Who had an affair with Queen Guinevere?
Guinevere Guinevere Guinevere ( ; ; ), often written as Guenevere or Gwenevere, is the wife of King Arthur in Arthurian legend. Guinevere has been portrayed as everything from a villainous and opportunistic traitor to a fatally flawed but noble and virtuous lady. She first appears as "Guanhumara" (with many spelling variants in the manuscript tradition) in Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Historia Regum Britanniae", a pseudo-historical chronicle of British history written circa 1136. In the later medieval romances, one of the most prominent story arcs is Queen Guinevere's tragic love affair with her husband's chief knight, Lancelot, indirectly causing the death of
Guinevere with the queen is dealt with for the first time in this poem. It has been suggested that Chrétien invented their affair to supply Guinevere with a courtly extramarital lover. Mordred could not be used as his reputation was beyond saving, and Yder had been forgotten entirely. In Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's "Lanzelet" (c. 1200), Valerin, King of the Tangled Wood, claims the right to marry her and carries her off to his castle in a struggle for power that reminds scholars of her prescient connections to the fertility and sovereignty of Britain. Arthur's company saves her, but Valerin kidnaps her