THE WARRIOR WOMAN PRECEDENT I: GWENHWYFAR: ROMANO-BRITON BADASS

Boudiccea Haranguing the Britons, by John Opie

I’m just going to say it: Boudicca was a badass.  And, don’t say, “Whooooooo?”  Boudicca.  That’s who.

Queen of the British Iceni tribe after her husband died.  Freedom-fighter against the Romans after they flogged her and raped her daughters.  Burner of London, amongst other cities.  And suicide: she killed herself after the Romans finally beat her in battle.

Boudicca.  That’s who.  Anyway, she was a badass.

You might ask: What does this have to do with Guinevere, King Arthur, Camelot, or my book, The Tyrant and the Twins, which is really the raison d’être for this blog?  Well, I suppose now is as good a time as any to tell you that my book has not one, but THREE narrators.

Yep, that’s right.  THREE.  All female.

Two out of three are – or over the course of several books will become – what scholars, archaeologists, and snobbish history-buffs like me like to call warrior women, battle maidens, or, in the Tolkien tradition, shieldmaidens.  Shieldmaidens, as in J.R.R. Tolkien.  As in Lord of the Rings.  As in “Eowyn, Shieldmaiden of Rohan”.

Anyway, two of my narrators are shieldmaidens.  Or battle maidens.  Or warriors.  And, all of them are badasses.  Every one.

Like my Narrator #2, Cwenhild.  She’s sort of the Anglo-Saxon, Jutish, Rohirrim shieldmaiden of this piece.  A tomboy who knew what she wanted to be pretty much from birth.  Maybe ‘cause she just already WAS a fighter.  She was born that way, and she was born knowing it.  She’s THAT person.  We’ll deal with her more later, in another post or three.

NOT like my Narrator #3, Rapha.  She’s NOT that person.  She’s got her own thing going on.  We’ll be dealing with her much, much later.

Nope, Boudicca is more like Anavere, my #1 Narrator.  Anavere was Irish, Pictish, and, yes, Romano-Briton.

(“Romano-Briton” is more of a cultural than a racial designation.  We’re talking about a Britain that had been occupied by Rome for about four centuries and had more of a melting pot of cultures.  Like America).

Anavere is the Guinevere of the piece.  The titular character of the series, The Annals of Anavere.  The main narrator.  The head honcho.  The big fig.

She’s just a little girl in this first book.  But, you might as well know at least some of where I’m going with this.  You might as well know what the possibilities are.  And what the “career paths” were for a fifth-century, royal, educated, landed woman with the brains and guts and moxie and, really, no other choice, than to get out there and fight with and against the “big boys”.  Like a badass.  Like Boudicca.

Snettisham Great Torc, buried c. 100 BC; from Ealdgyth

Speaking of whom…back to Boudicca.  A tall, redheaded firecracker with a piercing glare (like some of the women in my family), who allegedly wore a golden torc around her neck, she fought back when her husband’s Roman creditors called in their loans after his death.  Politics and money.  The same things that have started every war since the beginning of time.

See, in his will, her husband had left his kingdom jointly to his daughters and the Roman Emperor.  Probably to make sure this sort of shit didn’t happen once he died.  Once he did die, the Roman Emperor annexed his lands outright as part of the Roman Empire, flogged his wife (Boudicca), had his daughters raped, and told his financiers to call in their loans.

Wouldn’t that tick any woman off?  Especially, if she was a royal redhead with a royal red temper who hailed from a tribe of warriors?

The answer is “Yes.”  It would tick her off.  And it did.  So she fought.

Under her direction, the Iceni demolished Colchester, burned London, and destroyed St. Albans.  They killed upwards of 70,000 people and literally took no prisoners.  Someone’s pissed…

The locals fled.  The future governor with his decimated cavalry fled.  The greedy procurator – the villain, or scapegoat, of the piece, depending on which story you believe – fled.

Fragment of Wall of Roman Londinium, photographer John Winfield

The current governor abandoned London and St. Albans to their fates.  And fled.

(Some say he sacrificed the cities to save the province.  Don’t make him out to be a Churchill: you know, the cracking of the German code, the bombing of London, and all that.  He just didn’t think it was a good place to make a stand.  So he left.  Or fled).

The Iceni are described as having gone on a rampage, butchering and crucifying the local innocents, impaling them on stakes in sacred groves, cutting off body parts, and feasting before the bodies of their victims.  The picture painted is virtually identical to that drawn of Vlad the Impaler – Dracula – by his enemies, the German monks of the fifteenth century, right after he kicked them out of Romania and they lost all their trading revenue.  (Unfortunately for Dracula, the printing press had just been invented in Germany: a great way for his monkish foes to disseminate a large amount of negative propaganda, known nowadays as “bad press”).  Naturally, the press statement regarding Boudicca’s depredations was issued by her enemies, the Romans, who are the people who brought us crucifixion in the first place.

Anyway, eventually Boudicca was defeated.  In doing a William Wallace and exhorting her troops – with the slight improvement of the speech being given from the back of her chariot with her deflowered daughters beside her – she told her men that they might live as slaves if they wished, but she, a woman, was determined to fight.  Basically, “Live free, or die hard.”  And she did.

The Romans defeated her in battle somewhere along the old Roman road, which is nowadays known as Watling Street.  She either took poison to avoid capture and humiliation, or fell ill, died, and was given a lavish burial.

I prefer to believe she poisoned herself, rather than live as a slave.  She was a pistol in life.  Maybe she was in death, too.

Cordelia's Portion, by Ford Madox Brown

Oh, sure, there were other British warrior queens.  Like Marcia, who wrote the Marcian Laws.  And, Cordelia, about whom William Shakespeare wrote King Lear.

Women fighters weren’t even unknown to the Romans.  I’m including a photo here of an engraving of two FEMALE Roman gladiators, optimistically if not exactly originally named after two famous warriors or types of warrior: Amazonia and Achillea.  (That would be the “Amazons”, the legendary female fighters of Scythia, and “Achilles”, an equally illustrious male Greek warrior, who killed an Amazon, Penthesilea, in the Trojan War.  But, more on her later).

Engraving of Two Roman Gladiatrix: Amazonia and Achillea

These British warrior women were leaders, lawmakers, fighters…politicians, even.  They had innovation, intelligence, audacity, even sex appeal.

But, none had Boudicca’s style.  None had her fire.  And none were better known than the “Big B”.  Except for Guinevere.

Through the good offices of the romance writers of the Middle Ages, Guinevere became known for conducting a salacious – and probably erroneous – adulterous affair with Lancelot.  For betraying and attacking her husband, King Arthur.  And for ending her days ignominiously in a nunnery.  (“Get thee to a nunnery.”  And I reply, “Get thyself to a nunnery, Herman”).

(Incidentally, Guinevere wasn’t her real name.  Her birth name was Gwenhwyfar, which translates to Gwen + hwyfar = “White Phantom or Fairy”.  But I don’t think that was her real name, either.

(These people – Celts, Picts, or whoever they were – liked plays on words.  But what am I saying?  They LOVED plays on words.  I should know: I’ve been translating every Arthurian name that came my way for the last twenty-one years.  Plus, I’m Irish myself.

(I mean, these are the people who brought us bards and trilogies and love-knots and all kinds of circular thinking.  To this day, the Irish will answer a question with another question.  Their American descendants play “the dozens” in the streets of New York.  [See Sleepers if you don’t know what “the dozens” is].

(Anyway, a name like “White Phantom” might come in handy if you had some enemy troops you wanted to throw a scare into.  Psychological warfare, if you will.  Really ancient, psychological warfare.

(So, they played off her real birth name, which seems to have been Gwentylwyth: Gwen + tylwyth = “White Tribe”.  “Tribe”, meaning the Picts of the White Land, Alba, or Scotland.  [The connection between the two names is tylwyth teg, the “fairy people”.  Tylwyth is people, and teg means…oh, you figured it out).

Back to reality.  In reality, it seems to have been the other way around.  Arthur cheated on Guinevere by taking another wife, who, by the way, was Guinevere’s own sister.  Arthur tried to repudiate Guinevere, and a big legal battle ensued (Read: “The Original Ugly Divorce”, or “OUD”), followed by a military campaign.

Arthur attacked Guinevere – and the two friends who remained true to her – leading a bloody war against them and eventually killing one of the friends.  (This is why to this day, people will tell you not to take sides when a couple you’re friends with decides to get a divorce).

All for land, money, and – that most elusive of motives – power, which the American Indian activist John Trudell says people commonly mistake for authority.  Authority is something you can attain through personal effort.  But it’s manmade.

Power is intangible.  Power only comes from within.  No one can give it to you.  And you cannot take it from anyone.

This was not the first campaign Guinevere fought.  Nor was it the first she had fought against Arthur.  See, when she was young, she seems to have fought a war against him, winning most of the battles, but ultimately losing the war.  Her own private Vietnam, you might say.

Once he defeated her, Arthur married her.  Or forced her to marry him so he could keep the legal rights to her lands.  (By Pictish inheritance law, which we’ll get to later).

Guinevere’s lands were the most strategic lands in what is now Britain.  (Britain, by the way, is an island.  If you could hold her lands, you could hold the whole island.  But, we’ll get to that later).

This is what, in the Dark Ages, they liked to call “marriage by capture”.  After the honeymoon, Guinevere and her men had to fight for Arthur.  Against her former allies and some of her family members.

And then they had a period of peace.  A SHORT period of peace.

Anyway, Arthur attacked Guinevere.  Again.

And she fought back.  Again.

She fought for her inheritance, for her people, her pride, her friends, and yeah, I’ll go ahead and say it, for honor.  ‘Cause she was in the right.

Like Boudicca.