Medieval influences on fairytales?

As I was reading “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle,” I became extremely interested in the Dame and her story and how I recognized some of the traits she portrays and things that are described in the story and related them to some fairytale’s we have in today’s society. The way she is described as something extremely unattractive yet, she has all the insight the King needs to survive if he gets Sir Gawain to marry her, kind of like how Ursula the sea witch from Ariel says if Ariel gives Ursula her voice, she will make her human. Dame Ragnelle gets married to Sir Gawain and when they do their ‘marriage activities,’ she becomes beautiful. Sort of like how in Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs, the prince has to kiss Snow White to wake her from the sleep she is cursed into. The fact that Dame Ragnelle would stay beautiful for him from dusk until dawn forever, because he gave her the CHOICE to choose when she wanted to be beautiful, is a very uncommon thing to do during this time because women didn’t have much choice of anything. Even though, he originally married her because he was loyal to the King and wanted nothing more than to have his king survive, it turned into something more beautiful than that. This sounded to me like Beauty and the Beast when Belle goes to rescue her father from the jail and bamb Belle gets locked away in the castle with the Beast! Here comes the invention of my most favorite fairytale.

 I feel as if there is a lesson to be learned from the Dame and one basic life lesson/saying that I’m sure everyone has heard is “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” I feel as if this was a lesson, as the reader, we were to take away from the story. Does that saying really date that far back? This is also something we see in the Disney tale of Beauty and the Beast! Say What? Except, in Beauty and the Beast, clearly the Beast is the male figure. We rarely see women portrayed as the “ugly one”.

What exactly is her goal in this story? Is it as innocent as giving the king his answer to survive? Or, is it as selfish as to getting the curse lifted that her evil step mother placed on her? Some of these aspects we also see in Snow White and Cinderella! Snow White is cursed by eating an apple, and Cinderella is turned into her stepmother and stepsister’s slave practically and marries the prince; turning her from a maid into royalty—rags to riches type thing, (Ragnelle even has the word rag in it, coincidence? I think not) similar to how Sir Gawain’s actions change Dame Ragnelle into something more beautiful than he ever imagined possible.  It’s like Walt Disney took some of the characters from the Medieval writings and created different versions of them! I thought it was a farfetched idea that maybe, just maybe these fairytales’ we see today didn’t always have a happy ending. Anyone else have thoughts on that? Tell me guys, how far out of the box did I go?