King Guinevere Character Traits

Guinevere is almost as ubiquitous to the Arthurian legends as Arthur himself, although much less ink has been spilt characterizing her than her king. Where Arthur is always the prefect king for his era, some mix of wise and fair, just and war-like, usually with golden hair, Guinevere is must less consistent, with many fewer character traits. She is always beautiful, is usually Arthur’s true love, is rarely true to him, and is always blamed for the fall of Camelot, no matter how little or how much she had to do with it. The specifics of Guinevere’s part of the tale vary from retelling to retelling, throwing the changes each author in each time period makes into sharp relief because there is so little about her to begin with. One of the oldest

She is initially described as “the fairest of all flesh on Earth”, which is similar to how Helen of Troy is described in the Iliad (Tennyson TCoA). Guinevere is also described as having “white arms”, which is a common epithet for Helen (Tennyson TLT). This sets up a parallel between the two queens, both the most beautiful in their lands, both of whom betrayed their husbands and started a war, both of whom survive the war they caused though so many others do not. It is still debated to what degree Helen was guilty of her war, and Tennyson uses Helen to add ambiguity when describing Guinevere. He associates Guinevere with the color white, the traditional color of innocence; she has white arms, and dresses in white several times, both of which show her innocence and purity. However, she is not purely innocent, because both Arthur and Guinevere blame her for the fall of Camelot. In the last section of the poem, Arthur comes to abbey where Guinevere has hidden herself and berates her for her sinfulness which caused his whole reign to rot. He says “Then came thy shameful sin with Lancelot;/Then came the sin of Tristram and Isolt;/Then others, following these my mightiest knights,” which shows the same belief as Malory that the king’s marriage is tied to behavior of the populace (Tennyson TPoA). So even though Guinevere was good and pure at the beginning of the poem, indeed

Courtly love can only exist from afar, a worship of the woman who is on a pedestal of purity and goodness and righteousness by the man who wins her favor through actions, usually fighting. This means if the woman ever makes a mistake, she falls forever from the pedestal and is no longer worthy, one mistake is sin enough to be permanently unlovable. Later writers however, mapped courtly love onto romantic love and came up with a problems, because now the marriage between Guinevere and Arthur must be false if Guinevere’s love of Lancelot is true, instead of separating those two into different kinds of love, or simply not caring. The oldest legends of Arthur make no judgements about Guinevere’s cheating on Arthur, they label her as a villain, or as nothing at all and leave it at that. In the medieval legends all the heroes were flawed, all the characters were flawed, but that didn’t matter because the point of the stories wasn’t to showcase or enforce a morality, but as simple entertainments. But post courtly love authors like Malory and Tennyson are wrapped up in how true Guinevere is to Arthur or Lancelot, and use her purity as the only measure of her whole person. She has sinned and thus she cannot be worthy of Arthur, even though Arthur fathers Mordred out of wedlock in Malory’s