Despite their long-standing mutual friendship, and the camaraderie shared as the two highest ranking knights of King Arthur's round table, Sir Launcelot and Sir Gawain spend a large part of the Arthurian cycle as bitter enemies. We'll explore the root causes of this animosity, its base in the cultural understandings of the time, and how that very culture healed the rift between them.

At the beginning of the cycle, Arthur and Launce lot are as close as brothers, or possibly closer. Launcelot is rumored to be involved with Queen Guinevere, but their clandestine affair matters little to Arthur, since there appears to be no public knowledge of the matter. It is only when Agravaine and Mordred decide to expose the affair, and to challenge Lancelot's position, that Arthur takes action. It is also then that Gawain becomes indirectly involved in the eventual exile of Lancelot from the court of King Arthur.

In the ensuing exile, and eventual cross-channel advance of Arthur and his still loyal knight Sir Gawain, that Gawain's brothers Sir Gaheris and Sir Gareth are accidentally killed by Sir Lancelot. In a curious and telling piece of text, Lancelot bemoans the killing, saying that if the brothers had been armed, they would not have been slain. This is a key to understanding the culture under which Lancelot and Gawain lived, and the chivalric code they vowed to uphold.

The knights were obedient to a code that demanded an almost dualistic personality: They had to swear allegiance to a more powerful patron, while standing firm to their personal sense of fairness and obligation. When the two separate loyalties couldn't be justified, that is, when the patron himself appeared to abandon the code, or in some way performed contrary to it, which obligation was the knight to follow? Must he blindly go with his powerful patron? Or was he to adhere to his own personal, highly evolved inner sense of obligation? It must be remembered also, that part of the code demanded that a knight seek to protect the weak against the strong in all things. Gawain had no choice, then, to avenge his unarmed, thus weaker brothers.

It was in this context that Gawain and Lancelot found themselves at odds, even to the threat of fatal consequence. Loyalty was all; thus, Gawain had no choice but to uphold the round table's demand of him to accept Sir Gaheris and Sir Gareths' killings as a matter of fate. But his loyalty to his brothers forced him to abandon long-standing fealty to Lancelot, a fellow knight. It must have been a searing choice. In the end, Gawain's loyalty returned to Lancelot, or more correctly, to the code of the round table, and the overarching need to preserve the social order it engendered.

In yet another telling scene, Lancelot wounds Gawain badly, even unto death. Gawain recovers, only to seek Lancelot in battle yet again, and yet again to be badly mauled. Gawain is determined that one of them will die to satisfy the death of Gaheris and Gareth. In both battle scenes Lancelot has every opportunity to kill Gawain. He refuses to do so, revealing what could be either a flaw in Lancelot's loyalty to the code, or his sense that the code itself is no longer useful for the emerging society he finds himself part of. Then, in the third encounter, Gawain is truly killed. Before his death he forgives Lancelot for the death of his brothers, and he urges his old friend and fellow knight to rush to Arthur's side, to help the king against Mordred's opportunistic palace coup.

Then Gawain dies, having restored his own position in the code, and at the table round. Lancelot does assist Arthur at Salisbury Plain, where not only Mordred but Arthur himself are slain. Thus, Lancelot and Gawain's rivalry and reconciliation are the last examples of the application of the chivalric code in the Arthurian cycle. Lancelot subsequently joins a religious order. He and Guinevere die, separated for eternity, their unrequited love a matter for the ages. The round table, and its knightly code of chivalry then vanish into history.