The Once and Future Queen

Chapter One-2

End of Life

Thanks to the popularity of the musical Camelot, many people in the twenty-first century are most familiar with the idea of Guinevere ending her days in a convent. This part of the story began early in the tradition as a reflection of how disposable women were in the Middle Ages. During that time, women who were widowed, outcast, or no longer necessary to society were often sent to or voluntarily sought refuge in convents. For some, this was due to religious fervor or a desire for repentance, but for many it was a matter of survival, as convents were the only place that would take them in. As Barbara Gordon-Wise says,

While Arthur dies or is carried off to Avalon, the queen apparently lives on in piety and obscurity. On the one hand, her enclosure in a nunnery may be interpreted as the final suppression of a troublesome queen; representing the patriarchal order of medieval Christendom, the nunnery provides a secure imprisonment for a faithless queen and the story of the queen’s retirement serves as a cautionary tale which warns of the dangers of the world and of the flesh. On the other hand, historically, the convent or nunnery also provided one of the few spheres where a medieval woman might enjoy relative freedom from patriarchal control.24

Indeed, a convent was one of the only places a medieval woman could gain an education and hold a position of power. Nuns often learned to read, write, and perform basic calculations in order to run the business side of a busy convent and read their prayer books. Some also worked in scriptoriums, which created beautiful works of illuminated art that were in high demand with the nobility. While technically beholden to the bishop, many abbesses held as much, if not more power than their male counterparts, running large estates that produced wine, wheat, produce, and other goods that made them an important part of the surrounding kingdom. They were also centers of great wealth, so the abbess could be thought of as akin to a noblewoman given the large budget and number of workers she oversaw.

In the Arthurian tradition, Guinevere can be seen benefiting from this cultural construct in Gillian Bradshaw’s final Arthurian novel, In Winter’s Shadow (1982). After the fall of Camelot, Guinevere flees to the convent. But instead of leading a life of humble repentance, she uses the skills she learned as queen to lead the nuns and oversee the transfer of the literate culture she and Arthur built to the Irish monastery of Iona. Guinevere is so revered in this position that even she recognizes that it has redeemed her of her sins in the eyes of her people.

While this is the ending we know the best, it is by no means the only one. Andrea Hopkins points out, “As the medieval authors had a very broad spectrum of appreciation for Arthur’s queen, so they also devised a number of very different endings for her. Guinevere’s fate ranges from the very gruesome to a more demure ending where she repents of her sins dedicating the rest of her days to prayers and good deeds.”25

In a few stories, Guinevere dies before the fall of Camelot. In Perlesvaus (1200-1210), she dies of grief over the death of her son Loholt in Arthur’s lifetime. In the MS Lancelot, she dies before Arthur goes to war with Mordred. There is also a French tradition of Guinevere dying before the battle of Camlann, although this one plays out very differently. “In the French prose Genievere, Mordred is shut in a prison cell with the decaying body of Guinevere and is forced to resort to cannibalism before dying miserably of starvation.”26

Hector Boece, a Scottish historian who wrote Scotorum Historiae (1552), originated the idea that Guinevere went north after her disastrous affair, but before King Arthur died. He tells us she ended her life a prisoner of the Picts and that Arthur ordered her to be dragged to death by wild horses or dogs in revenge for her affair. Whether or not this is true, there is a local legend that Guinevere fled to the town of Meigle in Scotland where she may be buried.

Boece is not alone in laying Guinevere’s death at Arthur’s feet. Layamon’s Brut (1190-1215) hints that Arthur murdered Guinevere, then put a curse on her head. We will examine this ending more closely in the chapter on Layamon’s influential work.

In contrast, many modern retellings let Guinevere live, giving her respite in her old age. She most often retreats to the countryside, where finally retired from a life of politics, she provides the services of a healer, herbalist, and teacher. In the 1980s and 1990s’ trilogies of Sharan Newman, Rosalind Miles, and Persia Woolley, Guinevere ends her life as a resourceful, independent dowager queen, widely respected for her wisdom and accomplishments.27

But what about the famous grave of Arthur and Guinevere at Glastonbury? Despite being a tourist attraction to this day, carbon dating and other scientific study has proven it a hoax. Not long before its “discovery” in 1190, the abbey suffered a tremendously damaging fire. It is believed by most scholars that the monks invented the famous grave to attract tourists to their abbey because more tourists meant more funds they could use to rebuild. Regardless of the truth, the site’s ongoing mystique attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year and reminds us of the human desire to grasp something physical related to our heroes, even if they have their source in legend, rather than in fact.

A Changing Woman

As we will see, Guinevere underwent changes as the society for which she was written evolved and changed, both in their attitudes toward women and their “proper” place in society. As Barbara Gordon-Wise asserts, “the treatment of Arthur’s queen in every historical time period has been influenced by basic sociological and ideological pressures…. The study of the development of Guinevere over the course of almost a thousand years of literature suggests far-ranging implications concerning Western attitudes toward women, for Guinevere has developed into a secular Eve with Camelot a parallel to the lost Garden of Eden in Genesis.”28

She is, then, a representative figure for the fears, hopes, lusts, and dreams of society. Guinevere is an archetype like the figures of old, only instead of being a fixed representation, she is ever morphing to meet the needs of her reader. “The enduring legacy of the Arthurian lady is the mirror she holds up to the psyche of creator and reader: the idealized women of Arthurian literature reflect the social mentalities and s****l preoccupations of their class.”29

Guinevere begins her Arthurian journey as very much a peripheral character with no real identity or agency outside of her interactions with Arthur. Arthurian scholar Maureen Fries writes that in many of her early incarnations and even into the Middle Ages, “Guinevere exists, like heroines of Arthurian and other romance, to get into trouble that the hero must get her out of. The incentive to heroic action, she is at the same time its reward. Functionally, Guinevere is unable to act on her own. She is carried off and imprisoned; fought for and defended; freed and returned home; and fought for again: all at the will of and/or agreement between the males in the tale.”30

This is a theme we see over and over again, as Guinevere, like the real-life women of the time, is treated like a means to an end, rather than a person with her own intrinsic value. Katherine Bonner writes, “The medieval authors, Geoffrey, Wace and Layamon, merely present Guinevere as a flat character, a tool in their narrative. She is not a woman in her own right…In the works of Malory and Chrétien, Guinevere is given more dialogue and is mentioned much more frequently…still [they] predominately portray her as merely a part of the action, not its center. Moreover they virtually ignore her emotions and motivations.”31

Over time, the situation improves, but only by degrees, often taking one step forward—as in Morris’ “The Defence of Guenevere”—only to take two back—as she is next portrayed as a harpy by T. H. White or a self-centered shrew by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Bonner adds, “The authors of the late 1800’s [sic] and early 1900’s [sic], Tennyson, Morris and White…still present her as a one-sided character…. Neither [Tennyson or Morris] presents her as a self-sufficient character with story all her own, nor does White…. While Guinevere may be the ‘villain’ of Bradley’s novel, Bradley nevertheless give Guinevere much more status and attention than the authors of previous years…. [She] keeps Guinevere in the forefront of her narrative.”32

In novels such as Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, Guinevere is not so much valued for herself, but for the light she sheds on other female characters, being a foil for them or a reflection of the proper place of all female characters. As Gordon-Wise notes, through the mid-1980s, Guinevere’s role “serves as a vehicle for assigning women their proper subordinate position within a hierarchy of gender-determined relations. The representation of Arthur’s queen has been traditionally conditioned by a masculine interpretation of woman.”33

It is only from the mid-1980s onward that Guinevere comes into her own. Perhaps this is only fitting because it is when the second wave of feminism (at least in the United States) was starting to give women their due. Women were fighting for equality, for an end to s****l harassment in the workplace, and to show they could be mothers and wives as well as working women. It is during this time that authors like Sharon Newman, Rosalind Miles, Persia Woolley, and Nancy Mackenzie bring Guinevere out of Arthur’s shadow and into the spotlight. For the first time, female authors have seized control of the narrative of this very powerful woman and made her their own. No longer do we have to see Guinevere through the filter of the male gaze; she is allowed to speak for herself, to show us what being a woman means, rather than simply to reflect others’ perceptions.

Finally, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a millennium and a half after her name was first uttered, Guinevere has her due, with modern authors building entire books, series, and worlds around this strong female figure. She is a woman of all trades: a queen, wife, lover, and often a mother, who rules over both the political and domestic spheres alongside her husband. Andrea Hopkins points out that “if a real test of character lies in how a person handles catastrophe, then Guinevere triumphs. It is in the face of imminent disaster that the queen’s innate nobility emerges, whether she be bravely confronting an enemy endangering the lives of her knights or resolutely facing the consequences when her love affair is exposed.”34 She has become the embodiment of the modern woman’s dream, able to handle anything, to overthrow the patriarchy and finally usher in the elusive era of equality women have been actively campaigning for since they first whispered the notion of suffrage nearly two hundred years before.

12 Walters, Lori. “Introduction.” Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook, ed. Lori Walters (New York: Routledge, January 4, 2002), xv.

13 Nennius, Bill Gunn and Mark the Hermit, ed. The Historia Brittonum (London: John and Arthur Arch, 1819), 35.

14 Matthews, John and Caitlin, The Complete King Arthur (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2017), 217-218.

15 Tichelaar, Tyler, King Arthur’s Children (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Modern History Press, 2010), 64.

16 117.

17 Bromwich, Rachel, Trioedd Ynys Prydein (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), Triad 56.

18 Gordon-Wise, The Reclamation of a Queen, 63.

19 Bethlehem, Ulrike, “Guinevere, a Medieval Puzzle: Images of Arthur’s Queen in the Medieval Literature of England and France” (Doctoral Universität, Bochum, 2001), 34.

20 Matthews, John, King Arthur: Dark Age Warrior and Mythic Hero (New York: Rosen Publishing, 2008), 77.

21 Korrel, Peter, An Arthurian Triangle: A Study of the Development and Characterization of Arthur, Guinevere and Mordred (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984.), 191.

22 Rhys, John, Studies in Arthurian Legend (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1891), 49.

23 Ibid., 50.

24 Gordon-Wise, The Reclamation of a Queen, 61.

25 Hopkins, Andrea, The Book of Guinevere (Salford, England, Saraband, 2004), 24.

26 Ibid.

27 Noble, James, “Guinevere, the Superwoman of Contemporary Arthurian Fiction, Florilegium, vol. 23.2 (2006): 197-210, 199, https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/flor/article/viewFile/12554/20003.

28 Gordon-Wise, The Reclamation of a Queen, 2, 6.

29 Lacy, Norris J., The New Arthurian Encyclopedia: New Edition (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 524.