A game played on board ship in warm climates, in which a person, grotesquely personating King Arthur, is drenched with buckets of water until he can, by making one of his persecutors smile or laugh, change places with him.
As she stepped over the threshold, she remembered Sister Marianne had told her she was not to step foot in the kitchens again, not after setting fire to her hair. The sweet maiden, Emily, tried to teach her once, but on one occasion she left the Queen alone for a moment and came back to find her mistress dipping her fingers in the boiling water to retrieve the eggs. After that she refused to carry on with their lessons. He never minded, of course. For their nine days of blissful ignorance, he ate everything she put in front of him with a delighted smile.
“I am still your Queen! I can behead you.“ A quick and sudden silence fell. The air grew heavy and she thought she might choke. “My Queen, it took you half the morning to behead that chicken…"
Marina Ruy Barbosa as Guinevere & Rômulo Estrela as Lancelot
“(…) The queen was the king’s lady (…), a symbol of all the realities of life. A king fought for the protection of those who were unable to fight for themselves(…), so the queen, joining to the king, created a symbol of the central strength behind all the armies and the wars.”
– Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon.
That’s the other thing about having professors as parents: They name you after totally random authors—like poor Geoff, after Geoffrey Chaucer—or characters from literature, such as the Lady of Shalott, aka Lady Elaine, who killed herself because Sir Lancelot liked Queen Guinevere—you know, the one Keira Knightley played in that King Arthur movie—better than he liked her.
I don’t care how beautiful the poem is about her. It’s not exactly cool to be named after someone who killed herself over a guy. I have mentioned this several times to my parents, but they still don’t get it.
Arthurian Legends 