Legend says Guinevere spent her final days in penance in a convent, but that is far from the truth.
Having escaped death at the stake, Guinevere longs to live a peaceful life in Brittany with Lancelot, but the threat of Arthur’s wrath quickly separates the lovers. Guinevere finds herself back in Camelot, but it is not the peaceful capital she once knew; the loyalty of the people is divided over Arthur’s role in her death sentence. When war draws Arthur away from Britain, Mordred is named acting king. With Morgan at his side and a Saxon in his bed, Mordred’s thirst for power becomes his undoing and the cause of Guinevere’s greatest heartache.
In the wake of the deadly battle that leaves the country in civil war, Guinevere’s power as the former queen is sought by everyone who seeks to ascend the throne. Heartbroken and refusing to take sides in the conflict, she flees north to her mother’s Votadini homeland, where she is at long last reunited with Lancelot. The quiet life she desires is just beginning when warring tribal factions once again thrust her into an unexpected position of power. Now charged with ending an invasion that could bring an end to the Votadini tribe and put the whole island in the hands of the Saxons, Guinevere must draw upon decades of experience to try to save the people she loves and is sworn to protect.
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Researching a Strong Woman in Dark Ages Britain
by Nicole Evelina
Researching women in any historical time can be a complex venture because history is mainly written by the dominant, which have been almost exclusively male. This means we are missing the female perspective as well as seeing events and people through eyes that were often prejudiced.
But when you’re talking about a time period like the Dark Ages, about which so little is known to begin with, researching women becomes even more difficult. Given the dearth of facts, one must rely upon literature, myth, accounts written by the leaders of other cultures (which are usually biased because they are seeing it in comparison with their own), and archaeology. And as the 2017 discovery that a famous Viking warrior was female, not male as had been assumed since the 1880s, shows even archaeology can have an anti-female bias.
Despite this, I was very lucky when I decided to place my Guinevere in the period when most scholars believe a historical King Arthur (if such a man existed) would have lived – Dark Ages Britain, specifically between 450-550 CE. The Celts were known for their strong women, a tradition that could have continued into the post-Roman period, as it is thought that after the Romans abandoned Britain around 400 CE, their former tribal system re-asserted itself. This may have meant that women’s high status either remained or was returned to them, depending on how deep the Roman influence had been felt in a given location. (Roman women were not generally highly regarded.)
No written record of the laws of Britain exists for this period. But many experts assume their laws were similar to the Brehon Laws of Ireland and those of early medieval Wales, which means these women would have had many rights compared to their Roman and Greek counterparts. For example:
