Guinevere: Four Fathers for a Phantom Queen

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Camelot Chat! I’m your hostess, Shannon Watson; and this month, we are talking about King Arthur’s Four Queens… and Their Fearsome Fathers.

Welsh sources suggest that there were three Guineveres, each with a different father, each married to King Arthur. We have already covered the subject of one of Arthur’s many lovers, the Saxon shieldmaiden, Cwenhild, who bore him a son, in the last episode.

So, one down, three to go. Let’s dig in.

Today's episode is about Queen Guinevere herself: the one woman formally and certainly designated as Arthur's queen. I’m calling it Guinevere: Four Fathers for a Phantom Queen.

The original version of Guinevere’s name was Gwynhwyfar, which renders as “White or Blessed Spirit, Specter, or Demon” in Proto-Brythonic. It has also been suggested that Gwyn or Gwen may have been a title linked to the throne. While this is possible, I've already covered the subject of Guinevere’s name and titles in an earlier episode, so we won't delve too far into that here.

Let's just assume that there was one legitimate Guinevere. I will get to the subject of her illegitimate half-sister in a later episode... and in the sequels to my book, The Wanderer and the Wolves.

While the meaning of the name Gwynhwyfar has been hotly disputed over the centuries, what it boils down to, if evocative and mysterious, is simple enough. What is not simple is that Gwynhwyfar has been listed as having several fathers. The top three are Gwythyr ap Greidol, King Garlin of Galore, and King Leodagan.

I'm going to dive more deeply into King Leodagan’s name and title in the next episode. Suffice it to say that he was variously called Leodegrance, Leondegrance, Leodogran, and Leodagan, each of which is quite the mouthful.

It was King Leodagan who “gifted” King Arthur with the Round Table – or the loyalty of the company of the Round Table – as a wedding present, which, of course, reads like a dowry. The romances say that Leodagan was one of the few Briton chieftains who accepted the young Arthur as his overlord and was therefore attacked by Arthur's mortal enemy, King Urian. When Arthur “rescued” Leodagan, saving his castle and kingdom, he met and fell in love with the lovely Guinevere.

There is another, less lovely, theory, however. This outlines how Leodagan rebelled against the young, unblooded Arthur's new reign, claiming that Arthur attacked and defeated the king in battle, seizing the queen as a war prize, marrying her “by capture,” and taking her kingdom and the loyalty of her warriors for his own.

The queen, her defeated father, and all her chieftains would have been forced to swear fealty to their sometime enemy, Arthur, and to fight for him in future. Probably against their own former allies. This jibes better with what we know of savage fifth-century practices in Britain.

Leodagan fathered a second daughter… out of wedlock and under extremely shady circumstances. This daughter became known as the False Guinevere. Given the troublesome conditions of her conception, it is no wonder she grew up to be dishonest, treasonous, and homicidal.

Once Guinevere and Arthur are married, Leodagan sort of just disappears from the tale… for a really long time. Geoffrey of Monmouth said he died during one of Arthur's Gallic campaigns, but that may be a later gloss.

But I'm saving my take on that version for my books. More on Leodagan in the next episode.

Now, let's look at the other two candidates for Father of the Year: Garlin of Galore and Gwythyr ap Greidol.

King Garlin of Galore is mentioned in a German version of the Arthurian romances. The name Garlin may have stemmed from two Proto-Brythonic words, such as Gor-glɨnn, “Over-Valley,” giving King Garlin the meaning of “King-over-the-Valley.” Or else, it could have come from Cawr-glɨnn, “Champion-of-the-Valley.” There are certainly lots of valleys in the British Isles from which to choose. Or it could come from the Proto-Brythonic word, gwur, rendering Gwur-glɨnn, “Man-of-the-Valley.”

This brings us to the second part of his name. Galore.

More specifically, “Of Galore.”

The “of” would seem to designate Galore as a locative. So, we should be looking for geographic designations as translations of this name. Therefore, let's ignore the usual late-seventeenth-century English translation of the word galoreas “abundance.”

The Proto-Brythonic gal means “might” or “ability.” But, while suitable for an honorific, “might” is not a geographic term and does not correspond well with the preceding “of.”

The same word, gal, is in Welsh an “enemy” or “foe.” Now, we're getting somewhere. While “enemy” or “foe” isn't necessarily a geographic designation, it does sometimes describe a place inhabited by an enemy or a foe.

Let's take a look at the second part of the word, ore. -Or in Old French is a suffix used to denote a quality or a characteristic, the same way in which the suffix -ness is employed in English. That word might have gotten attached to the Welsh gal during the Middle Ages, when France and Wales were allied against their common enemy, England. A number of Arthurian romances were written during this period, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, and Thomas Chestre’s retelling of the earlier, twelfth-century, Old French lay, Lanval.

What would the Welsh gal and the Old French -or give us? Gal-or: something like “Of the Foe.”

I'm still not convinced. Let's try something else.

Could the Welsh gal plus the Pictish uer, U-E-R, “over,” work here? That would give us Gal-uer, “Over-Foe.” Rendering something like King Garlin Over-Foe: “King over the Valley over the Foe.”

Hmm. Still not sure.

Let’s take another look at the whole.

The words Garlin and Galore look an awful lot alike. Each starts with G-A, followed by some combination of R-Land another vowel or vowels.

What if one was an anagram of the other? A play on words, meant to create a melodic, alliterative name?

What if we rearrange them? What do we get then?

Possibly something like: one word with a G + a vowel + an L and a second word with a G + a vowel + an R.

So, if one of the words is gal, “foe” or “enemy”, and the other word is gore, that brings us to something approximating a placename. Because, aside from its yuckier connotations, gore in English means a “point” or “triangle.”

Hmm. That sounds fairly placename-y.

Ôr in Welsh is a “boundary,” “limit,” or “edge.”

Can we go one better?

Yep. Goror – that’s G-O-R-O-R – in the same language is a “boundary, frontier, or border.”

That's one better. And it's geographic.

So maybe the intermixing of the two names, Garlin and Galore, were a confusion of something that was originally intended to designate a boundary or frontier? Maybe this king’s name meant something like “Champion of the Frontier?” A borderland populated by an enemy tribe?

I'm going to leave the resolution of King Garlin and his strange name till the next episode. Let's move on to Guinevere’s next father.

The name Gwythyr ap Greidol situates us in Wales, or at least in the language that preceded Welsh and obtained in Britain at the time: Proto-Brythonic. Gwythyr commonly renders as the name Victor in modern Welsh. Map means “son of.” And Greidol means “gridiron.” So, Gwythyr ap Greidol was “The Victor, son of the Gridiron.”

Gwythyr ap Greidol was known as a supernatural figure. An attribute designated to many royal fathers in Arthurian legend, such as the heinous giant who fathered Olwen in the Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen.

Doesn’t mean Gwythyr was a giant. Just that he was larger than life. Or a formidable fighter. Maybe one of the famous, outsized champions of the day, like Gawain and Lancelot and Cú Chúlainn. As his name, Victor, would indicate.

But based on the Welsh translation of his name, we find ourselves once again in what looks like Wales. Or do we?

Is it possible that Queen Guinevere hailed from fifth-century Wales?

Yes. The country we now know as Wales, however, was then being newly settled by colonists from what is now known as Scotland. Particularly, from Stirlingshire and Lothian in the Borders region.

These settlers were the Votadini, a northeastern Celtic tribe closely allied to Rome, but possibly also to the Picts, who surrounded them on the north and west. Since they were allied to Rome, the Votadini might have been considered northern Romano-Britons.

But at heart, were they? Or were they more like opportunist-Britons, who saw in their strategically-placed fortresses at Stirling and Edinburgh an advantage and used it to carve out a lucrative deal with the Romans?

A trade deal? A military alliance? A calculated series of intermarriages?

Who knows?

What seems certain is that the leader of these Votadini at the time was a man named Cunedda Wledig, who had married the daughter of the famous Coel Hen of York: the man who would become known in nursery rhyme as “Old King Cole.” One of Cunedda’s sons married a Pict. And their son became an infamous chieftain later associated both with Scotland and Wales, well after Cunedda and his tribe had emigrated south and populated Wales.

So, Queen Guinevere might have been born in the north to a northern king, who later migrated to and became associated with Wales.

The name Wales derives from the old English word, Wealas, which, while later designating the Welsh people, earlier simply indicated the people of Britannia in general, or, more specifically, “The Strangers,” or “Foreigners.” Meaning: the Britons that surrounded the Anglo-Saxons when they first came over from Germania. All of the Britons.

This covers a lot of territory. Early territory. Before any such place as Wales was known.

And possibly suggests a fourth potential father. Linked to a mighty dynasty. A dynasty allied to Rome and well-suited to a powerful queen, who was later described by Geoffrey of Monmouth as “a Roman lady of good family.” A lady whose strategically situated birthright would have presented as prime pickings to an up-and-coming, but unproven, duke of war looking to make his mark on the world.

We'll get back to that in next week’s episode.

That episode examines the father of the False Guinevere: Queen Guinevere’s treacherous, illegitimate half-sister. Though they had different mothers, the two Guineveres were fathered by the same man. Theirs was a bitter rivalry that nearly cost them both their lives, rent the kingdom in two, and, so say the Welsh bards, caused the dreadful strife at Camlan, in which both Arthur and his successor, Modred, perished. Thus closed the so-called Golden Age of Camelot.

And thus closes this episode of Camelot Chat.

If you can’t wait for more Arthurian lore till the next episode, you will find my historical fiction novel, The Wanderer and the Wolves, told from Queen Guinevere’s perspective, 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 worlds. So, keep living, keep reading, and keep dreaming... till we meet again.