
Gorgocutie Says:
From The Unhinged Feed — a thread about why we should be grateful for standardized spelling.
AstraNovalis: Grateful the standard spelling is “Guinevere” because the historical variants are atrocious — Guanhumara, Guennuuar, Gahunmare, Wenneuereia.
kuttithevangu: Thanks to whoever stopped using the “random horse noises” spelling.
The joke: the Welsh form Gwenhwyfar (fair ghost / white phantom) looks and sounds like “random horse noises” to modern English eyes. Arthurian legend survives from Latin chronicles through French romances — and the spelling got mangled at every step of the way.
Mythology angle: While not Greek, the Guinevere legend draws from Celtic mythology (the Mabinogion). The Arthurian cycle became the Matter of Britain — the mythological corpus that rivaled Greek and Roman myths in medieval imagination. Every culture has its Queen.
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