Arthurian Legends

effulgentpoet:

there was a spot for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot:

GUINEVERE

Guinevere is, in Arthurian legend, the wife of King Arthur. In medieval romances, one of the most prominent story arcs is Queen Guinevere’s tragic love affair with her husband’s chief knight, Lancelot. This story first appeared in Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart and became a motif in Arthurian literature, starting with the Lancelot-Grail of the early 13th century and carrying through the Post-Vulgate Cycle and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Guinevere and Lancelot’s betrayal of Arthur preceded his eventual defeat at the Battle of Camlann by Mordred. Guinevere has been portrayed as everything from a weak and opportunistic traitor to a fatally flawed but noble and virtuous gentlewoman. In Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, she is praised for her intelligence, friendliness, and gentility, while in Marie de France’s Lanval (and Thomas Chestre’s Middle English version, Sir Launfal), she is a vindictive adulteress, disliked by the protagonist and all well-bred knights. Early chronicles tend to portray her inauspiciously or hardly at all, while later authors use her good and bad qualities to construct a deeper character who played a larger role.