Abstract
Generally seen as the source of English Gawain and its congeners, the Welsh name Gwalchmei is traced to an Old British *uolco-ma(g)ios ‘great falcon’, a derivation consistent with both the formal and semantic features of northwestern European heroic onomastics and the specifics of Gwalchmei’s status in Arthurian tradition. To be rejected, then, are explanations of the name as ‘hawk of the plains’ or ‘of May’. A second onomastic trail, marked by Latin Gualguanus and Walwen, French Gauvain, Dutch Walwein, English Gawain, leads to a hypothetical Indo-European compound meaning ‘wolf-killer’ and a consideration of tabu or language avoidance.
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