Gawain

The Hawk of May

Gawain is the oldest of the great knights and the only one whose career can be traced from Welsh tradition through to a masterpiece of English poetry. His Welsh name is Gwalchmei fab Gwyar. The first element is gwalch, "hawk"; the second is traditionally read as Mai, "May", giving the attractive gloss "hawk of May", though the etymology is contested and the second element may be a personal name ^1,8. In Culhwch and Olwen he is already Arthur's nephew and already exceptional: the best of walkers and riders, a kinsman who never came home without the errand he sought.

The Chronicle Gawain

Geoffrey of Monmouth calls him Walwanus, son of King Lot and Arthur's sister, and gives him the plainest heroic role in the whole Historia: the hot-tempered envoy who provokes the war with Rome, the finest fighter in Arthur's army, and the man who dies in the landing at Richborough against Mordred's forces ². Wace and Layamon keep him in that position. For roughly a century, before Lancelot exists, Gawain simply is the best knight of the Round Table.

The Model of Courtesy

Chretien de Troyes uses him as a measuring instrument. In Yvain and Perceval Gawain is the established standard of chivalry against whom the young hero is calibrated, and Chretien gives him long parallel sequences of his own: he is unfailingly courteous, socially adroit, physically supreme, and — in the Conte du Graal — comprehensively unable to make progress on the spiritual quest that the poem cares about ³. Ad Putter's study of the relationship between the French tradition and the English poem shows how much of this is a matter of register rather than character: Gawain embodies the courtly surface, and each writer decides whether that surface is enough ⁸.

The French Demotion

The thirteenth-century prose cycles decided it was not. As Lancelot rose, Gawain fell. In the Vulgate he becomes proud, quick to violence, promiscuous, and disastrous on the Grail quest, where he kills fellow knights of the Round Table in unrecognised combat and is told plainly by a hermit that his sins bar him from any share in the Holy Grail ⁴. In La Mort le Roi Artu his refusal to forgive Lancelot for the accidental killing of his brothers Gareth and Gaheris drives Arthur into the war that empties Britain and lets Mordred take the crown ⁴. He became, in French hands, the flaw in the fellowship.

The English Gawain

English writers refused to accept the demotion, and Gawain remained the national favourite. The alliterative Morte Arthure gives him a magnificent death; The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle has him marry a loathly lady to save Arthur's life and win the answer to the riddle of what women most desire, which turns out to be sovereignty over themselves ⁶.

Above all there is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, composed in the north-west Midlands in the late fourteenth century and preserved in a single manuscript. A green giant rides into the Christmas feast at Camelot and offers a beheading game; Gawain takes the axe, and a year later rides north to keep the appointment that will cost him his head. The genius of the poem is that the real test is not the axe at all but three mornings of conversation with a lady in a bedroom, and that Gawain fails it only slightly, by concealing a green girdle he thinks will save his life ^5,8. He returns wearing it as a badge of shame; the court adopts it as a fashion. Nowhere else in medieval literature is a hero's tiny, entirely human lapse examined with such tenderness. The whole affair, the poem finally reveals, was arranged by Morgan le Fay.

Malory and the Feud

Malory, working mainly from French sources, inherits the demoted Gawain but softens him. His Gawain is loyal, formidable, and finally consumed by grief: after Lancelot kills his unarmed brothers in the rescue of Guinevere, Gawain forces the war that destroys the kingdom, is mortally wounded by Lancelot in single combat, and dictates a letter of forgiveness from his deathbed ⁷. Malory also preserves the tradition, found in the French cycles, that Gawain's strength waxes with the sun until noon and wanes afterwards — an odd, archaic detail that some scholars have read as a survival of an older solar-hero conception, though the evidence for that is thin ^7,8.

In Popular Culture

Gawain's modern reputation rests almost entirely on the fourteenth-century poem, kept alive by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon's standard edition and Tolkien's later translation, and taught in schools and universities across the English-speaking world. David Lowery's film The Green Knight (2021), with Dev Patel as Gawain, reworked it as a dreamlike study of a young man trying to become worth a story. Elsewhere he tends to appear as the loyal nephew and second blade to Arthur, which is roughly where the twelfth century left him.