Guinevere

Guinevere was the Queen consort of King Arthur. Guinevere may be an epithet - the Welsh form Gwenhwyfar (in older spelling Gwenhwyvar) can be translated The White Fay or "white shadow" (see also Ishara) that falls over the knights of the Round Table and leads to Arthur's ruin. However, as Rachael Bromwich notes, it can also be analyzed as "Gwenhwy-vawr" or Gwen the Great in contrast to the personage "Gwenhwy-vach" -- Gwen the less (Gwenhwyvach appears in Welsh literature as a sister of Gwenhyfar). She is childless in most stories, two exceptions being the Perlesvaus and the Alliterative Morte Arthurehttp://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/alstint.htm. In the former, the character Loholt is apparently her son; he appears as Arthur's illegitimate son in other works. In the latter, Guinevere willingly becomes Mordred's consort and bears him two sons, though all of this is implied rather than stated in the text. There are mentions of Arthur's sons in the Welsh Triads, though their exact parentage isn't clear.

In current pop culture

Motion pictures

• King Arthur, the 2004 movie featured Guinevere as a Celtic warrior maiden who became Arthur's consort after he rescued her from imprisonment.
• Guinevere is a 1999 motion picture that had nothing to do with King Arthur.
• Guinevere is also the name of a 1994 made-for-TV-movie which centres the storytelling of the Authurian legend around the title character. Guinevere grows up with Lancelot, an orphan, as a Pagan under the tutelage of Morgan Le Fey, who harbors a grudge for King Uther and his son, Arthur due to Uther's murder of her father and seizure of her mother.
• First Knight is a movie featuring Sean Connery as King Arthur, Julia Ormond as Guinevere, and Richard Gere as Lancelot.

Novels

• The Guenevere Trilogy by Rosalind Miles follows the Queen of Summer Country from the time of her mother's death to the death of her husband King Arthur.
• The Guinevere Series by Sharan Newman
• The Tales of Guinevere by Alice Borchard
• Queen of Camelot by Nancy McKenzie

Television

• The children's television show Guinevere Jones revolves around the adventures of a girl who finds that she is the reincarnation of the Guinevere of legend.
• The Legend of Prince Valiant, an animated adventure series that aired in the early 1990s, included Guinevere among its cast of characters.