Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country, Rosalind Miles

I was so tempted to write about my dear Harrius Potter, but he’s too much of a go-to for me. I mean, he was the first one to introduce to me how the medieval world, or rather some aspects of it, could interweave with the modern world. But, I’d rather share some lumos on a different book that really inspired me.

Rosalind Miles’ book, “Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country,” was the first sort of adult novel that I read. I read it for my “Advanced Reading” class in 8th grade as my own chosen project. To be honest, I just really liked the title. At this point, I had not read any sort of medieval tale since I read King Arthur’s tales. So, it was such a treat to be reintroduced into this world but from a FEMALE perspective. I was so entranced. This book chronicled the life of Guenevere, the wife of King Arthur of Camelot, from about childhood to her marriage to him to the beginning of her affair with Lancelot. The ideas behind pagan rituals and goddesses and medieval courting – it was more than I could bear at the time! The magic of Merlin, the deceitfulness of Morgana, the loss of Guenevere’s son because of war, the forbidden love between Lancelot and Guenevere – someone could have just put Fabio on the cover because the drama was just that palpable. I remember trying to explain it to my class and basically going on a tangent about magic and how you can use to seal up wombs and cause brilliant sorcerers to go mad and ask druids for help. Yeah.. I was never a “cool” kid in middle school… but their loss! I still have my book in my room with its notes on the sides and highlights. I planned on reading the other two books, but, for some unexplainable reason, medieval fiction is so hard to find sometimes. It was just the read I needed to inspire me to essentially geek out about the Middle Ages again.