Gareth is also the ideal lover, contrasting with both his close friends, Launcelot and Tristram, whose love, for all its virtuous loyalty, is adulterous. The true end of love, Gareth's story shows, is marriage. And all the symbolic extensions of the ideal of marriage which Malory had earlier set up in "Arthur and King Lucius" are reintroduced here.
Gareth's tale ends in his own marriage and that of his brothers, followed by the related ritual of feudal commendation, wherein all those who have been overcome or rescued by Gareth come to pledge their fealty in return for his protection as overlord; the ending then widens out to Arthur's parallel dispersing of titles and lands.
In the tale of Gareth, Malory presents the high point in the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom. Almost every motif here has its analog in "Arthur and King Lucius," but whereas that tale concerns a noble kingdom at war, Gareth's tale concerns a kingdom in time of peace. Every element in the tale reflects the elegance, the ritualistic pomp and circumstance of a peacetime kingdom: the knights Gareth fights are all identified with clear, bold colors — black, green, red, india-blue, red again, and brown — and great tournaments formally divide the main action. It should be added, incidentally, that the tale (Malory's clearest departure from any known source) introduces one of his most brilliant creations of character — the sharp-tongued Lynet.
