Acta Universitatis Danubius. Communicatio, Vol 6, No 2 (2012)

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the role of some Arthurian feminine characters in contemporary Arthurian literature. Whilst their medieval counterparts had a mainly passive role and they did seldom take part in the action of the text, current Arthurian literature has turned this idea upside down. The first hints at this change could be observed in a few Victorian poems, but it has been in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that this trend has shown more popular, not only in texts written by women, as the popular The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, but also in those written by male authors, as it is the case of Bernard Cornwell’s trilogy “The Warlord Chronicles”, on which this papers focuses. The study deals with the four most important feminine characters of the trilogy and how they interact in the political and religious upheavals of the time.