Guinevere (/ˈɡwɪnəvɪər/ i GWIN-ə-veer; Welsh: Gwenhwyfar pronunciationi; Breton: Gwenivar, Cornish: Gwynnever), also often written in Modern English as Guenevere or Guenever,[1] 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.

Guinevere

Matter of Britain character

Guinevere watching the mortally wounded Arthur being sailed off to Avalon in Queen Guinevere by James Archer (c. 1860)

In-universe information

Race

Giant (some folklore, otherwise human)

Title

Princess, Queen, Mother Superior

Occupation

High Queen of Britain

Later tradition: Queen of Logres and Britain (or England), convent head

Family

King Leodegrance (father), Gwenhwyfach (sister)

Spouse

Arthur, occasionally also Mordred

Significant other

Varied, including either Lancelot, Mordred or Yder

Children

Usually none, occasionally a son with Arthur or children with Mordred

Relatives

Varied, including a cousin

Religion

Christian

Home

Malory version: Cameliard, Camelot, Tower of London, Amesbury Priory

Nationality

British

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 le Fay.

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

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Guinevere by Henry Justice Ford (c. 1910)

The original Welsh form of the name is Gwenhwyfar (also Guenhuibhar, Gwenhwyvar), which seems to be cognate with the Irish name Findabar (the name of the daughter of Queen Medb and Ailill mac Máta in the Ulster Cycle); Gwenhwyfar can be translated as "The White Fay/Ghost", from Proto-Celtic *Windo- "white" + *sēbro "phantom" (cognate with Old Irish síabar "a spectre, phantom, supernatural being [usually in pejorative sense]").[2][3][4][5] 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 (also spelled Gwenhwyach) appears in Welsh literature as a sister of Gwenhwyfar, but Welsh scholars Melville Richards and Rachel Bromwich both dismiss this etymology (with Richards suggesting that Gwenhwyfach was a back-formation derived from an incorrect interpretation of Gwenwhy-far as Gwenhwy-fawr).[6] A cognate name in Modern English is Jennifer, from Cornish.[7]

The name is given as Guennuuar (Guennuvar) in an early Latin text Vita Gildae. Geoffrey of Monmouth rendered it in a Latinized form as Guenhuuara (Guenhuvara – but some manuscripts and thus modern editions also spell it with an M as in Guenhumara or Ganhumara, possibly stemming from scribal error confusing "uu/uv" for "um") in his Historia Regum Britanniae, further turned into Wenhauer (Wenhaiuer) by Layamon (Gwenayfer in one manuscript) and into both Genoivre and Gahunmare in Wace's Roman de Brut. Chronicler Gerald of Wales refers to her as Wenneuereia (Wenneveria) and the popular romancer Chrétien de Troyes calls her Guenievre (Guenièvre). The latter form was retained by the authors of Chrétien-influenced French prose cycles, who would use also its variants such as Genievre (Genièvre) or Gueneure. Her many other various names appearing through the different periods and regions of medieval Europe include both Gaynour and Waynour (Waynor[e]) in the English poems Alliterative Morte Arthure and The Awntyrs off Arthure, Genure (Gaynor) in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, Guenloie in the Romanz du reis Yder, Guenore in Sir Gawayn and þe Grene Knyȝt, Gwenvere (Guennevere, Guenera, Gwenner) in the Polychronicon, and Gwendoloena (Gwendolen) in De Ortu Waluuanii. Her name is almost invariably Ginover (Ginovere) in Middle German romances (e.g. by Hartmann von Aue, Heinrich von dem Turlin, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven) but was written Jenover by Der Pleier, and the audience of Italian romances got to know her as Ginevra (Zenevra, Zenibra). 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 (Guenever, Guenivere) in his seminal compilation Le Morte d'Arthur.[8] 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 (Wanore).[9][10]

Family relations

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Henry Justice Ford's 1902 illustration for Andrew Lang's The Book of Romance

In one of the Welsh Triads (Trioedd Ynys Prydein, no. 56), 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 (a supernatural figure), and the third of (G)ogrfan Gawr ("the Giant").[11] In a variant of another Welsh Triad (Trioedd Ynys Prydein, no. 54), 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 (Gwenhwyfar, daughter of Ogrfan Gawr / Bad when little, worse when great)."[12] An echo of the giantess-Guinevere tradition appears in local folklore regarding the Queen's Crag boulder at Simonburn in England.[13]

The earliest datable mention of Guinevere (as Guenhuvara, with numerous spelling variations in the surviving manuscripts) 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.[14] 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.[15] 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 (the historical Basque country) as her father.[15]

Welsh tradition remembers the queen's sister Gwenhwyfach and records the enmity between them. Two Triads (Trioedd Ynys Prydein, no. 53, 84) 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 (possibly the first known text featuring Guinevere if indeed correctly dated c. 1100[16]), 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.[17] The few exceptions to that include Arthur's son named Loholt or Ilinot in Perlesvaus and Parzival (first mentioned in Erec and Enide).[18] 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 (Guinevere herself, who unlike Mordred seems to show little care for the safety of their children,[19] is spared and forgiven by Arthur). 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 (Lancelot–Grail) and Diu Crône respectively, but neither character is mentioned elsewhere (besides the Vulgate-inspired tradition). 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 (this is the case in the Middle English romance The Adventures of Arthur, in which the ghost of Guinevere's mother appears to her and Gawain in Inglewood Forest). 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 (Elibel) and Morgan's knight Carrant (or Garaunt,[20] apparently Geraint[21]). In Perlesvaus, after the death of Guinevere, her relative King Madaglan(s) 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.[22] In Perceforest, the different daughters of Lyonnel of Glat (the greatest knight of the ancient Britain) and Queen Blanche of the Forest of Marvels (also known as Blanchete, daughter of the Maimed King and the Fairy Queen) are distant ancestors of both Guinevere and Lancelot, as well of as Tristan.[23]

Portrayals

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Guinevere with Enid and Vivien by George and Louis Rhead (1898)

Guinevere and Iseult stained glass by William Morris (1862)

In Geoffrey's Historia, Arthur leaves her as a regent[24] in the care of his nephew Modredus (Mordred) 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 ("in violation of her first marriage, had wickedly married him"[25]), who declares himself king and takes Arthur's throne. Consequently, Arthur returns to Britain and fights Modredus at the fatal Battle of Camlann.[26] Wace's chronicle Roman de Brut (Geste des Bretons) makes Mordred's love for Guinevere the very motive of his rebellion.[27] 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.[28]

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,[29] but little more is said about her.[30] 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.[31] 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.[32]

Lady Guinevere, Howard Pyle's illustration for The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903)

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 (and Thomas Chestre's later Middle English version, Sir Launfal, where she is a daughter of King Rion of Ireland and Arthur marries her on the advise of Merlin despite her having had many lovers[33]), 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 (identified by some as the figure of Morgan[34]). Guinevere herself wields magical powers in The Rise of Gawain, Nephew of Arthur. The Alliterative Morte Arthure has Guinevere commit a great 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 [chivalric] romance, imperious, jealous, and demanding, with an occasional trait such as the sense of humor" (Edward Donald Kennedy), 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" (Derek Brewer, cited by Kennedy).[35]

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"[36] 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 (c. 1200) features a prophetic dream sequence in which Arthur himself hacks Guinevere to pieces after beheading Mordred.[37] Historically, the bones of Guinevere were claimed to have been found buried alongside those of Arthur (described as "his second wife" on their grave stone as reported by Gerald of Wales[38]) during the exhumation of their purported graves by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey in 1091.[39]

Abduction stories

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Story types and their earliest known sources

Abductor Rescuer Text

King Melwas (unclear, includes ) Gildas (negotiated) Vita Gildae

Prince Maleagant (out of unrequited love) Lancelot (in a duel) Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charette

King Valerin twice (claiming to be her rightful husband) Lancelot (in a duel)

Arthur (aided by Lancelot, Malduc, and others) Lanzelet

Gotegrim (to honor kill her for infidelity) Gawain (in a duel) Diu Crône

Brun de Morois (motivated by love) Durmart Durmart le Gallois

King Urien (as a war prisoner) Gawain Livre d'Artus

Conspiracy of the False Guinevere (to replace her on the wedding night) Abduction failed[40] Vulgate Lancelot

King Arthur (to execute her on a false accusation) Lancelot (in a trial by combat duel against Mador de la Porte)[41] Vulgate Mort Artu

King Arthur and his loyalists (to execute her for treason) Lancelot and his followers (in battle) Vulgate Mort Artu

King Mordred (to secure power; some versions, including the derived Morte Arthure, present the episode as an affair between them) Escapes herself (helped by her cousin Labor and others)[42] Vulgate Mort Artu

King Eugenius of Scotland (as a war trophy)[43] None Historia Gentis Scotorum

A major and long-running Arthurian story trope features Guinevere being kidnapped and then tells of her rescue by either her husband or her lover. Welsh cleric and author Caradoc of Llancarfan, who wrote his Life of Gildas sometime between 1130 and 1150,[44] recounts her being taken and raped (violatam et raptam) by Melwas, king of the "Summer Country" (Aestiva Regio, perhaps meaning Somerset), and held prisoner at his stronghold at Glastonbury. The story states that Arthur (depicted there as a tyrannical ruler) spent a year searching for her and assembling an army to storm Melwas' fort when Gildas negotiates a peaceful resolution and reunites husband and wife.[45] The 14th-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym alludes to it in one of his poems, calling her Ogfran the Giant's daughter.[46] It is also the subject of the obscure Welsh poem "The Dialogue of Melwas and Gwenhwyfar" that exists only in two late copies.[46]

"Winlogee" depicted on the Italian Modena Archivolt (c. 1120–1240)

The Melwas story seems to be related to an Old Irish abduction motif called the aithed in which a mysterious stranger kidnaps a married woman and takes her to his home; the husband of the woman then rescues her against insurmountable odds.[47] A seemingly related account was carved into the archivolt of Modena Cathedral in Italy, which most likely predates that telling (as well as any other known written account of Guinevere in Arthurian legend). Here, Artus de Bretania and Isdernus approach a tower in which Mardoc is holding Winlogee, while on the other side Carrado (most likely Caradoc) fights Galvagin (Gawain) as the knights Galvariun and Che (Kay) approach. Isdernus is most certainly an incarnation of Yder (Edern ap Nudd), a Celtic hero whose name appears in Culhwch and Olwen. Yeder is actually Guinevere's lover in a nearly-forgotten tradition mentioned in Béroul's 12th-century Tristan. This is reflected in the later Romance of King Yder, where his lover is Queen Guenloie of Carvain (possibly Caerwent in Wales[48]).

N. C. Wyeth's illustration for The Boy's King Arthur, abridged from Le Morte d'Arthur by Sidney Lanier (1922): "He [Lancelot] rode his way with the Queen unto Joyous Gard."

Chrétien de Troyes tells another version of Guinevere's abduction, this time by Meliagant (Maleagant, derived from Melwas), in the 12th-century Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart. The abduction sequence is largely a reworking of that recorded in Caradoc's account, but here the queen's rescuer is not Arthur (or Yder) but Lancelot, whose adultery with the queen is dealt with for the first time in this poem. In Chrétien's love triangle of Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot, the young knight is literally madly in love with the queen.[49] In his trials, Lancelot accepts shame and dishonor to prove his total submission and devotion to Guinevere,[50] in the end earning the reward of a night of love after rescuing her from the otherworldly land of Gorre. It has been suggested that Chrétien invented their affair to supply Guinevere with a courtly extramarital lover (as requested by his patroness, Princess Marie); Mordred could not be used as his reputation was beyond saving, and Yder had been forgotten entirely.[51] This version has become lastingly popular. Today it is most familiar