A “gauntlet” is a kind of glove. Originally it was a reinforced glove that was the part of medieval armor that protected the hand. Even today a “gauntlet” would usually be a glove of the larger, sturdier sort. But gauntlets weren’t just used for protection. A gauntlet might have been thrown down to signal a challenge, or even used to whack a rival on the cheek, also signaling a challenge.
Then there’s “running the gauntlet,” which was a sort of military punishment where the offender had to run between two rows of abusers, each trying to hit him as he passed. How did a glove get associated with that sort of thing?
The answer is that it didn’t. You don’t really “run a gauntlet.” The thing you run, the punishment, is a “gantlet.” “Gantlet” arrived in English from Swedish in the 1600s, and at first there were several variations, from “gattlopp” to “gantelope” and “gantlope.” In about 1650 or so, there were even imaginary origins made up for the word. “Gantelope,” one writer speculated, came from “Ghent Lope,” because it was invented in Ghent and involved running or loping. Ghent is a real city in Belgium, but they never invented that sort of punishment.
What really happened was that “gantlet” never really caught on in a big way in the 1600s and its meaning was subsumed under the already-existing “gauntlet.” But the story doesn’t end there. In the 1800s “gantlet” was resurrected, this time in the US. Newspaper editors in the 1800s seem to have been particularly diligent about the distinction between “gantlet” and “gauntlet.” That’s still the case today, although “gauntlet” is showing up more often in US media. Outside the US, “gantlet” never staged a comeback at all, and “gauntlets” are what tend to be metaphorically employed when there’s any sort of punishment-related running to be done.
That might explain the poor showing the 1977 movie The Gauntlet had among US newspaper editors at the time; reportedly they stayed away in droves. They must have influenced their colleagues who movie reviews as well; The Gauntlet wasn’t well regarded by critics. As a Clint Eastwood movie, though, it apparently did pretty well commercially — it was the 14th-highest earning film of the year.
Where “gauntlet” is really well represented though, is video gaming. The Wikipedia entry for “gauntlet” lists no fewer than 14 entries in the video game category. It seems it was a series, sort of, by Atari, beginning in 1985 with the newest installment released in 2014. “Gauntlet” has been run on systems from the Atari home entertainment console in the 1980s to arcade games to modern consoles and computers. Whether anyone has run the gantlet of playing all of them has not been recorded, so consider the gauntlet thrown.
