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Sir Gawain - Blog Posts
The Burne-Jones agenda: Gawain had an emo phase
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...
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.
Obscure Arthurian text which everyone should read #1: The Story of the Crop-Eared Dog
This is what happens when you mash together a revenge quest, a slasher movie, a buddy road trip, a bildungsroman, a fantasy epic, and a shaggy dog story and set it in medieval times. Because there aren’t many Irish Arthurian texts, whether Bhalbhuaidh, the protagonist, is meant to be Gawain or Galahad is controversial. His name and titles could point to either and his life situation seems more like Gawain’s, but I will refer to him Galahad because I find the idea of a Galahad AU where he’s pagan and gallivants around with a prince who was turned into a giant dog and lost all qualms about murder along the way entertaining. It starts when Arthur, who inexplicably holds the title of King of the World, convenes a hunt in the Dangerous Forest on the Plain of Wonders and the mysterious Knight of the Lantern does what any antagonistic knight worth his salt would do: gatecrash and ask for violence. It gets less normal very rapidly from there. Abhlach the druidess is at least as awesome as she is wicked, Galahad may or may not have a magical music-making sword, and the fact that there’s an Island of Naked Monks is never given any explanation because it’s only mentioned in passing when the dog tells Galahad he killed them all.
Yeah, it’s a fun read.
Here’s a link to the translation I read:
