And Women Took Over Arthuriana

AND WOMEN TOOK OVER ARTHURIANA CARLOS A. SANZ MINGO Cardiff University Abstract: Women in Arthurian literature have traditionally followed two pat- terns: they are considered evil or they are thought to be the real cause for the fall of Camelot. These two visions have radically changed in Modern Literature and it is in Bernard Cornwell’s trilogy that these innovations are most obvious, as I intend to demonstrate in this paper. Keywords: history, feminine characters, modern Arthurian literature, medieval Arthurian literature, religion. 1. Introduction Whenever the word Arthuriana is mentioned, it conjures up a selec- tion of characters, mainly masculine, such as Arthur, Lancelot, Gawain, Merlin, Mordred or Uther Pendragon. However, the stories of Arthur and his men would not have developed were it not for the part women played: who bewitches Accolon in order to kill Arthur with his own sword? Who turns Sir Bercilak into a horrendous green giant? Who puts Merlin into a glass tower — or within a mountain, depending on the version — and keeps him there until the end of time? Who provokes, indirectly, the doom and fall of the Round Table? For better or for worse, the answer to these questions is a woman’s name. These characters have to atone in different ways. Morgan, Arthur’s half-sister and a horrible witch, is either killed or vanishes from the court. Guinevere becomes a nun in order to expiate her sins. Two more types of female characters can also be seen in Arthuriana. On the one hand, the dame who goes to court to ask for help from Arthur and his men and who, almost invariably, ends up falling in love or marrying the hero. On the other hand, the ugly lady who sorts out the hero’s problem and, as a means of compensation, marries him. This ugly, old lady becomes young and beautiful on the wedding night. B.A.S. vol. XV, 2009 156 2. Changes in modern Arthuriana Contemporary Arthuriana has shifted from this traditional, male-orient- ed view to a different one, wherein women occupy a more determining role. It was during the Victorian period that the first examples of this change — such as William Morris’s (1834-1896) long poem “The Defence of Guinevere” (1858) — could be seen. In the early twentieth century, this new wave became more evident: in 1911, the American poet Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) wrote “Guinevere”, in which the queen, in a wonderful mono- logue, comments on her affair with Lancelot. Teasdale also wrote other poems with women as central characters, such as “Galahad in the Castle of Maidens” (1911) or “At Tintagil” (1926), where Iseult remembers her love for Tristan. The British author Rosalind Miles (b. 1943) also chose Arthur’s wife as the main character in Guinevere: Queen of the Summer Country (1999). Another modern writer who has paid attention to women in her novels is Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-1992), whose The Lantern Bearers deals with the Roman withdrawal from the British Isles. The subsequent Saxon inva- sion is seen through the eyes of Aquila, a Romano-British Imperialist soldier haunted by two women: his sister, whom he fails to save from a marriage to a Saxon chieftain, and Ness, his wife, the daughter of a Nationalist chieftain who supports Vortigern. In The Road to Avalon (1988), Joan Wolf (b. 1951) concentrates on Arthur’s infatuation with his aunt Morgan. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s (1930-1999) The Mists of Avalon (1982) is a meditation on Arthur’s rise and fall through the eyes and lives of four women: devout Guinevere, his beautiful aunt Morgause, Viviane, Priestess of Avalon, and Morgaine, Arthur’s sister and lover. This trend has shown little sign of abating. Indeed, it continues even in the literature written by men, as in the case of The Warlord Chronicles, a trilogy written by Bernard Cornwell (b. 1944). Consisting in The Winter King (1996), Enemy of God (1997) and Excalibur (1998), this trilogy resuscitates some commonplaces and long-forgotten characters in the Arthurian tradi- tion. The (hi)story of this kaleidoscopic group of novels is retold by Derfel Cadarn, one of Arthur’s soldiers and best friends, during his final years in a monastery in North Wales, where he puts on parchment Arthur’s life, as commanded by Queen Igraine of Powys. The time that Derfel covers in his retelling begins with Mordred’s birth on a cold winter night (hence the title of the first book) and finishes with the famous battle of Camlann, where 157 CULTURAL REMAPPINGS Arthur kills his nephew and the latter mortally wounds Uther Pendragon’s son. The role of women writers in medieval literature is almost inexistent. There are very few exceptions, such as Marie de France in the Arthurian uni- verse. As Wynne-Davies stated, “no woman wrote about the Arthurian material until the nineteenth century, and […] a significant female contribu- tion to the myths did not really begin until the twentieth century.” (1996: 2). Furthermore, considering the characters, Wynne–Davies affirms that they are “recurring representations of the virgin and the whore, the dutiful and the unchaste wives, the hag and the lady” (1996: 5). By way of contrast, modern authors such as Zimmer Bradley or Stewart depict female characters as firmly independent, since “they choose their own partners on the basis of a personal desire” (Wynne-Davies, 1998: 6). This clearly reflects the freedom that Celtic women enjoyed at a cer- tain stage in the past. For instance, this was the case of Queen Cartimandua, who repudiated her husband and took his charioteer as a lover. In Bernard Cornwell’s trilogy, the four main female characters move freely within a male world. Nimue beds Merlin and Derfel. Ceinwyn elopes with the man she loves and does not marry the one she is betrothed to. Guinevere marries Arthur out of ambition and when she finds out that he does not want to be a king, she becomes Lancelot’s lover in order to achieve her aim of becoming a queen; finally, Morgan marries Bishop Sansum, to avoid her loneliness. These four women perfectly represent the idea which Wynne- Davies explains, that the struggle between male and female has now opened to different ways of feminism. In other words, these four characters understand femininity in different ways 3. The case of the female characters in The Warlord Chronicles Out of the four main characters in the trilogy, Morgan is probably the least feminist of all, as she gives up her freedom and religious creed when marrying Sansum. While to the bishop the wedding brings more power, influence, and money, the compensation for Uther’s daughter is of a different nature, as Merlin, who did not attend the marriage, asserts: “She is lonely,” he told me when he heard the news, “and the mouse-lord is at least company. You don’t think they rut together, do you? Dear Gods, Derfel, if B.A.S. vol. XV, 2009 158 poor Morgan undressed in front of Sansum he’d throw up! Besides, he does not know how to rut. Not with women, anyway” (Cornwell, 1997: 265). Morgan is not going to be the diabolic character pictured in the Middle Ages, constantly plotting against her brother, as in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur: Arthur betook the scabbard into Morgan Le Fay her sister, and she loved another knight better than her husband King Uriens or King Arthur. And she would have Arthur her brother slain, and therefore she let make another scabbard for Excalibur like it by enchantment, and gave the scabbard Excalibur to her love (1998: 41). In The Warlord Chronicles, Morgan is an embittered woman who lost her husband in a fire which charred the left-hand side of her body. She is very intelligent, but very ill-tempered. She feels lonely and this is probably her most characteristic feature. One of the moments where Morgan shows her lonesomeness is after her father’s death, King Uther, when she locks herself up in a hut for days on end to weep, until her brother Arthur comes back from Armorica to see her and “when he offered to embrace her she began to cry behind her gold mask […] He held her tight and patted her back. “Dear Morgan,” I heard him say, “dear, sweet Morgan.” I had never realised how lonely Morgan was until I saw her weep in her brother’s arms” (Cornwell, 1996: 117-8). This good fraternal relation is a topic that Cornwell has taken from some texts in the Middle Ages (such as the Catalan texts La faula (c.1370) and Tirant lo Blanc, written c.1460), where Morgan is a good sister looking for a solution to Arthur’s sorrows. The most interesting feature we can observe in Morgan is her change of religion, prompted by her marriage to Sansum. She will be no more “the priestess of Merlin, the adept of the mysteries, the pagan Morgan” (Cornwell, 1997: 263). She becomes “strident in her protestations of Christ as she had ever been in her service of the older Gods and after her marriage all her formidable will was poured into Sansum’s missionary campaign” (Cornwell, 1997: 265). This striking shift from medieval literature, which mainly condemned her for being a sorceress, could explain why she is the least feminist character in the trilogy. Notwithstanding, Cornwell still keeps some of her best-known features, such as her spite and enmity against 159 CULTURAL REMAPPINGS Guinevere. Her role as the constant plotter opposed to Camelot has been taken over by Nimue.

Load more