Gawain - Blog Posts

In La Tavola Ritonda, the Orkneys' loyalties are a bit different: all of them except for Mordred are in on trying to reveal the affair, with Gawain as the leader. They prepare an ambush, which Lancelot escapes after killing Agravaine, Gaheris, and eight unnamed knights.

As would be expected, Gawain furiously tries to avenge his brothers—though it isn't quite the same, since he already had a vendetta against Lancelot and might have duelled him anyway.

Regardless, Gareth, presumably still alive but now unimportant to the narrative, is never heard from again.

In a way, Lancelot saved Gareth (and Gaheris) in killing them, bc we will never know if they would've taken Mordred's side. And I think a lot of people in and out of the narrative would like to assume Gareth wouldn't but we don't know and I genuinely believe it could've gone either way. AND in overshadowing their protest in his own actions, Lancelot obscures a key piece of evidence that Gareth and Gaheris might have gone against Arthur.

As much as I love these boys, the most "important*" thing they do is to die, and become martyrs for Gawain's vengeance against Lancelot. And like many martyrs what they actual thought, believed, or would have done stops mattering when the bodies hit the floor....

*or well, memorable. Most impactful on the main through line, and most incorporated across texts and retellings

Maybe Apollo. They have a few similarities. Aphrodite might, too, and she and Apollo are both on the Trojan side.

It looks like Gawain is standing by Hector. Then again, if Hector is de Maris, that would make Lancelot Paris, Guinevere Helen, and Arthur Menelaus, so it makes more sense for Gawain to be an Achaean on Arthur/Menelaus' side.

In that case, Gawain probably has the best Achilles parallel: fighting out of a furious desire for revenge, sometimes at odds with his commander (though Arthur is the opposite of Agamemnon, at least in Morte, since he doesn't want to be fighting the war), and killed due to an injury in a specifically vulnerable place (Gawain's re-wounded head, Achilles' heel). That being said, I think the gods on the Trojan side are a better fit for Gawain than the gods on the Greek side.

If Sir Gawain could time travel and dropped into the Trojan War, which Greek God(s) would start supporting him?

The Burne-Jones agenda: Gawain had an emo phase

is this too niche

A few things which are “canon” somewhere for people who are worried they’re stretching it too far

Arthur was killed by a giant cat.* 

Arthur killed the cat.

Arthur didn’t fight the cat. Kay did.

Kay and Bedivere use salmon as taxis. 

Lucan is half giant, half lion. (This Lucan, Lucano in the original Italian, is evil and not related to Bedivere). 

King Arthur raided the land of the dead.

The human knight Caradoc Briefbras has three half siblings: a dog, a horse, and a pig.

A large portion of Arthur’s troops was killed a while before Badon by his nephew’s attack ravens in self-defense. Arthur and said nephew were playing chess at the time and neither did much to stop it. [Edit: before Badon, not Camlann, which has apparently already happened despite Arthur and Mordred being alive]

Merlin retired peacefully and went to live in the countryside with his also-magic sister Ganieda, Taliesin, and another of their friends. [Edited]

Wherever Arthur walks, plants die. They don’t grow back for years.

Arthur had a spunky (half?) brother who died in battle after making a mysterious oath.

Dagonet is more or less able to run the kingdom when Arthur is gone. His biggest error is overspending on mercenaries.

Guinevere has an evil almost identical twin half-sister.

Hector beat up all the best knights except for Galahad while possessed by a demon.

Gawain plays tennis.

Gawain has used a chessboard as a weapon.

Near the start of his reign, Arthur left Lot in charge of the kingdom and went on a quest with a sassy parrot.

Gawain or Galahad succeeded Arthur as king.** 

*Whether or not this is canon anywhere is a somewhat meta matter. André de Coutance complains that the story that Chapalu/Cath Palug killed King Arthur and conquered England is a slanderous lie while also implying it's widely circulated. He's saying that it's canon in other places and also that it's wrong. As far as I know, no other text mentions a tradition where the cat kills the king.

**Not in different texts--Bhalbhuaidh is either Irish Gawain or Irish Galahad.

Dindrane: claimed I could remember my unborn sibling from Heaven, then gave a description of said sibling which turned out to be accurate 

Taliesin: went outside during a lightning storm and tried to fly away by using a Mary Poppins umbrella to catch the wind while making dramatic poetic declarations (I got about two feet in the air)

Sebile: tried to practice necromancy to talk to a dead Monarch butterfly

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This isn’t something I did, but an evangelical organization once showed up at my family’s house to see whether one of us was the Messiah, and that seems pretty Galahad-esque.

arthurian legend characters as weird things i did as a kid

Arthur: created clubs for the sole purpose of making myself in charge of them

Guinevere: played barbies, but the plot of the game was that they were fighting in world war iii

Lancelot: pretended to be an exterminator by spraying actual hornets with a hose, and somehow not getting stung, against all odds

Gawain: held stair-jumping competitions, and regularly jumped down around 10 stairs at a time

Merlin: designated a particular tree branch for reading and refused to let anyone climb this branch

Gaheris: held ‘screaming contests’ in my backyard to which invited my friends (this is exactly what it sounds like and it was banned by my mother immediately)

Dinadan: eaten spaghetti while riding a bike

Galahad: made a graveyard for bugs

Morgana: recruited a friend’s little brother to spy on said friend because she wasn’t talking to me

Mordred: accidentally made a gallon of poison

May I propose a quite likely erroneous theory for why Gawain is associated with May?

His name.

Even if that etymology is wrong, it could have been influential, to the source or to the scholarship. At any rate, it’s a compelling reason to celebrate Gawain in May.

Ellian my friend Ellian I'm going mad please help me locate the source for Gawain's birthday on May 1st I remember seeing it and now I can't verify to save my life. Phoning a friend rn.....thank you<3

okay im trying to find it right now but one of the earliest mentions of it on tumblr i can find is from lou's blog here and lou mentions here that it's from an academic article

I had a realization the other day:

Gawain was supposed to be the narrator of the Grail Quest.

Before Vulgate cycle and Sir Bors, the only other participant of the Grail Quest was Gawain. Gawain was used as a foil for Percival's story - a counterpart for Percival's character arc.

When reading Chretien's (unfinished) Grail story, it was always funny how Gawain takes up a significant chunk of the tale, but looking back at every version of the Grail cycle, there's this general trend that Percival was never going to return to Camelot to report the entire adventure to Arthur.

Percival's story is meant to end with him staying in the Grail Kingdom. So, someone else had to tell the story so it could be "passed down" and preserved as "history".

And that someone, had to be Gawain, the then-premier hero of the romances and Chretien's favorite.

Gawain isn't just the deuteragonist in Percival's story, he's also the one lives to tell the tale of Sir Percival.

Of Course, Robert de Boron comes along, and suddenly, the Grail Quest is everyone's adventure, but that's a different story...

💚😏🗡️ <for arthuriana ask game =)

Favorite quest/story arc:

That’s a tough one. Basic as it is, one of my favorites would have to be the Grail quest. It’s been told in so many different ways, it has so much potential for interpretation and reinterpretation, and if you look around, its influence is everywhere in pop culture. I also really like Galahad, Percival, and the Grail Heroine (though reading T. H. White left me with an anti-Bors bias I’ve never been able to shake).

Gawain: 

The way I got into Arthuriana was a seventh-grade GVC assignment where I had to write an alliterative paragraph, drew “G” out of a hat, started writing about Gawain, never got to a stopping point, decided to write a novel, decided I had to do research for the novel…you get the idea. He isn’t my all-time favorite, but I like Gawain. I find his revenge quest interesting when it’s done well, but I think that it’s become too ubiquitous. There are so many stories about him and there’s so much more to him than the man in The Once and Future King whose main traits are “angry” and “Scottish” (though I do love it when he calls Galahad “yon lily laddie”).

Who Are You Betting On In This Month's Tournament?

I think it depends on which canon it is and who’s in town. If I could choose from every Arthurian character I know of, I would say the Knight of the Lantern, hands down. At the start of The Story of the Crop-Eared Dog, he defeats and ties up everyone on Arthur’s hunting trip who he thinks is worth fighting—which adds up to well over seven thousand knights—in one afternoon. Later on, he’s defeated by his older brother Alastrann (who’s in monster-dog form), but when their father dies, Alastrann becomes the King of India, and he can’t very well casually jaunt over to the far end of another continent when he has a country to run. The Knight of the Lantern also returns to India, but he has unparalleled magical powers and less responsibility, so he could probably swing by for a tournament.

Thanks for the ask!

One I didn’t like at first but which really grew on me as I read more of his poems is Edwin Arlington Robinson’s characterization of Gawain. He appears in Tristram, Merlin, and Lancelot, always as a side character who’s only there for a fairly short time, so you have to fit his arc together from the fragments. At the start, everyone sees him as cheerful and careless—he’s called “gay Gawaine” in the old sense of the word more than once—but he’s more insightful than most of the others give him credit for, and, after his brothers are dead and he becomes unhinged in his quest for revenge, you realize that he was already unhinged and his cheerful flippancy was a coping mechanism/mask. He also has a delightful way with words. In Tristram, he tells Isolt of Brittany that he isn’t sure whether he’s hitting on her or not but it doesn’t matter because “Tristram, off his proper suavity, has fervor to slice whales, and I, from childhood, have always liked this life.” During his last conversation with Lancelot, Gawaine tells him, “A gloomy curiosity was our Modred, from his first intimation of existence. God made him as He made the crocodile, to prove He was omnipotent.”

Tell me about the best modern characterization of your favorite Orkney brother(s).

Pick and choose from whatever adaptations or retellings you know of, they don’t all have to appear in the same story. No wrong answers. :^)

Obscure Arthurian text which everyone should read #2: The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne

The name is a bit misleading, since Gawain and Guinevere (here referred to as Dame Gaynour) feature more in the story. The first part concerns their lakeside encounter with the terrifying ghost of Guinevere’s mother, who bemoans her fate, gives Guinevere advice, and doles out prophecies of doom, predicting the death of Gawain and the fall of Camelot to Mordred. The second part is about a fight between Gawain and Galeron, which is more mundane in subject but suggests some of the factors which will make the ghost’s prophecies come to pass.

Six years ago

Me: Knights? Sounds boring. Greek mythology all the way.

Six weeks ago

One of my friends: Something-something-Dwayne Johnson-something…

Me: DID SOMEBODY SAY GAWAIN?!?!?

Arthurian hot takes from before I joined the fandom

Funny story: the way I got into this fandom was a seventh-grade assignment to write an alliterative paragraph using the letter G. Something clicked (or snapped, however you want to look at it) and though I’d never given much thought to the Round Table before, I wrote a paragraph about Gawain, which spiraled into a chapter, which spiraled into an attempt at a novel, which spiraled into a neverending research wormhole and long term fixation. Older and at least a little wiser, I give you ten of my original takes on the characters and how they seem in retrospect.

Guinevere doesn’t really do anything. In my defense, my knowledge of her mostly came from watching the first half of an amateur production of Camelot, which is bound to give anyone the wrong idea.

Mordred is a socially awkward evil wizard. In my book, he made a number of cartoonish villain speeches, mostly to his long-suffering familiar, since no one else would listen. No, I have no idea why I thought he had magic… Is it awful that I kind of like him that way?

Arthur is perfect. Uh…

Gawain is perfect. Uh….

Lancelot is an absolute monster. My version of him was a mix of a guy who bullied me and the god Ares as depicted in D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Needless to say, he did not have an affair with Guinevere, because she would never cheat on Arthur, because only morally pure characters are good, and she is secretly awesome, even though most people think she doesn’t do anything… Uh… Yeah. I was wrong.

Agravaine is mildly aggravating. Gareth and Gaheris are just sort of there and uninteresting. This opinion was derived entirely from their names.

Morgause is an evil witch but has great style. That sounds more like Morgan.

Morgan is a terrible name. I debated renaming her Marianne or Meredith. Yes, I have seen the error of my ways.

Galahad is a rustic himbo. That was the vibe I got from the name “Gallahad”.

The Lady of the Lake is awesome. I stand by this one and always will.

I'd like to introduce you to 4kota after a 4 year timeskip, in my opinion of course. Maybe Lance will have a slightly different hairstyle. And I wanted to do Percy like the cover of one of the previous chapters.

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P. S. Maybe I'll draw them full-size later...... but it's not definite.

I know it's been quite a long time since I've posted my work. But I have enjoyed the last 2 chapters VERY much, so I wanted to feature the main characters from those chapters.

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Ahem, ahem!

I decided to start with Gawain, it's quite likely that there will be a Tristan afterwards as well, as he did a really good job in the last chapter!

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🌵 Please enjoy! 🌵

I'm willing to admit that this is one of the best moments of the chapter!

Firstly, because Gawain just picked up and sat on Schwartz's face! I hope she's comfortable! 😅

Secondly, I loved the fact that Gawain started to resent the fact that no one would grab her and Tristan immediately started praising her. That's so funny. And I definitely know where Tristan learnt that kind of attitude towards women from..... 😉

I know I've talked about it, BUT..... I'M SO HAPPY! WE FINALLY GOT TO SEE IT IN THE MANGA! 😭 I'M PROUD OF YOU TRISTAN!!!

I'M SURE MELIODAS IS PROUD OF YOU TOO!!!!!

I wonder if the fact that it was Gawain who channelled Tristan and helped create his first combined attack will affect the plot? 🤔...

It's really great that Gawain was able to influence Tristan, and she's the only one who did it successfully....

Uuuhhhh...

Nakaba, is that a hint? 🧐

I want to admit this is my favourite frame from the whole chapter!

Also, Tristan didn't say anything to Gawain about her sitting on Schwartz's face lol.... 😅

This technique was really incredible!

I especially loved that Tristan was able to create a new technique thanks to Gawain.....

I'm really so happy to hear that! 🥲😭

Gawain has absolutely grown in terms of character. She has encouraged herself and then Tristan. I really hope he listens to what she has to say!.....

Whew…

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First I want to apologise, the plan was to have this work yesterday, but I was completely sidetracked.🥲

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I finally finished painting the wallpaper with the knights of prophecy, but I think there will be other characters later.

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And by the way, I'll probably do a job with little Gawain later.

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🌵Please enjoy!🌵

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P. S. : not for sale!

This beautiful evening made me want to draw Gawain...😅

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She's the only one I haven't drawn yet by the way. So I decided to fix that! 😤

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I would like to introduce you to the new owner of sunshine, Gawain!

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🌵 Please enjoy! 🌵😌

I've had a song by 《Panic! At the Disco》"The Greatest Show" on my mind lately.

And I've been wondering, what if Percival were the Sprechstahlmeister in a circus and everyone else was a circus performer?

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P.S.: I don't know why, but I picture Lance as an animal trainer...😅

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Based on the above, I want to provide you with sketches of Percy, the Sprechstahlmeister!

🌵 Please enjoy! 🌵

Is it just me or is Lancelot promising too much? 😅

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You promised Tristan a berry pie by the way...! 😤

Donnie, what are you looking at...?😏