Could not finish. This is a bunch of garbage. ( )

The dust jacket of Guinevere bills Norma Lorre Goodrich as the world's most important living Arthurian scholar — dust jackets, of course, are completely unbiased sources. Maybe I'm missing something, but this book does not lead me to believe anything of the kind. In fact, in the end I was reduced to skimming, her egoism was so off-putting. She claims that she is qualified to do an unbiased study of Guinevere because she is an American (excuse me?), and later describes thirteenth century poet and translator Layamon as "an ignorant, ugly English monk." All questions of manners aside, how does she know he was ugly? It's clear that she is more interested in hurling insults his way than sticking to the facts.

This lack of good taste wouldn't be as troubling if her scholarship were less dubious. She often contradicts herself, as when she says that the "best source for this story of Guinevere is the voluminous Prose Lancelot manuscript," then writes on the next page, "Nothing in the Prose Lancelot comes very close to Guinevere's real life, marriage, betrothal, and alliance." If that is true, why does she regard it as the best source for these very events? And how does she know what Guinevere's life was really like? This is a problem throughout the book, in which she makes truth claims without explaining her reasoning process or providing citations. She seems bent on treating the Lancelot-Guinevere love story as fact (while denying any sexual relations between them) yet never offers an argument as to why he is left out of all the chronicles and doesn't appear until the French romances. Later she mentions a marriage contract between the queen and Arthur, of which I had never before read, yet fails to provide a reference.

Far from living up to the claims made by this book's dust jacket, Goodrich scarcely comes across as a professional. ( )

G. is a Pictish Queen with all the sparkle of a Grave's Goddess, so says the redoubtable Goodrich. i enjoy these kind of studies, but i throw my lot in with Joe Campbell and those of his kidney. ( )

Wikipedia:
She adopted the view that the 12th century pseudo-historian, Geoffrey of Monmouth had known that Arthur had not been in England, but in Scotland, but had concealed this unpopular view by listing the names of Arthur's battles in Latin rather than Gaelic—the original Celtic language of Scotland. “When I finally figured out what he was doing, I translated the Latin back into Gaelic,” Goodrich told the Riverside Press-Enterprise in 1994. She then found that the names coincided with places in Scotland. (The conventional view has always been that Geoffrey was describing places in southwestern England or Wales.) From her analyses of ancient languages, Goodrich discerned that Guinevere was a Pictish queen and Lancelot a Scottish king.

Goodrich's books were infrequently reviewed in scholarly journals and generally ignored by academic authorities.