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Wait A Minute - Blog Posts
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...
