"'Now fie on thy proud words!' said Sir Gawain. 'As for my lady queen, wit thou well I will never say of her shame. But thou, false and recreant knight,' said Sir Gawain, 'what cause hadst thou to slay my good brother, Sir Gareth, that loved thee more than me and all my kin? And alas, thou madest him knight thine own hands! Why slewest thou him that loved thee so well?'

'For to excuse me,' said Sir Lancelot, 'it boteneth me not [...] And alas, that ever I was so unhappy,' said Sir Lancelot, 'that I had not seen Sir Gareth and Sir Gaheris!'

'Thou liest, recreant knight,' said Sir Gawain, 'thou slewest them in despite of me! And therefore wit thou well, Sir Lancelot, I shall make war upon thee, and all the while that I may live be thine enemy!'"

We're getting into the endgame of Le Morte D'Arthur here, and things are really starting to go to hell in a handbasket. When we join our two heroes in this passage, Lancelot has just recently killed Gawain's two brothers, Sir Gareth and Sir Gaheris. Accidentally, of course.

He simply did not recognize them in their armor. Sadly, this was a real problem back then. And, to boot, there was mass confusion and chaos going on when these killings happened. Arthur's men were fighting Lancelot's men as they tried to rescue Guinevere from being burned at the stake.

(She was caught in a, um, compromising situation with Lancelot. But that's a whole 'nother story…)

In this passage, Gawain swears vengeance against Lancelot. He refuses to accept that it was all just a horrible, tragic accident. His quest for un-knightly vengeance is what ultimately brings down the Round Table.

Well, That Escalated Quickly

Sure, we understand that Gawain is angry because his brothers have just been killed. But he goes from zero to sixty on the AngerMeter. He doesn't want to give Lancelot a chance to explain. And when Lancelot does try to do so anyway, Gawain has none of it.

He immediately wants to know why Lancelot killed his brothers. He even starts flinging around fighting-phrases like "fie on thy proud words!" and "false and recreant knight."

For knights, things don't get much worse than being called "recreant." That word basically means that the knight has shirked all of his duties—he's just not living up to the chivalric code. Lancelot doesn't react to this insult because he's so focused on trying to explain how this tragedy happened.

We think that's evidence of how great a guy he is. Lancelot just wants Gawain to understand, and maybe even forgive him. He's got interest in engaging in a pointless blood feud.

Gawain's got other ideas, though. As you may have noticed throughout Le Morte D'Arthur, Gawain's got some anger issues. He's quite willing to go for the jugular. In the quote above, Gawain swears vengeance against Lancelot, proving that his desire to get back at others—for real or imagined actions—is a hard habit for him to break.

Oh, the Drama

This is a highly emotional moment in the text. Try and imagine the tension for a moment; this is when the end of the famous Round Table becomes a very real possibility. The brotherhood of Arthur's knights is what holds it together, and that's falling apart in front of our eyes.

How does Malory convey the intense emotionality here? For starters, we're sure you took note of all those exclamation points. If you were at all in doubt that Gawain is angry, those in-your-face punctuation marks are a dead giveaway.

To our modern sensibilities, Gawain's exclamations—especially when coupled with the archaic language—can read as comically extreme. They sound super overwrought to you, don't they? Like, "oh, the drama."

In Malory's times, however, this prose almost certainly read without a hint of irony. Malory is hugely invested in this brotherhood, and the chivalric code it represents, because he sees this code declining in his own era.

By lingering in the highly emotional moments of the brotherhood's demise, Malory drives home how important knighthood was to him. He clearly idealized knightly values, and waxed romantic about the days when these codes-of-conduct were taken for granted.