One morning the king had to leave on a journey and came to wish his daughter farewell. “I am meeting with many nobles and knights,” he said. “I will find you a fine husband.”
The princess tried to smile. “If you see the Green Knight, tell him I am waiting for him,” she said sadly. She was thinking of the green mounds in the churchyard, but the king did not understand this, and so, when he reached the gathering, he searched the crowds for the Green Knight. He also met many knights and princes and nobles, but no one known as the Green Knight.
As he was traveling home, he came upon a field where thousands of tame boars were feeding, guarded by a swineherd dressed as a hunter.
“Who owns these tame boars?” he asked the swineherd.
“The Green Knight,” he responded.
“Where does he live?” the king asked, overjoyed that he might fulfill his daughter’s wish.
“Far to the east,” said the swineherd. So the king and his men rode east through thick forests until they reached a plain where herds of elk and oxen grazed, guarded by another herdsman dressed in hunter’s garb. These too belonged to the Green Knight. “He lives east,” the herdsman said.
The king traveled on through green woods until he reached a castle covered by vines. A tall, handsome man clad in green warmly welcomed the king.
“I promised my daughter’s mother I would never refuse my daughter a wish, and my daughter wishes to marry you.”
The Green Knight smiled. “She cannot have heard of me. She must have been thinking of the green mounds of the churchyard. Take this book and tell your daughter whenever she is sad, she must open her east window and read. She will find joy.”
The king tried to read the book, but the letters were a language he did not know. Still, he thanked the knight and rode home with the book. The first thing he did was give the book to the princess. “This is a gift from the Green Knight,” he said. She was stunned to hear her father had met the Green Knight, and as soon as he was gone, she opened the east window and began to read. To her amazement, she understood the poems. They spoke of winds rising on the sea, the earth brooding, and knights riding to the rescue. Suddenly she heard a rush of wind, the rustling of leaves, and a moment later a bird flew through the window. Once inside, the bird turned into the Green Knight.
He bowed to her and said, “I am the Green Knight, and each time you read those verses, everyone else will fall asleep, and I will visit you.”
The moment the princess closed the book, the Green Knight disappeared, and everyone in the palace who had been asleep, woke.
Afterward, the princess slept. In the morning all her sorrow was gone. Each night she read the book; everyone fell asleep and the Green Knight visited her. As the days passed, the princess’s cheeks grew rosy; she laughed again. Everyone was amazed at the change. No one knew of the knight’s visits, and that they were falling in love.
“In three months,” the Green Knight told her, “I will ask your father for your hand in marriage, and I will take you home with me. Until then we must keep our secret.”
Meanwhile, the stepmother was furious. She had hoped the princess would die so her own daughter would inherit the throne. She sent her ladies to spy on the girl and they learned of the book and the open window. But before the ladies could discover the secret, they fell fast asleep.
The queen sent her daughter to spy, but she too fell asleep, and so the stepmother went to the princess. She pretended to be sweet and kind as she examined the east window. When she saw the vines, she realized someone could climb up the vine through the window, and so she hid a pair of scissors coated in poison just beneath the windowsill, the points turned upward.
That night when the Green Knight departed, the scissors grazed his leg. He let out a cry and the book fell from the princess’s lap, and she too cried out.
That night when she opened her book, the knight did not appear. He did not come the next night or the next, and once again the princess began to waste away.
As the princess sat in the garden one afternoon, two ravens perched in the tree above her began to speak. The princess was amazed to find she could understand them. They spoke of the Green Knight: “The princess is the only one who can cure the knight of the wound inflicted by the queen’s poison scissors.”
She listened closely as the ravens described the cure. “Like cures like,” they said. “The knight needs the poison of adders from the stable.”
The princess ran to the stable. Just as the ravens had described, she found an adder coiled around its young. She wrapped them in her apron and mounted a horse, and for weeks she traveled through forests until she found the same herdsmen her father had met. They led her to the castle of the Green Knight. There she disguised herself as a maid and went to the kitchen. She asked the cook if she might make the knight a soup to cure him.
“Why not?” the cook said, for no one had been able to help the prince and everyone in the palace was grieving. The princess prepared a soup of adders, and when the knight ate the soup, his fever vanished. He could stand once again.
The doctors were amazed. The next day he ate the soup again, and his health was completely restored. He ran to the kitchen to thank the cook, but there he found the princess instead, and they fell into each other’s arms.
“You saved my life,” he said.
“And you saved mine,” she said.
So they married in the green forest, and they lived there happily ever after.
“TELL ME A STORY 3: Women of Wonder,” the third CD in the audiobook series, is now available. For more information, visit www.mythsandtales.com.
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