While there are other significant similarities between the characters Beowulf and Erec, the complexities in the Erec character that result from his role as a lover and the integration of women into his life, contrasted with Beowulf's near-symmetrical lack of either love or women as significant issues, can give us a model that can be generalized to later romance. In any given scenario, we can predict one logical course for a character limited to the male world, like Beowulf, and another course for someone like Erec, who must account for a number of different and conflicting needs stemming from the women in his life and what mutual expectations he has with them.

A standard course followed in all of these tales of adventure is the road trip, and the importance of a person or thing is demonstrated by whether or not the hero takes it along on a trip, and how well he can function without it. For example, both heroes bring weapons with them, but for Erec, his arms are irreplaceably necessary in all critical situations, whereas Beowulf can do without them if he must. Ultimately, Beowulf's own prowess is more important than what hardware he has. Similarly, Erec's adventure relies on the presence of his female companions, allies and even superiors at every critical stage. Erec's adventure begins at the behest of a woman, Queen Guinevere, whom he accompanies on a hunt because, he tells her "for no other reason than to keep you company" (Chretien, 38). It would be nonsensical for Beowulf to be interacting with a woman out in the forest, wilderness, sea or other zone of adventure. The only time Beowulf speaks to women is back in the hall or other home base, before or after the adventure begins, such as when Hrothgar's queen Wealthow hovers in the background in chapter 18, passing out door prizes and offering words of encouragement, but doing nothing to advance the plot aside from filling the cups of the men (Beowulf 61-2).

It is significant that Beowulf does speak at length (at least for Beowulf) about women, again not in the field, but back at base, and he warns of the folly of involving them in the relatively simple and predictable affairs of men, as he sees it. Having too great an attachment to women, his mother in particular, is part of Grendel's perversion.

Conversely, the involvement of women is the defining fact in Erec's story. After Guinevere sets him motion, Erec is drawn with almost gravitational certainty towards a love story: his willingness to take up fighting challenges entails a need for arms, and this, given the assumptions of romance, leads to the involvement of a woman, and we expect this to be a romantic involvement. Where Beowulf has specifically scorned using daughters as bargaining chips and as the means to ally powerful or important men, for Erec and for the romance audience, this is the most natural thing in the world. Where Beowulf would have either simply shrugged off his lack of armor and would have never connected his need for arms with a marriage, for Erec one leads naturally to another, and so the same recognition of Erec's worthiness that causes the destitute vasovar to rather abruptly hold forth his daughter and announce " `Here,' said he `I'll give her to you' " (Chretien 45). The defense of Guinevere's honor leads directly to a contest over beauty, which leads on to a series of battles which all test and re-forge the love relationship. Erec's opponents, like him, have relationships of their own with women, and those relationships define why they oppose Erec, and how they will play out their knightly battles. On the masculine-centered, battle-oriented level of Beowulf, Erec's story could have ended before it began, and could have ended with any of his victories that establish his prowess as a warrior. But Erec's story is about his Queen, her ladies, Erec's mother, and many others, most prominent of them, his wife. It isn't over until his relationship with her reaches a level of maturity that satisfies Chretien and his audience.

This emphasis on relationships, and the goal of a much more sophisticated domestic stability than that sought by warriors like Beowulf and Hrothgar, is the catalyst that transforms the relatively one-dimensional plotting of the earlier stories to the multi-layered romantic plot, and the logical implications of this relationship-centered catalyst are a set of dilemmas and paradoxes that don't exist for Beowulf, but are at the core of Erec's story. Once entering this arena, the stage is set to generalize the more abstract notion of an idealized relationship between a knight and his lady to the similarly subtle and complex relationship between the Christian knight and God, at least in the form of transcendent ideals made immanent though concrete symbols such as the grail. The kinds of changes that take place in the transition from Beowulf to Erec are a record of the creation of a symbolic language for using stories about fighting to talk about psychological needs and conflicts that otherwise remain inexpressible up to this point, and we can anticipate from this the full range of inquiry that will become possible once this symbolic language becomes fully developed.