Guinevere: What's in a Name?

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Camelot Chat! I’m your hostess, Shannon Watson, and today, we’ll be talking about the many names–their translations, in what languages they originated, and what that all means–of the famous Queen Guinevere of Camelot.

Queen Guinevere had a lot of names. I mean a lot.

Let’s start with the obvious. Guinevere. What does it mean, and where does it come from? What was the original form? And was it even a name at all?

What else could it be, you ask? Well, it could be a title. It could be a nickname. An honorific. A family or tribal name. Or it could, in fact, be the given or birthname of one very famous queen.

Let’s check it out.

The name Guinevere goes back to the 1130s AD, when it was recorded in Medieval Latin as Guennuvar, or Guennimar. It gets weirder-looking after that, with renderings like Guanhumara, Guennuuar, Wennevereia, Gwenhwyfar, and Gwynnever, which segues into the modern Jennifer. So, if you have any friends named Jennifer, spread the word. Somewhere down the road, she was even called Wanders, which is a nice tie-in with the many difficult journeys the queen made throughout her life.

In the fifth century, the name Gwenhwyfar would have originated from two Proto-Brythonic words: gwɨnn, which means “white,” and huɨβar, which indicates a “spirit, demon, or specter.” So, that gives us “White Phantom.” Which is pretty cool.

Gwenhwyfar is also an extremely spiritual name. We do not know exactly what the Picts or early Britons thought a “spirit, demon, or specter” was, whether it was to them a good or bad concept, a powerful entity, or something completely outside the Judeo-Christian ethos. The Picts of southern Scotland were just becoming Christianized at this time, so Guinevere might have been Christian or pagan... or a hybridization of the two: what we would now call a heretic. Stay tuned for more on that subject...

In further evidence for the Christian argument, the Proto-Brythonic word, gwɨnn, when later rendered into Welsh, meant “blessed” or “holy.” So, this could have been an early Christian reference to the Holy Spirit: in other words, a baptismal name or even a name Guinevere took for herself upon confirmation.

And for the Irish version of the name...? Same thing. Almost.

In Old Irish, Guinevere would have been called something like Findabair. I know it doesn’t sound the same. But really, Findabair is the contemporary Old Irish version of the Brythonic Gwenhwyfar, or Guinevere. It comes from the Old Irish find + síabair and means “White Fairy, Phantom, Specter, or Ghost.”

Fairy gives me pause. That could be a reference to the Aes Sidhe, the Irish Fairy People, who were once the Tuatha de Danaan, an earlier–and wiser–tribe who settled Ireland before the Celts. It could also be a reference to the Picts, or “Pixies,” from whom Guinevere may have descended. Again: stay tuned...

And there’s more!

Just for fun and because what our enemies call us is seldom anything we’d care to call ourselves, I approximated an Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, name for Guinevere, gifted by her Jutish enemies and one-time allies. These Old Englishspeakers must have had a name for such a renowned foe. They may have chosen to honor her courage and skill in battle by giving her a name befitting a great queen, like Cwen Mæru, “Illustrious Queen.”

Then, later, after Guinevere had been forced to side with Arthur against them, the Jutes may have elected to denigrate her as one of the mære, nightmare-women who fell like incubi upon sleeping men. In his famous monologue in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio speaks of them: “I see Queen Mab hath been with thee.” Guinevere’s Jutish name may have been similar: Cwen Mære, “Nightmare-Queen.”

People in those days seemed to enjoy playing with names: they gave nicknames that either sounded like the person’s original name, or meant the same thing but sounded different, or meant the opposite of how the person appeared. Like calling a really tall guy “Shorty.”

I went a bridge further. If Guinevere was a native Pict–which is a whole bunch of episodes down the road–she must have had a native name. What was it? And what was Pictish?

Modern scholars increasingly concur that Pictish was an Indo-European language, one of the branches of the Proto-Celtic language tree. These included modern Welsh and Gaelic, as well as older tongues, like Cornish, Manx, and Scottish-Gaelic, and, across the Pond, Breton and Gaulish. In the fifth-century British Isles, Proto-Brythonic and/or Old Welsh and Old Irish and/or Primitive Irish would have been spoken. So would Pictish.

Unfortunately, not much Pictish survives. Even less of it has been translated.

So I went another way.

An old legend–lots of fun!–claims that the Picts, like the ancient Amazons, originated in Scythia. Now, not much of the Scythian language survives, either, but more than Pictish. So, I stole a Scythian word, plus a Ural-Altaic one from the same area, to create a native name for Guinevere.

The name I came up with is Anavere. It means “The Blood of the Mother” and refers to her matrilineal line. Neat, right?

In next week’s episode, we will begin to dig into Guinevere’s possible roles in her fifth-century world. Was she really a queen? Or was she something more akin to a chieftainess? Did she rule? Did she fight? Or was she a traditional subservient medieval lady, waiting in the shadows for her warrior-husband, Arthur, to return home, like Penelope and Odysseus?

Could she even have been something more? And what higher rank could there be than that of queen?

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.