the transformation these ogres undergo, to turn them back into beautiful women,
seems, ironically, to erode their freedom the very thing they claim to prize above all else.
Aforementioned critic Feinstein makes the point that while the loathly lady archetype seems to
desire sovereignty , figures such as Ragnelle while inhabiting old and ugly bodies already
possess what it is said women most desire. We can see this in the Ragnelle poem while still loathly,
Dame Ragnelle is able to force King Arthur, THE King Arthur, to marry one of his best
and brightest young Knights to her. But after she returns to human form at the poem s end,
she holds no more power, no more sovereignty, than any of the other courtly ladies of Camelot.
This is a fairly dark and ironic fate, then, as after claiming that all women want is a measure
of authority, the poem strips Ragnelle of hers. But Shrek? Shrek changes that, by essentially
reversing the traditional narrative direction of the loathly lady motif. Alongside her
transformation to full ogre, Fiona goes from a passive damsel in distress with little agency
to a being able to openly defy the feudal power structure and live outside its reach. This ironic,
self-defeating sovereignty in the poem is corrected, as Shrek turns the loathly lady motif
on its head to tell an interesting, feminist story, in which female agency and autonomy
emerge as more important than beauty all while maintaining a positive take on love and marriage.
I think, partially, this is because Shrek is an exploration of otherness that s why it plays out
a mirrored version of the story, taking as its starting point the glossed-over idea of
Gromer s lost land. It flips the script so the outsiders take centre stage, reversing both the
ending and the audience s sympathy. And despite the modern soundtrack and the veneer of parody,
Shrek emerges as a surprisingly sincere and thoughtful update of an ancient story.
So there you have it: Shrek, or at least the film s narrative skeleton, is way older than you think.
But that s not the interesting part the real shocker here is the way Shrek tries to engage with
and update the ideas of this medieval original. And I think it s safe to say that it succeeded.
Cards on the table, I adapted the last part of this video essay from an
actual essay I wrote while at university. And if you re signed up to my Patreon,
I ll throw a copy of that essay up over there, in case anyone fancies reading it. I mean,
I wrote it a good while ago, and there s definitely weaknesses to it and things I d change,
but I still think it s a fun read for anyone interested in either Shrek or medieval literature.
But let me know below what you thought of this video I ve got a few other things I want to cover
in this format, and in case you haven t seen it, I made a similar video on Marvel s Hulk a few weeks
back. And also back in December I made another kind of similar video, so if I end up making an
Older Than You Think playlist, I might retcon that to be part of this series. Otherwise chuck
a like on this video if you learned anything, and thanks for watching and I d like to extend
a special Ogre-sized thank you to all my patrons onscreen now, especially Ian Fyfield.