They ride to an anchorite’s cell: 

“Si waren doe in dire gedochten
Mochten sie daer comen tier stont
Datten Walewein soude maken gesont."[13]

The Dutch Lancelot has numerous references to Gawain’s skill in healing.  Of course the advocates of the originality of Chrétien de Troyes will object that these references, though found in poems which have no connection with Chrétien, and which are translations from lost French originals of an undetermined date, are one and all loans from the more famous poem.  This, however, can hardly be contended of the Welsh Triads; there we find Gwalchmai, the Welsh Gawain, cited as one of the three men “To whom the nature of every object was known,"[14] an accomplishment exceedingly necessary for a ‘Medicine Man,’ but not at first sight especially needful for the equipment of a knight.[15] This persistent attribution of healing skill is not, so far as my acquaintance with medieval Romance goes, paralleled in the case of any other knight; even Tristan, who is probably the most accomplished of heroes of romance, the most thoroughly trained in all branches of knightly education, is not credited with any such knowledge.  No other knight, save Gawain, has the reputation of a Healer, yet Gawain, the Maidens’ Knight, the ‘fair Father of Nurture’ is, at first sight, hardly the personage one might expect to possess such skill.  Why he should be so persistently connected with healing was for long a problem to me; recently, however, I have begun to suspect that we have in this apparently motiveless attribution the survival of an early stage of tradition in which not only did Gawain cure the Grail King, but he did so, not by means of a question, or by the welding of a broken sword, but by more obvious and natural means, the administration of a healing herb.  Gawain’s character of Healer belongs to him in his rôle of Grail Winner.

Some years ago, in the course of my reading, I came across a passage in which certain knights of Arthur’s court, riding through a forest, come upon a herb ‘which belonged to the Grail.’  Unfortunately the reference, at the time I met with it, though it struck me as curious, did not possess any special significance, and either I omitted to make a note of it, or entered it in a book which, with sundry others, went mysteriously astray in the process of moving furniture.  In any case, though I have searched diligently I have failed to recover the passage, but I note it here in the hope that one of my reader may be more fortunate.

It is perhaps not without significance that a mention of Peredur (Perceval) in Welsh poetry may also possibly contain a reference to his healing office.  I refer to the well-known Song of the Graves in the Black Book of Carmarthen where the grave of Mor, son of Peredur Penwetic, is referred to.  According to Dr G. Evans the word penwedic, or perfeddyg, as it may also be read, means chief Healer.  Peredur, it is needless to say, is the Welsh equivalent of Perceval, Gawain’s successor and supplanter in the rôle of Grail hero.