Queen of Hearts

Legends love problematic queens. Semiramis, Helen of Troy, the endless range of evil stepmothers - their ranks are some of the largest out there. You can see why: the dramatic potential of a woman who stands for an entire country and doesn't do her job by it is fantastic. On one hand, the queen is a powerful symbol; on the other, she's also an imperfect person. And for my money, no problematic queen is more interesting than Guinevere.

The Accolade, Edmund Blair Leighton

For one thing, she embodies that dramatic potential better than anyone else. The other problematic queens really aren't very good at the queen thing. Helen may look great on Menelaus' arm at public festivals, but she also openly and drastically shucks her duty. Semiramis drags Babylon into a war because a hot king turned her down. The jealous stepmother of "The Six Swans" robs her country of every single one of its heirs, just because they're not her kids. Not only are these women troubling, they can't even do their actual job properly.

Not Guinevere. Regardless of what she does behind Arthur's back, she is acknowledged in every version as a paragon among queens for her performance of her duties. She does the arm candy thing at every tournament and Pentecost feast Arthur throws. She hosts Maying parties and leads court excursions. She even (in an ironically Anglo-Saxon move, given who the historical Arthur's enemies were) offers the cup to his knights when they gather. (We'll ignore that one time the cup was poisoned and she was accused of murder. That's not the point.) Guinevere knows what none of the other queens do: her title is a role. She has lines to memorize and marks to hit, and she nails them all, every single time. Even the writers who don't like her (ahem, Tennyson) freely concede that publicly she is everything and more that a queen should be.

Sir Launcelot and the Queen Talked Sadly Together,
Arthur Dixon

Her failures, unlike her fellows', are private and behind the scenes. And also incredibly, heartbreakingly human. It's hard to forgive her for her betrayal of Arthur, but it's also hard to hate her just because she fell in love. And it's not as if (like Helen, say) she jumped headlong into Lancelot's arms. There are versions I've read where their love remains unconsummated, and even unspoken, up through the Grail Quest. Again: this is a woman who knows her duty. She bottles up her passion, confides in no one, and goes the hell on with her life, her job, and her marriage, as best she can and as long as she can. There's no outside divine influence, no heedless snap decision, not even any base motives. She just loves a man she must not love, and she fights it as hard as she can.

But not hard enough. Guinevere is a problematic queen for a reason.

When at last she begins her affair with Lancelot, writer after writer leaps on those problems. The perfect queen who betrays her duty, her husband, and her kingdom presents a stunning piece of hypocrisy. It doesn't help that Guinevere is actually a crucial piece of the lasting legend of Camelot. Arthur the lawgiver creates a kingdom, but it's Guinevere who brings civilization. Arthur only gets the Round Table because it's part of his wife's dowry. Without Guinevere, Camelot would lack its most potent symbol, as well as much of its courtly appeal and chivalric code. So for one of the true backbones of the realm to break faith with its highest aspirations is an act that undermines not only Guinevere personally, but the entire kingdom she represents.

Lancelot and Guinevere, Michael Manomivibul

And Guinevere's character becomes the mirror for that hypocrisy. From the wise and gracious hostess handing out elegant atonement to young Gawain at her wedding feast, she becomes a shrew of the first order, constantly doubting and questioning Lancelot's love. She can never just talk things out like a normal person; instead she picks fights, deliberately choosing her words to wound. Only honest people make clean breasts of their problems; Guinevere's deception bars her emotionally from taking the straightforward and more honorable road. Worse, she sometimes engages in petty jealousy, in a way highly uncharacteristic of the charmer and politician she would have to be in order to foster harmony and civilization.

In one sense, of course she can't be sensible and thoughtful; she is too symbolic a figure not to be identified first and foremost with her position, and her betrayal is too great not to exploit symbolically in literature. But the transformation of Guinevere from angel to harridan is also much too simple. If she's so obnoxious, why did Arthur fall for her? Why does her court mostly like her? There's got to be something else going on, something not symbolic but human.

La Belle Iseult (also called
Queen Guinevere), William Morris

Enter perhaps the oddest knight in shining armor ever: William Morris.*

A would-be painter and a revolutionary craftsman, Morris wrote the first work to present Guinevere not as a symbol of a decaying realm built on a dream and a lie, but as a human woman caught between passion and duty. The Defence of Guenevere imagines her at her trial before Arthur's knights, speaking on her own behalf with eloquence, dignity, and full awareness of herself. Brilliantly, her "defence" rests on that very thing nearly all earlier Arthurian chronicles deny her: total emotional honesty. Having at last found love, she demands to know if she "must...give up forever...that which I deemed would ever round me move, glorifying all things; for a little word, scarce ever meant at all, must I now prove stone-cold for ever?" She describes her agony of conscience, the anguish of love, the delight at its fulfillment and the shame she feels at that delight. She is, at last, open and honest and entirely sympathetic.

Guinevere, Meredith Dillman

But even at her best, she can't win. Because despite her eloquence, and despite the real torment of her soul, she is still a woman both wronged and wronging. Guinevere's archetypal appeal and human fascination are both tied directly to her dual nature: perfection and destruction, love and betrayal, honor and shame. No matter how sympathetic and understandable her motives are, what draws us to her are the contradictions that break Camelot. She is the greatest problematic queen in all of legend: problematic because we understand her and cannot absolve her.

*(Morris, of course, had personal experience with a problematic woman torn between love and duty: his own wife, Jane, one of the great muses of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It's not hard to see where Morris could have drawn from life; but it is moving that he, the cuckolded husband, can summon such vast sympathy for the adulterous wife.)

The Reckless Ring-Giver

Is Beowulf a hero?

Beowulf vs. Grendel, TheFool432

Sometimes you just need to ask the blunt question. Even when it sounds incredibly stupid. By any definition, of course Beowulf's a hero. He fights monsters! He kills dragons! He trash-talks with class! He's right up there with Hercules for perhaps the classic heroic archetype. Is Beowulf a hero? What meds, exactly, am I on to ask that question?

First off, what on earth do we actually mean when we say "hero"? By the Anglo-Saxon code under which he should properly be judged, Beowulf is as close as you can get to perfection. He is a valiant fighter whose prowess commands the respect of the men he leads. He never falls victim to false modesty; his boasts are always justified by his feats, and he isn't shy about explaining his worth. He jumps at the chance to win glory, even - especially - embracing the danger by which that glory can be had. And when he comes into wealth and power, he shares it out among his friends and thanes, as a good lord should.

Beowulf Battles Grendel's Mother, John Howe

Beowulf also passes the classical Greek definition with flying colors. He's no coward, shying away from danger and fate; he, like Achilles, wants nothing more than to be remembered well. He upholds the honor of the noble house into which he was born. He charges headlong into treacherous situations, winning free by equal virtue of his strength and his wits. He always keeps one eye on posterity. The Greeks would have loved this guy almost as much as the Anglo-Saxons did.

And what do we mean now, when we talk about heroes?

It's a considerably more complicated question than it used to be. Modern myth-readers are less inclined to give heroes a pass on their brutality or their stupidity simply because of their divine birth or their astonishing strength. Hercules is superhuman; he also murdered his first wife and all their kids in a fit of temporary insanity. Achilles is a self-absorbed whiny one-man killing machine. And Beowulf is a glory hound.

Beowulf's Funeral, John Howe

On one hand, it's his story; we'd feel cheated if he went around offering his thanes the chance to do something awesome. On the other hand, even we know that he is very overmatched when he takes on a dragon alone. Beowulf's end is classic Greek hubris: his pride forbids him to enlist the help of the able-bodied men who accompany him to the dragon's lair. And when they all desert him except for valiant and loyal Wiglaf, it's hard not to wonder if Beowulf monopolized everyone else's chance to become a hero and made himself great by making his contemporaries cowards.

Beowulf's Funeral, Virgil Burnett

In that sense, he himself contributes tremendously to the fall of his kingdom, built mainly on his own reputation. The crone who cries his funeral lament at the end of the poem foresees no defense of her homeland now that its hero has fallen. Why were there no young Beowulfs ready to take their dead king's place? Well, maybe because that king took their shots at glory for himself. Unwilling to follow in the well-meaning but ineffectual footsteps of Hrothgar, Beowulf goes out in a blaze of aged glory. But Hrothgar at least kept his people together until a hero could arise. Beowulf's death is actually rather selfish, seen in that light. By risking his life as a hero should, Beowulf robs his people of their greatest protection. His wholehearted embrace of the hero's role leads him to ignore the role in which his people need him most: that of guardian, guiding hand, and arbiter of justice. His betrayal (or worse, ignorance) of that need is hardly a heroic act.

Beowulf, Olga Falinskaya

But all the same, it's impossible to discount his astonishing deeds. He rips off a monster's arm with his bare hands. He fights a she-demon underwater for hours on end. He takes on a dragon with the help of one young retainer. And throughout his story, he retains a nobility of spirit. When he makes mistakes, he makes them with the best intentions. It's hard to blame him for always betting on himself when he always wins through. Beowulf knows himself. He knows who he is and what he's capable of. It's a blunt kind of wisdom, one that heroes like Theseus and Lancelot - other heroes with grave single flaws - often display.

Is Beowulf problematic? Yes. He's too proud, too reckless, too overconfident. But he commands admiration in spite of his flaws. He is a hero, but not a divine one. Despite his supernatural foes, Beowulf is heroism at its most human: endangered by its weaknesses, but always capable of surpassing greatness.

A Woman's Other Weapon

Jupiter and Io, Antonio da Correggio

The sexploits of most gods are quite literally legendary. Sometimes a god is remarkable for being the only one in a pantheon to get much action; sometimes you just can't join the club until you drop your pants and chase every nymph in sight. What doesn't get talked about nearly as much, if at all, are the comparative lusts of goddesses.

(Yes, I just saw Magic Mike, and my mind's on double standards. Can you tell?)

Take the Greek gods. Hera's seduction of Zeus in the Iliad is possibly the only time in the entire mythos when we see its central couple engaging in mutually consensual sex, and this is well after she's given birth to at least two kids. (She's also the mother of the goddesses of youth, childbirth and discord; analyze that, Dr. Freud!) Aphrodite has a very famous roving eye, and what does it get her? Trussed up in a net by her husband, as well as being bad-mouthed forever as the biggest slut in a pantheon of sex maniacs. Echo's shy advances to Narcissus are brutally rebuffed; Eos claims a man and has to watch him wither into a grasshopper, while her sister can only sleep with her beloved while he is actually asleep. And it's never made universally clear whether Persephone was a product of rape or not.

Isis and Osiris, Susan Seddon Boulet

Things don't get much better elsewhere. The contemporary Norse turned a relatively blind eye to Freya's gadding about, but nearly everyone since has passed judgment on her actions, either by censoring, over-excusing, or simply writing her sex drive out of the story. Isis, who as a mother goddess derives an enormous amount of her power from her sexuality, gets mostly a throwaway mention about how she resurrected Osiris and slept with him to get pregnant and can we move on now please? Inanna's undeniable and insatiable passion gets her typecast as a terrifying hellion to fear and avoid, and her very real power is, if not shunned, then not actively courted. And the Virgin Mary's power is right there in her name: to be important, she has to lack desire.

So what are we talking about here? Is female sexuality too much to handle, even in primal tales of basic urges, even in pantheons with characters like Zeus and Odin and Jacob? Did the mostly-male mythologists shy away from really discussing women and sex out of blind fear? If myths ignore or censor women harnessing their sexuality free of judgment, isn't that really just an age-old manifestation of the madonna-whore complex?

Well, maybe not.

Female sexuality is an astoundingly powerful force, in myth and in reality. Women hold the power to create life as a direct result of their sexuality. You get early matriarchal society because early humans recognized and acknowledged that power. And you get creation myths like the Greek one, where Gaia trains her children to destroy her selfish and unsatisfactory consort, harnessing the product of her sexuality to annihilate Uranus once he's given her the missing ingredient to make life. And she turns that same power on Cronus when he too displeases her. It is no accident that Cronus' final defeat is Zeus castrating him; by going against the will of the female - that is, the one in charge - Cronus brings on himself his unmanning, by all the classic Greek rules of hubris.

Jupiter and Juno, Annibale Caracci

And even in the less satisfactory myths, you can see the threads of that power. Hera distracts Zeus from the most epic war of all time just by flashing a bit of cleavage. Inanna may be frightening, but as Gilgamesh aptly points out, she is not someone to mess with; tapping into her primal power allows her to control men's lives. Freya snatches up the best warriors for her own hall before even Odin gets his pick, and no one dares to question her. Isis and Mary turn the alarming threat of female sexuality into salvation by giving birth to their respective messiahs.

The Awakening of Adonis, John William Waterhouse

Yes, openly sexual women are scary things to the makers of myths. But it's not plain old misogyny. It's born of a healthy respect for the change a woman can make in the world, just by embracing her sexuality. And while stainless Vestal Virgins might get a story or two - Artemis, anyone? - it's the women grounded in their instinctive power who keep coming back to shake things up, even when the men around them get scared and try to push them away.

The Lone Artist

Let's talk about Hephaestus.

Hephaestus, Scott Eaton

Because honestly, who else is going to? The poor guy is the underdog to beat all underdogs, even in a mythos that includes Menelaus. He's the son of Zeus and his actual wife, so he gets no fun cavorting origin story. He's got a much hotter, flashier brother - and a gorgeous wife who flagrantly cheats on him with said brother. He's stuck in a volcano making pretty and amazing things for the ungrateful bastards he calls family, who grab what he gives them and don't even stay to say thank you. After Oedipus, he may have been dealt the worst hand in all of Greek mythology.

Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan,
Alexandre Charles Guillemot

It gets worse. All the memorable Hephaestus myths involve him getting humiliated in some way. How did he become lame? Well, Zeus pitched him off Olympus for siding with Hera in a marital spat. How did he score the most beautiful of all goddesses? Well, because his dad thought opposites might attract (and also figured that he owed him one after the whole laming business). How did he finally figure out that Aphrodite was two-timing him? Well, he had to catch her with Ares in a net before he could get anyone to pay attention. Even when he's a peripheral character, he's put-upon; when Achilles needs new armor in which to kill Hector, guess who has to pull an all-nighter to have it ready by morning?

You have to feel for the guy.

What makes things even sadder is that everyone on Olympus recognizes his competence.  No one dreams of going to anyone but Hephaestus for everything from jewelry repairs to new thunderbolts. Among scads of glory-hungry and talented deities, he is universally recognized as the most gifted. And no one ever asks anything more of him than what they want from him. He's the ugly friend who makes you look better by comparison.

And he does his job tragically well. Athena gets all the glory for giving handicrafts to humans, with no mention of who might have taught her. Apollo runs away with the artistic laurels, because it's not like any other god might be good at making pretty things. The guy can make a freaking volcano erupt when he works the night shift, but his own father steals the shock-and-awe points whenever he feels like pitching a hissy fit and a few thunderbolts. Hephaestus gets no credit for things that, in a more attractive god, would be cause for adoration and fangirling.

To which he says, with consummate grace: So what?

Hephaestus isn't a fame-seeker. He's not waiting with bated breath for the popular verdict on his latest creation. He knows it's good. He knows he made it. And he knows the next one will be even better. Hephaestus is an artist. He's actually a much more dedicated artist than Apollo, who spends more time skirt-chasing and scoring good PR than actually making music. Hephaestus lives in his studio. He literally breathes his creations. He is focused 24/7 on the thing he does well and that he loves to do. And most importantly, he's made it pay. All artists need patrons; what good is art if no one sees it? Hephaestus's skills earn him a dedicated clientele. Big freaking deal if they don't actually talk to him; capital-P Patrons of Art are almost always assholes in one way or another. The main thing is, they come back. They recognize the value of what he creates, and they want more. Hephaestus is living the artist's dream.

Sure, he's the solitary artist, the one who works in seclusion churning out beauties. But he's also a god. When he wants something done, he gets it done, whether it's a gorgeous new shield or an invisible wife-catching net. It's no coincidence that he traps Ares and Aphrodite in the literal coils of his own skill, which they thoughtlessly undervalued in undervaluing him. Hephaestus lives by his art. And he likes it that way.

Because if he didn't? Come on. This is a go-getter. This is a guy who knows where he's headed. If he didn't like the destination, he'd just set course for a new one. He wouldn't do it with a fuss and a fanfare, and someone would probably tease him for it. But he'd still be doing what he wanted. You just can't stop him.