Guinevere
Guinevere, also often written in Modern English as Guenevere or Guenever, was, according to Arthurian legend, an early-medieval queen of Great Britain and the wife of King Arthur. First mentioned in literature in the early 12th century, nearly 700 years after the purported times of Arthur, Guinevere has since been portrayed as everything from a fatally flawed, villainous, and opportunistic traitor to a noble and virtuous lady. The variably told motif of [|abduction of Guinevere], or of her being rescued from some other peril, features recurrently and prominently in many versions of the legend.
The earliest datable appearance of Guinevere is in Geoffrey of Monmouth's pseudo-historical British chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae, in which she is seduced by Mordred during his ill-fated rebellion against Arthur. In a later medieval Arthurian romance tradition from France, a major story arc is the queen's tragic love affair with her husband's best knight and trusted friend, Lancelot, indirectly causing the death of Arthur and the downfall of the kingdom. This concept had originally appeared in nascent form in Chrétien de Troyes's poem Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart prior to its vast expansion in the prose cycle Lancelot-Grail, consequently forming much of the narrative core of Thomas Malory's seminal English compilation Le Morte d'Arthur. Other themes found in Malory and other texts include Guinevere's usual barrenness, the scheme of Guinevere's evil twin to replace her, and the particular hostility displayed towards Guinevere by her sister-in-law Morgan.
Guinevere has continued to be a popular character featured in numerous adaptations of the legend since the 19th-century Arthurian revival. Many modern authors, usually following or inspired by Malory's telling, typically still show Guinevere in her illicit relationship with Lancelot as defining her character.
Name
The original Welsh form of the name is Gwenhwyfar, which seems to be cognate with the Irish name Findabar ; Gwenhwyfar can be translated as "The White Fay/Ghost", from Proto-Celtic *Windo- "white" + *sēbro "phantom". Some have suggested that the name may derive from Gwenhwy-fawr, or "Gwenhwy the Great", as a contrast to Gwenhwy-fach, or "Gwenhwy the Little/Lesser". Gwenhwyfach appears in Welsh literature as a sister of Gwenhwyfar, but Welsh scholars Melville Richards and Rachel Bromwich both dismiss this etymology. A cognate name in Modern English is Jennifer, from Cornish.The name is given as Guennuuar in an early Latin text Vita Gildae. Geoffrey of Monmouth rendered it in a Latinized form as Guenhuuara in his Historia Regum Britanniae, further turned into Wenhauer by Layamon and into both Genoivre and Gahunmare in Wace's Roman de Brut. Chronicler Gerald of Wales refers to her as Wenneuereia and the popular romancer Chrétien de Troyes calls her Guenievre. The latter form was retained by the authors of Chrétien-influenced French prose cycles, who would use also its variants such as Genievre or Gueneure. Her many other various names appearing through the different periods and regions of medieval Europe include both Gaynour and Waynour in the English poems Alliterative Morte Arthure and The Awntyrs off Arthure, Genure in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, Guenloie in the Romanz du reis Yder, Guenore in Sir Gawayn and þe Grene Knyȝt, Gwenvere in the Polychronicon, and Gwendoloena in De Ortu Waluuanii. Her name is almost invariably Ginover in Middle German romances but was written Jenover by Der Pleier, and the audience of Italian romances got to know her as Ginevra. In the 15th-century Britain, she was called Gwynnever in the Middle Cornish play Bewnans Ke, while the Middle English author Thomas Malory originally wrote her name as Gwenever or Gwenivere in his seminal compilation Le Morte d'Arthur. Some assorted other forms of her name in the Middle Ages and Renaissance literature of various countries and languages have included Ganor, Ganora, Gainor, Gainovere, Geneura, Guanora, Gueneour, Guenevera, Gwenore, Gwinore, Ntzenebra, Vanour, Vanore.
Family relations
In one of the Welsh Triads, the 13th-century series of texts based on the earlier oral tales of the bards of Wales, there are three Gwenhwyfars married to King Arthur. The first is the daughter of Cywryd of Gwent, the second of Gwythyr ap Greidawl, and the third of Gawr. In a variant of another Welsh Triad, only the daughter of Gogfran Gawr is mentioned. There was once a popular folk rhyme known in Wales concerning Gwenhwyfar: "Gwenhwyfar ferch Ogrfan Gawr / Drwg yn fechan, gwaeth yn fawr." An echo of the giantess-Guinevere tradition appears in local folklore regarding the Queen's Crag boulder at Simonburn in England.The earliest datable mention of Guinevere is in Geoffrey's Historia, written c. 1136. It relates that Guinevere, described as one of the great beauties of Britain, was educated under Cador, Duke of Cornwall. The other chronicles typically have Cador as her guardian and sometimes relative. According to Wace, who calls Cador an earl, Guinevere was descended from a noble Roman family on her mother's side; Layamon too describes her as of Roman descent, as well as being related to Cador. Much later English chroniclers, Thomas Gray in Scalacronica and John Stow in The Chronicles of England, both identify Cador as her cousin and an unnamed King of Biscay as her father.
Welsh tradition remembers the queen's sister Gwenhwyfach and records the enmity between them. Two Triads mention Gwenhwyfar's contention with her sister, which was believed to be the cause of the disastrous Battle of Camlann. In the Welsh prose Culhwch and Olwen, Gwenhwyfach is also mentioned alongside Gwenhwyfar, the latter appearing as Guinevere's evil twin in some later prose romances. German romance Diu Crône gives Guinevere two other sisters by their father, King Garlin of Gore: Gawain's love interest Flori and Queen Lenomie of Alexandria.
Guinevere is childless in most stories. The few exceptions to that include Arthur's son named Loholt or Ilinot in Perlesvaus and Parzival. In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Guinevere willingly becomes Mordred's consort and bears him two sons, although the dying Arthur commands her and Mordred's infant children to be secretly killed and their bodies tossed into the sea. There are mentions of Arthur's sons in the Welsh Triads, though their exact parentage is not clear. The possibly medieval tale of King Arthur and King Cornwall has the latter having a daughter with Guinevere. Besides the issue of her biological children, or lack thereof, Guinevere also raises the illegitimate daughter of Sagramore and Senehaut in the Livre d'Artus.
Other relations are equally obscure. A half-sister and a brother named Gotegin play the antagonistic roles in the Vulgate Cycle and Diu Crône respectively, but neither character is mentioned elsewhere. While later romances almost always named King Leodegrance as Guinevere's father, her mother was usually unmentioned, although she was sometimes said to be dead. Some works name cousins of note, though these too do not usually appear more than once. One of such cousins is Guiomar, an early lover of Arthur's half-sister Morgan in several French romances; other cousins of Guinevere include her confidante Elyzabel and Morgan's knight Carrant. In Perlesvaus, after the death of Guinevere, her relative King d'Oriande is a major villain who invades Arthur's lands, trying to force him to abandon Christianity and to marry his sister, Queen Jandree. In Perceforest, the different daughters of Lyonnel of Glat and Queen Blanche of the Forest of Marvels are distant ancestors of both Guinevere and Lancelot, as well of as Tristan.
Portrayals
In Geoffrey's Historia, Arthur leaves her as a regent in the care of his nephew Modredus when he crosses over to Europe to go to war with the Roman leader Lucius Tiberius. While her husband is absent, Guinevere is seduced to betray Arthur and marry Mordredus, who declares himself king and takes Arthur's throne. Consequently, Arthur returns to Britain and fights Modredus at the fatal Battle of Camlann. Wace's chronicle Roman de Brut makes Mordred's love for Guinevere the very motive of his rebellion. In the later romance Alliterative Morte Arthure, Guinevere is a traitoress who secretly plots her husband's death while pretending to be his devoted and caring wife.Early texts tend to portray her barely or hardly at all. One of them is Culhwch and Olwen, in which she is mentioned as Arthur's wife Gwenhwyfar and listed among his most prized possessions, but little more is said about her. It can not be securely dated; one recent assessment of the language by linguist Simon Rodway places it in the second half of the 12th century. The works of Chrétien de Troyes were some of the first to elaborate on the character Guinevere beyond simply the wife of Arthur. This was likely due to Chrétien's audience at the time, the court of Marie, Countess of Champagne, which was composed of courtly ladies who played highly social roles.
File:Arthur-Pyle The Lady Guinevere.JPG|thumb|upright|Lady Guinevere, Howard Pyle's illustration for The Story of King Arthur and His Knights |alt=
Later authors use her good and bad qualities to construct a deeper character who plays a larger role in the stories. In Chrétien's Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, for instance, she is praised for her intelligence, friendliness, and gentility. On the other hand, in Marie de France's probably late-12th-century Anglo-Norman poem Lanval, Guinevere is a viciously vindictive adulteress and temptress who plots the titular protagonist's death after failing to seduce him. She ends up punished when she is magically blinded by his secret true love from Avalon, the fairy princess Lady Tryamour. Guinevere herself wields magical powers in The Rise of Gawain, Nephew of Arthur. The Alliterative Morte Arthure has Guinevere commit the greatest treason by giving Arthur's sword kept in her possession to her lover Mordred in order to be used against her husband. Throughout most of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, a late-medieval compilation highly influential for a common perception of Guinevere and many other characters today, she figures as "a conventional lady of romance, imperious, jealous, and demanding, with an occasional trait such as the sense of humor", until she acquires more depth and undergoes major changes to her character at the end of the book, arguably becoming "the most fascinating, exasperating, and human of all medieval heroines".
Such varied tellings may be radically different in not just their depictions of Guinevere but also the manners of her demise. In the Italian 15th-century romance La Tavola Ritonda, Guinevere drops dead from grief upon learning of her husband's fate after Lancelot rescues her from the siege by Arthur's slayer Mordred. In Perlesvaus, it is Kay's murder of her son Loholt that causes Guinevere to die of anguish; she is then buried in Avalon, together with her son's severed head. Alternatively, in what Arthurian scholars Geoffrey Ashe and Norris J. Lacy call one of "strange episodes" of Ly Myreur des Histors, a romanticized historical/legendary work by Belgian author Jean d'Outremeuse, Guinevere is a wicked queen who rules with the victorious Mordred until she is killed by Lancelot, here the last of the Knights of the Round Table; her corpse is then entombed with the captured Mordred who eats it before starving to death. Layamon's Brut features a prophetic dream sequence in which Arthur himself hacks Guinevere to pieces after beheading Mordred. Historically, the bones of Guinevere were claimed to have been found buried alongside those of Arthur during the exhumation of their purported graves by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey in 1091.