Gawain is known as being chivalrous because he was the proper hero, who morals matched his fight. Sir Gawain’s shield represented "the five virtues of chivalry, which were friendship, generosity, chastity, courtesy, and piety. These where the virtues people strove to live by and those they demanded of kings and knights."

He plays the role of Justice, of Zeus, of the gods who keep up the neverending cycle of life and death. He plays the honest honor of a man, which in contrast, Iago believes he has but does not.

Victor refers to the legendary Knights of the Roundtable at the Court of King Arthur of Camelot. King Arthur and his Knights are the subject of the canonical medieval text Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory, published in 1485 by William Caxton.

In the 1831, this single reference to Mallory replaces a string of citations to chivalric romance in the 1818 edition: "Orlando, Robin Hood, Amadis, and St. George"--in both cases, these references serve to underline VIctor's fascination with the scientific imagination of the medieval period in the works of Agrippa, et al., through this earlier enchantment with the medieval literary imagination in his childhood.