Introduction

‘Then [in the time of William the Conqueror] in the country of the Welsh which is called Ros [Pembrokeshire] the tomb of Walwen was found, who was nephew to Arthur, his sister's son, and by no means unworthy of him. He ruled in the part of Britain now called Walweitha [Galloway]; he was a soldier of outstanding bravery, but he was driven out of his kingdom by the brother and nephew of Hengest [the Saxon leader], though he killed many of them before he went into exile….’ This is Gawain's first appearance in literature, in the Deeds of the Kings of Britain by William of Malmesbury, written in 1125. He does not appear in earlier Welsh stories, though it has been argued that he is the same as Gwalchmei, one of the heroes in the Welsh romance of Culhwch and Olwen, who is named as Arthur's nephew.

Gawain plays a prominent part in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, because a sister's son had a special relationship with his uncle in Celtic society, and he is therefore shown as Arthur's right-hand man. He retained this prominent place in the historical and supposedly historical versions of Arthur's story down to the fifteenth century; in Malory's Morte Darthur, Arthur's support of his quarrel with Lancelot is one of the chief causes of the downfall of the Round Table, and his deathbed letter to Lancelot is one of the most moving passages in the story.

In the French romances, however, he had a much less certain reputation. There are romances in which he is portrayed as a paragon of knightly virtues, but he always has a reputation as a ladykiller, which degenerates into that of a seducer and ultimately rapist in less sympathetic accounts of his exploits. At the other extreme, he achieves the Grail adventure instead of Perceval in the German romance Diu Krone. He is an ambivalent figure, and not only in terms of his behaviour and exploits: even in Malory, there are remains of magical powers once ascribed to him, for when he fights Lancelot in single combat, his strength grows greater until the sun is at its zenith, and then gradually fades away.