Who are your favorite characters in fiction?

[BatWulf]

Niran_Betta_Fish

Ah. Percival (Parsivale, Parsifal etc.) I know, having read several medieval versions. I feel like an idiot for not recognizing him.

Owein, I clearly missed somehow.

Don't feel bad, most people don't make the leap from Peredur to Percival or Parsifal. d doesn't usually mutate to s, nor r to l, so they really look like different names.

Owein becomes Yvain in French, and the the more recognized Owain in Mallory, and finally the Modern English Owen. As an historic figure, he once had a whole cycle of legends surrounding him (in much the same way as Charlemagne and Richard the Lion-Hearted), but with the advent to supremacy of the Arthurian cycle, the legendary character and many of his deeds became absorbed, to the point where he is relatively unknown today, outside Arthurian circles. I mean, everyone's heard of Lancelot (who was pretty much invented and inserted into Arthuriana) and Galahad (same deal, usurping Percival's role in later Grail legends), but who's heard of Owain?

If Wagner hadn't written Parzifal, would most people even know the name Percival? Hard to say, since his role as Grail Questor in the earlier works becomes submerged and largely usurped in the later.

Lancelot is remembered because of his famous Round Table-shattering affair with Guinivere. Galahad is well-known because he was consistently portrayed as the ultimate epitome of Christian knighthood. The names of other knights, if they're known by the layman at all, are generally all lumped together. Gawain? Oh yeah, one of Arthur's knights. Dagonet? Huh? Never heard of him. Owain? Kinda looks like Gawain, is he a knight, too?

Worse still, even among undergraduate scholars, only the Mallory versions/spellings are likely to be known. As an undergraduate English major, I read Sir Gawaine and the Greene Knight, but no one outside the class (including other English majors) had ever heard of it. And people in that class (aside from the prof, of course) had never heard of the Mabinogi, so that when I tried to make comparisons to Gwalchmai, I was met with blank stares. No idea what would have happened at the graduate level, since I shifted my academic focus to writing. I wish now that I'd taken a graduate level course in Medieval lit, but I was just too busy at the time (and the one really, really good professor of that subject went on vacation to Europe with his wife, who also taught Med lit, the summer before I started grad school, and as they were boarding the plane home, I kid you not, he dropped dead of an aneurysm at the boarding gate).

I think the point of all the above is, even if you had been an English major and read all sorts of English (and French and German) Arthurian literature, you're not likely to have been exposed to the Mabinogi or its characters. It's the sort of thing you need to sniff out on your own, and only because you really want to, for whatever reason.