Gauvain is King Arthur's nephew and he is also his best friend. He is one of the first knights that the king, helped by Merlin, appoints to the Round Table. There are several Celtic equivalents of its name:Gwalchmai and Gwalchmei (May Falcon or Plains Falcon) as well as Gawain.
He helps Arthur with many tasks, and proves his loyalty to him by confronting the Green Knight, a strange being who offers to have his head cut off...
When Lancelot saves the Queen Guinevere from the stake, he kills Gauvain's two younger brothers:Gareth and Gaeris. He then swears revenge and kills Lionel, Lancelot's cousin. When he confronts the latter in single combat, he does not kill him, but Gauvain comes out with a broken skull. Going mad, he kills Hector des Mares, another cousin of Lancelot du Lac, then dies of his wound, after asking Arthur to finally send him his forgiveness.
It is also said that he appeared shortly after his death to Arthur, to warn him that he had to side with Lancelot if he wanted to defeat Mordred.
In the Quest for the Grail, he is the most eloquent representative of this warlike stratum without God and without transcendence, while at the opposite end we find Gilead, the chosen knight, the perfect knight.
The romantic tradition, from Chrétien de Troyes, presents Gawain to us as a superficial character, a valiant knight, but incapable of going beyond the system of values here below.
However, he passes into the world of the dead by entering the castle of the queens where he finds his dead mother and is the first to return from there. Welcomed as a hero, he is, when he arrives, the only man in the castle and manages to bring out of this place of death the queens whose lands have been plundered. He also finds love there.
In The Tale of the Grail, often erroneously titled Percival, this accomplished knight encounters the uncourteous world, its ugliness and despair and must maintain his integrity, while Percival, out of this world, must in an opposite move acquire the hard chivalrous discipline. Closest relative of the king, guardian of royal justice, Gauvain becomes for the romantic tradition the partisan of primitive faide and a large number of texts place him on the front of the stage just to make him a charmer, an eternal gallant , medieval variant of Don Juan. Gawain must not be upset during lunch because at that time he is at the peak of his strength. He remains a wise knight and good advice for the king.
Mythological substrate
Gauvain is a solar hero, whose strength increases and decreases with the course of the star of the day. It is therefore at noon that it is most powerful. He thus presents affinities with the god Oengus whose name he shares, but the Christianization of the novels makes it difficult to analyze this character further.