The Balin-Balan story, wherein a pair of brothers fight each other to the death without recognizing who their opponent is, goes back into the mists of time. Marion Zimmer Bradley handled it very well in The Mists of Avalon by making the characters foster brothers, thereby bringing in the historical pattern of handing over children to a different leader for raising within that court. I chose to move in closer to the psychological portrait of a person who, when confronted with the advent of Christianity, tries to take up the new teachings only to find that his basic nature and spiritual convictions are pitted against each other, with disastrous results. (A note: Mists of Avalon came out just as I was completing the first draft of Child of the Northern Spring. I immediately ran down to the bookstore to buy it, then called Marion to congratulate her on it. We had a very pleasant phone conversation and I had contact with her on and off over the ensuing years.)
On the historical level, we know that for almost four centuries, England—but never Ireland or Scotland—was part of the Roman Empire, and happy to be so. Then, as the barbarian invasions overran one province after another on the continent, Rome called home her legions and Britain girded herself for war.
Across the English Channel, a welter of tribes that had been pushed out of their own homelands saw a chance to spill over onto the undefended farmlands of Britain, if they could endure the rugged crossing of the North Sea or Channel. Thus began the influx of Saxons and Franks, Jutes and Angles (who gave their name to the land and language). It took them fully 150 years to conquer the Romano-Britons and native Celts, and it was during this time that Arthur and Gwen would have lived, if indeed they did.
Archaeology shows that in the middle of that struggle there was a peaceful pause of twenty to forty years before the Angles and Saxons completed their sweep across the land and drove the remnants of the defenders into the Welsh mountains.
Here, the story of a beaten people’s last great king (whom they called Arthur) was kept alive in tales retold around campfires and cottage hearths. He seems to have been a unifying force and an almost invincible warrior, and while he may have simply been the biggest bully on the block, the Cumbri saw him as the last civilized king standing up to the barbaric horde.
It was this folklore that Geoffrey of Monmouth made into The History of the Kings of Britain at the end of the twelfth century, putting the Welsh stories down in Latin. When this book got to the continent, it became the first great bestseller. During the thirteenth century, the stories spread throughout western Europe, were translated into local languages, and often included the addition of each society’s own heroes to Arthur’s Round Table.
This guaranteed broad scale interest and a range of new story lines. The French introduced their hero, Lancelot, and with him the advent of “courtly love” (which was passion denied physical union), thereby elevating the tale to a new level: that of deep emotional involvement or “Romance.” (Prior to that time, all great stories focused on wars, heroes, or gods, not on love relationships.)
The Germans took up the Holy Grail story, and its influence and popularity extended as late as the nineteenth century: Wagner’s opera Parsifal was based on the story of the Grail knight Percival. The Italians were so entranced that the twelfth-century cathedral in Modena has an arch embellished with characters from the Breton cycle of King Arthur. And there is reference to an early Japanese version of The Matter of Britain (as the Camelot stories became known).
So what was happening to Guinevere during this time? She was early on seen as an equal co-ruler with Arthur, which was in keeping with Celtic tradition. In one early tale, they got into an argument while she was combing out her hair, and Arthur threw a car-sized boulder at her—it is still pointed out in southern Scotland.
Most of the European versions of the stories indicate she was abducted and raped, though they split on whether she was complicit with her kidnapper. I used the historical figure of Maelgwn (a northern Welsh ruler of that era about whom Gildas spoke disparagingly) as the villain and set up the antipathy between Gwen and Maelgwn early on in Child of the Northern Spring.
During the Middle Ages, Arthur’s queen was known as Guinevere the Gay, as in playful, spritely, full of life and enthusiasm—a far cry from the elegant but treacherous lady of later times.
As Christianity gained ascendancy, it appropriated Arthur’s Court, applauded the notion of chivalry, and turned Morgan le Fey, clearly a druidic priestess, into a villainous witch who makes multiple attempts on Arthur’s life.
Merlin, who may be based on a sixth-century madman who was also a king’s poet, has many qualities of a Master Druid: doctor, engineer, lawyer, philosopher, astronomer, historian, etc. The Druids did not trust written knowledge, so they became the equivalent of wandering college faculty and high jurists. They were so highly regarded that their very presence at a battle scene could bring a war to an immediate stop. Needed to give Arthur the aura of divine approval, Merlin was kept on but cut down to the role of tutor and wise man.
A thornier problem for the male-dominated Church was what to do with a popular and energetic queen? The obvious solution was to make her a Christian with a childhood in a southern convent who ends her days in a nunnery, repenting heavily for the sin of loving Lancelot as well as Arthur.
In between she was variously seen first as a strong and competent helpmate, a sometimes temperamental tyrant, a lonely and misunderstood wife, the much respected leader of both courtiers and common people, and eventually the destroyer of the Round Table and general scapegoat.
By then there were fancy castles and knights in shining armor to act out the stories, and one such named Thomas Malory of Warwickshire translated the various European stories into English while languishing in jail for burglary and rape. In his versions he cobbled together a work that presented a portrait of what chivalry should have been but generally wasn’t, and gave us a book that is still being taught and read today, more than five hundred years later. (His Le Morte d’Arthur was so popular that it was among the first secular books printed on Caxton’s printing press in 1485.)
Once the Arthurian stories were entrenched in Europe and the Renaissance broke through, interest turned away from them—even though every king of England has tried to trace his ancestry back to Arthur.
For the most part, the tales remained out of favor until the mid-1800s, when Queen Victoria’s consort, Albert, died and she fixated on the notion of his having been a manifestation of King Arthur. Guinevere, however, became something of a scapegrace, as the Victorians claimed that nonmarital love, no matter how chaste, was not to be allowed.
The Romantics and pre-Raphaelites had a field day with the characters in poem and paint, with William Morris even daring to put forth his own work titled The Defense of Guinevere. But the Matter of Britain didn’t find new direction until T. H. White wrote The Once and Future King while living in Ireland as a conscientious objector during World War II. A mixture of fantasy allegory and psychological portrait, it revived interest in the stories and became the inspiration for Lerner and Loewe’s 1960 musical Camelot.
White’s book was what led me to consider writing a realistic Arthurian novel that provided insightful portraits of the familiar characters as seen by their queen, Guinevere. It took five years of research and writing to complete Child of the Northern Spring, and I was just finishing the first draft when “Mists of Avalon” burst on the scene.
A huge international best seller, Mists is often touted as the book that presents Camelot from the woman’s point of view, and people frequently ask me if my work is like Marion’s. While hers was the first woman’s viewpoint rendition, I am quick to point out that it is high fantasy, whereas my book is founded on reality and probable history, and there are many women’s points of view where Arthur is concerned.
By their very nature, the Arthurian stories lend themselves to fantasy treatments. I have admired various of them, but I generally find fantasy pretty thin fare when compared with the power of real people trying to att
ain a magnificent dream—Camelot.
Secondly, while Marion deconstructed the myth in order to make Morgan le Fey the heroine and mother of Arthur’s son, I stay within the traditional legend in which Arthur’s other half sister, Morgause, is the mother of his incest-bred bastard and Morgan is the constant nemesis who is trying to kill him.
Naturally, in any work of fiction the author can rearrange story line and characters to his or her own liking. Marion explained to me that she based her timid little Christian Guinevere on an agoraphobic girl who had lived in Marion’s communal home for women and who had been ill-treated by men. Her dislike of the girl certainly shows in Mists, where Gwen is used as the scapegoat to explain the Christianizing of Arthur’s court, to say nothing of getting in the way of Morgan’s love for Lancelot. In that sense Marion kept her Guinevere in the Victorian mold of a beautiful, thoughtless twit who makes the men who love her seem to be pathetic dolts.
I wanted my Gwen to bring back the vital character of the earliest stories, and I made her an outsider to Arthur’s court so that the reader would see it with fresh eyes, just as she does. And while Cornwall and Somerset are traditionally the home of much Arthurian myth, I was pleased to discover how many things show up in the north, so it was logical to give my girl a childhood there.
I hope that this brief overview gives you a fuller perception of what is often called Western civilization’s greatest legend and explains a bit about where my Gwen came from.
There is an ancient saying that the bards will earn their dinners all down the ages by recounting the stories of Arthur. No doubt even as I type this someone is writing a new version of the Matter of Britain, bringing a different, and I hope thoughtful, perspective to the stories that have enthralled us for so many years.
The very best I can say to him or her is simply: bon appétit.
About the Author
Persia Woolley is the author of the Guinevere Trilogy: Child of the Northern Spring, Queen of the Summer Stars, and Guinevere: Legend in Autumn. Persia has had a career in journalism and television, and she has also written three nonfiction books. She presently lives near the northern California coast with her son and is currently working on an annotated version of her Guineveres for the use of students and scholars in the field.
Child of the Northern Spring (Guinevere Trilogy) Page 50