Just some brief notes on one of my favorite Arthurian characters.
Gawain, eldest of the Orkney brothers (sons of King Lot of Lothian and Arthur's sister, the enchantress Morgause), is one of the most commonly appearing of Arthur's knights. His position as Arthur's nephew (and heir presumptive, though he never assumes the role of crown prince) makes him an essential part of the court, and he is widely proclaimed as one of, if not THE best, of Arthur's knights.
Because he appears in so many different stories from so many sources, reports of his character may appear rather muddled. He is strong, capable, noble, and loyal. He is usually portrayed as quite secular, lacking the more spiritual focus of some of the other knights who went on to achieve notoriety in the Grail quests. He has a lot of visible character development, where one can see that he has actually learned something from his various knightly adventures. There are two schools of thought as to his basic temperament: the French romances tend to portray him as a boor, even a thug, in sharp contrast to the courtly Lancelot. This unflattering picture is clearest in Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. British writers also contrast Gawain with Lancelot, but here Gawain comes off better: authentic, assured, educated without being an effete popinjay more concerned with appearances than truth. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the three most important pieces of late medieval English literature (the other two being Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman), and in it Gawain is portrayed as a peerless knight, who must save the court (and learn the difference between courtly ideals and actual temptation).
He is connected with or identical to the welsh hero Gwalchmai (poetically if inaccurately derived as meaning "hawk of may"). His shield device is a pentacle. Some of the stories give him the supernatural quirk that his strength waxes and wanes with the sun. In the Dame Ragnell story, he cures the loathly lady by correctly observing that what she wants is not his correct judgement, but the ability to decide for herself.
What we have going on here is a set of stories that have been put to many purposes. The British stories are more nationalistic, and also more about social commentary in the real world, where as the French romances are more inner-spititual/allegorical.
There is a John Matthews book that's well worth looking at, Gawain: Knight of the Goddess. It puts forward the thesis that Gawain's character, attributes and activities best represent the concerns of a pre-Christian Goddess-worshipping strand of medieval consciousness.
What if Arthur and Gawain and others in these stories are actually thinly-veiled tales of the deities of an earlier people? A sun-god whose strength is tied to the solar cycle just makes sense. Arthur as a Mider-like underworld figure who claims and loses a sovereignty-goddess yields interesting food for thought, at the very least. Nobody is shocked at the Lady of the Lake as a divine figure, but many of the mortals (or faery-blood mortals) could be interpreted as such too.
Euhemerus was a philosopher from about a century after Plato who said that the Olympians (and, we have to assume, other gods) were merely mortal leaders, kings, extraordinary people who had been divinized by their people. cf Augustus and Alexander. This is like the inverse; gaining insight into the deities of the non-dominant culture by evaluating the stories in which powerful mortals can be interpreted as heavily-veiled deities. The misogyny of Western culture is such that this is lamentably necessary more often for female deities.
Wow, this got long quickly so I will leave it here.
References:
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/gawmenu.htm (this has links to medieval Gawain texts)
Gerald Morris has a series of young adult Arthurian novels, of which the first two are about Gawain. He also appears in a less central role in later stories.
The John Matthews book I mentioned:
http://www.amazon.com/Sir-Gawain-Goddess-John-Matthews/dp/0892819707/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243294839&sr=8-1
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