Guinevere: Not Such a Ninny After All

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Camelot Chat! I’m your hostess, Shannon Watson; and today, we will be continuing our discussion from last week about Queen Guinevere... except, this week, we will be talking about Guinevere’s secular totems and what they tell us about her function as queen.

Last week, we mentioned the Cult of the Severed Head, and how Guinevere rode about with the embalmed severed heads of her enemies swaying from the pommel of her saddle. So: either the queen or someone in her entourage was a headhunter: one of the ancient caste of warriors who took the heads of their enemies in battle and preserved them, thereby keeping their power.

This scene does not present the image of a traditional, late-medieval lady, meekly tending her needlework in the women’s quarters, or lingering forgotten in the shadows behind the throne.

This scene gives umph, chutzpah, the Dark Age version of the Marine “hoo-rah”... in a word, power.

This is not what twenty-first century folk generally think of when they picture a queen.

This is a chieftainess.

Some of Queen Guinevere’s other secular totems: The key. The Round Table. The sword.

I’ll start with the easy one first. While you might think a key is a prosaic symbol–that of a housewife holding the key to the storage room, or a queen holding the keys to the kingdom, which her husband, and not herself, ruled–the symbol harkens back to far more ancient times... and traditions.

Witness Penelope, wife of Odysseus, grasping with an iron grip the keys to the storage rooms on Ithaca. Guarding against her many suitors, and even her own son, her husband’s household goods. Preserving his oikos, or house, while he is away fighting the Trojan War and exploring the Greek Isles.

The duty of a wife to protect and preserve her husband’s household goes back in time to Hammurabi’s Law Code, written circa 1775-1750 BC. There, it is stipulated that a wife could be tied in a sack and thrown in the river should she squander her husband’s property.

By the Dark Ages, this law might well have been encoded in the DNA: “Thou shalt not squander thy husband’s goods.”

So, Guinevere’s key symbol is that of more than just a banal wifely–or even queenly–duty. It is a signpost of the survival of an ancient practice over the passage of thousands of years.

The queen’s second secular symbol: The Table Round. It was Guinevere’s, not Arthur’s. At least, before their wedding.

It came to Arthur via the queen’s dowry. But before we discuss what it was, let’s look at what the words “round table” actually say.

Tabula rotunda: “Round entablature.” Entablature, or “table.” Or “foundation.”

In the early years of Christianity, domed tombs were the fashion for the elite dead. Just a hundred years before Guinevere’s time, in the fourth century, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great had one such built for his daughter, Constantina: the Mausoleum of Santa Costanza, in Rome. Its exquisite mosaic ceilings must have been the talk of the civilized world.

Scholars have suggested a similar prototype for the Round Table, as well. Arthur’s O’en, on the old Roman road leading into Stirlingshire, Scotland, was a domed stone building on a round entablature with an oculus, or “eye,” in its roof. This may have been an early observatory, or else, a small temple. Unfortunately for scholars, tourists, and curiosity-seekers, Arthur’s O’en was torn down in the eighteenth century.

However, there may have been another, less literal, explanation for the famous table. This goes to the meaning behind the “Fellowship of the Table Round” legends.

In medieval Arthurian legend, the Round Table was supposed to be a companionship of knights loyal to King Arthur: the king’s bodyguard. They would have banqueted with the king, hunted and sported with him, and protected him with their lives.

In battle, once the king’s bodyguard died, the war, the king, and with him, the kingdom, were lost. At Arthur’s final dreadful battle at Camlan, Modred would have had to have cut through the Round Table warriors before reaching Arthur. Every member of the Round Table Bodyguard would have had to have fallen before Modred could mortally wound the king.

This fellowship was provided to Arthur by Guinevere: another stipulation in her dowry. So, whether their marriage was a love-match, or a marriage-by-capture, or simply an arranged, political marriage, it seems to have been made in good faith, at least on Arthur’s side, if the king trusted a sometime enemy to provide his closest bodyguard.

In Guinevere’s day, there seems to have been an honor code. Once defeated, you swore fealty to your vanquisher... and you kept faith with that oath. But for those who never forgave or forgot, there were ways around it...

Which brings us to Guinevere’s last, and most unexpected, sigil: the sword.

Guinevere possessed her own sword, which she gave to her personal champion, instead of Arthur’s Excalibur. She marched into battle at the head of her troops. She led them. She commanded. She would have been well able to read a map, to see the lay of the land, to determine the best battle positions, to understand strategy. In fact, these may have been a part of her education: as a chieftainess of the Celts, the Picts, the Romano-Britons, and a royal Irish dynasty, Guinevere would have been expected to lead.

Only when she married Arthur and became an anointed queen–blessed by holy oil on her head, her cheeks, her palms and the soles of her feet–did Guinevere lose the ability to defend herself. Apparently, in Guinevere’s Dark Age world, priestesses–like the weird and wild Jandree, who went down fighting for her life and those of her sacred sisters–could fight, but queens could not. Both were sacred personages, but queens were a cut... beyond.

Once anointed as queen, Guinevere could no longer taint her holy hands with the touch of iron or blood. She must designate someone to do her fighting for her. Enter Lancelot.

This is the true meaning of the scene where the Lady of the Lake presents a teenaged Lancelot at Court. Arthur has not deigned to meet him–which was a foolish miscalculation on the king’s part–but instead has gone hunting the Caledonian Boar or the White Stag or some other such will-o-the-wisp.

It has been suggested, however, that the meeting was carefully timed: so that in the absence of the king, the queen might give Lancelot her sword, binding his loyalty to her, and rendering him her champion. Not Arthur’s.

So, when we look at Queen Guinevere, what are we seeing? A warrior, who kept the heads of her enemies–and their purloined power–close. A powerful, sacred personage, anointed hand and foot, who held the keys to her kingdom. A chieftainess, who provided her husband with the loyalty of his former enemies... and probably retained the lion’s share of that loyalty for herself.

This is not some simpering medieval ninny, hiding coyly behind her veil and sighing over the stupendous Lancelot. This is a Dark Age warrior queen, a chieftainess by birthright, fighting and surviving–for she outlived Arthur, a formidable warrior by all accounts–in the harsh climate and brutal times of Early Medieval Pictland.

And, speaking of Pictland...

Our topic for October is The Picts. In next week’s episode, we will examine these enigmatic people of ancient Scotland, alongside whom Queen Guinevere lived and whose chieftainess she may have been. Who were the Picts?

What was their mysterious, undeciphered language? Was it a Celtic tongue? Or did it spring from some other language tree?

And which famous fairy tale creature evolved from Pictish legends? (I’ll give you a hint: sounds like Picti).

Find out next week. If you can’t wait for the next episode, you will find my book, The Wanderer and the Wolves, on Amazon.com. The link is included below. And be sure to check out my author page at ShanavereStudios.com.

Until next week: People who read live in many worlds. Books are the surest portals to those other worlds. So, keep living, keep reading, and keep dreaming... till we meet again.