Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

  Let us begin with the Celtic goddess and see how far chariot-driving Boadicea descends from her: for it is to her, if anyone, that Boudica must have been related in the perception of her British contemporaries, those who teemed after her.

  * The date of Boudica’s rebellion – AD 60 or 61 – is another matter in dispute. As to how Boudica is or was to be pronounced, one can only observe that an expedition of archaeological enquiry by the author to East Anglia in 1985 produced three separate pronunciations from the first three experts encountered: i.e. Bōūdica, Boudīca and Boudicā.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ANTIQUE GLORIES

  Where is the antique glory now become

  That whilom wont in women to appear?

  Spenser, The Faerie Queene

  Goddesses stalk the land in the Celtic mythology, ride their chargers, drive their chariots, fight their battles, are vanquished – sometimes – and more often than not emerge victorious. Nor was the sexuality of these deities ignored, as was appropriate in goddesses who were connected with birth (and the fertility of the earth and crops) as well as with war and its companion death. The concept of the Celtic Great Mother, overlording the other lesser tribal deities, may or may not have been universally known (although it was certainly known); what is evident is the rampant and rich nature of the female deities who paraded through the Celtic world. The precise relationship of goddess to goddess may also be impossible to determine – these were after all deities of a non-literate society, whose tales were finally written down hundreds of years after they had first been sung, chanted and spoken to Celtic audiences. What is evident is that a series of female ‘High Ones’ were celebrated in the epics.1

  Furthermore, in the Celtic world, again and again it is the magic intervention in the course of battle of a female, goddess, queen or a combination of the two, which provides the focus or climax of the story. Such a female may be a hag or a beauty (or one disguised as the other). She may be as Rhiannon, the horse goddess of the Welsh Mabinogion, ‘a woman dressed in shining gold brocade and riding a great pale horse’ or the nine sorceresses of Gloucester encountered in the same sequence of tales who laid waste the country in their helmets and headpieces before the champion Peredur finally smote them.2

  The name of the Welsh Rhiannon connects to the Celtic Rigantona, great queen or ‘Queen of the Demons’; she in turn links to the Morrigan, sometimes merely a sinister (and sexually active) raven-goddess of war and sometimes used as a composite name to denote a trio, Badbh, Nemain and Macha, all with strong connections to both fertility and battle.3 Above all there is the character of Queen Medb (or Maeve) who is to the great Celtic cycle of The Tain what the Greek goddesses are to The Iliad, the physique and appetites of a woman, the magic powers of a goddess.

  It can indeed be argued that Queen Medb is the true heroine of The Tain; for although the champion Cúchulainn, the Hound of Ulster, is unarguably its hero, Medb, his adversary, is the female protagonist, a vivid character in her own right, both glamorous and ferocious, and it is her ardent desire to secure the Brown Bull of Ulster which sets the whole cycle in train. Like the Mabinogion, The Tain first emerges in written form long after its stories must first have been current, in the case of The Tain Christianized by monks in the eighth century AD (as it was later to be bowdlerized by Lady Gregory). But the society which The Tain actually reflects is thought to be placed around the time of the birth of Christ – that is to say some sixty years before the Boudican revolt.4

  At the start of The Tain, Medb is having ‘pillow talk’ with her husband Ailill, her theme being her superior state before she got married – not an unusual theme for such conversations, perhaps, but Medb is able to back her claim by pointing out that she was the daughter of the High King of Ireland, the ‘last and haughtiest’ of his six daughters: ‘I outdid them in grace and giving and battle and warlike combat’, she boasts; moreover she controlled fifteen hundred soldiers and as many freeborn native men.

  Ailill responds that he too is a king, by descent from his mother (a queen). It is however as they wrangle on the subject of possessions, the pair matching bull for bull, that Medb has to admit that one of Ailill’s bulls is finer than all of hers, since her own star animal, Finnbennach, has deserted to the King’s herd, after refusing to be led by a woman. Since the finest bull in all Ulster is known to be the Donn Cuailnge – the Brown Bull of Ulster – Medb determines to secure him with her Connaughtian army, and vanquish her husband’s claims. In this fashion begins the long epic of The Tain, glorious and bloodstained, the most magnificent cattle raid in literature, with Medb leading the attack and Cúchulainn as the champion of Ulster attempting to defend the Brown Bull from her rapacity.

  Where Medb’s character is concerned, she is certainly both cunning and imperious as well as lustful (her behaviour in that respect certainly forms part of the Voracity Syndrome). It is also noticeable that when she does suggest breaking the rules of fair fight, this deviousness is ascribed to her sex. On one occasion Medb suggests, from the vantage point of her chariot, that certain people, currently friendly but potentially hostile, be killed as a safeguard. Ailill condemns this as ‘a woman’s thinking’ – and wicked. When Medb sleeps with the warrior Fergus in order to seduce him to her side, Ailill forgives Fergus with the consoling words: ‘I know all about queens and women, I lay first fault straight at women’s own sweet swellings and loving lust’.

  Cúchulainn is the persistent target of the Queen’s attempted treachery. Medb first suggests a truce and then secretly sends six soldiers against the champion, all of royal blood (fortunately Cúchulainn is able to slay all six). Medb then suggests a private meeting between Cúchulainn and herself, promising to be attended only by her unarmed women. Cúchulainn’s own charioteer warns him against such a dangerous rendezvous: ‘Medb is a forceful woman. I’d watch out for her hand at my back.’ So Cúchulainn does at least take along his sword – which is just as well, because he finds the rendezvous has actually turned into an encounter with fourteen armed warriors. (Fortunately Cúchulainn is able once again to despatch the whole lot.)

  Queen Medb, with the magical birds or squirrels on her shoulders, is not the only strong goddess-woman in the Celtic legends. Part of Cúchulainn’s training as a fighter consists of his encounter with Aife, ‘the hardest woman warrior in the world’, while Cúchulainn himself is being trained in arms by another woman named Scathach. But it is the physical description of Queen Medb which seems to sum up the type of the Celtic goddess-cum-warrior. This is the fighting Queen Medb, as described to Cúchulainn by his fellow warrior Cethern, grievously wounded by an unknown assailant. ‘A tall, fair, long-faced woman with soft features came at me … She had a head of yellow hair and two gold birds on her shoulders. She wore a purple cloak folded about her, with five hands’ breadth of gold on her back. She carried a light, stinging, sharp-edged lance in her hand, and she held an iron sword with a woman’s grip over her head – a massive figure. It was she who came against me first.’

  ‘Then I’m sorry for you,’ is Cúchulainn’s comment. ‘That was Medb of Cruachan.’

  The connection between the insubstantial if vigorous goddess and the historic figure of the Warrior Queen remains for all this an elusive if fascinating one. If we take a character like Semiramis, the ninth-century BC Queen of Babylon who did exist but whose legend far outstrips her historical reality, it is clear that her identification with the goddess Astarte formed a valuable part of that legend in the mind of posterity. Eight centuries later we find the Hellenistic Queen Cleopatra deliberately donning the mantle of the goddess Isis for sound political reasons. The reporting of Boudica by Dio Cassius, which will be discussed later, suggests that she was herself conforming to some kind of stereotype of the Celtic warrior-woman; this in turn derived from the infinitely powerful character of the Celtic mother-cum-war-goddess, like Medb.

  Such attempts on the part of the ancient Warrior Queens to assume the mystical authority of the War Goddess were obvi
ously linked with the prevalence of these martial goddess figures. Let us suppose that together they constitute proof that there is something deep in the human spirit which finds in the image of the strong and armed woman a figure of awe. If that be so, then the next step is to consider whether such awe springs not so much from the human subconscious as from some real state of society in the remote past. Is it possible that the aggressive goddess, far from being a surprising figure, in terms of the patriarchal attitudes which have generally prevailed, is actually a reflection of the preceding matriarchal age when women as a whole were the dominant sex? Thus the Warrior Queen herself might appear as a kind of vestigial relic of that distant epoch: hence her encouraging or terrifying aspect according to the contemporary view taken of women’s rightful role in society.

  It is certainly tempting to regard the chariot-driving Warrior Queen as owing her authority to deep memories of a matriarchal society where women either held the reins of the chariot or gave the men the orders which enabled them to do so. Matriarchy has always been an attractive concept (to some). On the one hand a nostalgic conviction that there was a golden age when women enjoyed a now vanished prestige is comforting to the oppressed. This is the age whose passing Spenser mourned in The Faerie Queene:

  Where is the antique glory now become

  That whilom wont in women to appear?5

  On the other hand, more vigorously, a remedy for the future is suggested by this nostalgia, to restore what was evidently Nature’s intended ordering.

  Interest in the notion of matriarchy, keen in our own day as an obvious development of the rise of feminism, is nevertheless not exclusive to it. In particular, the influential work of J. S. Bachofen, first published in 1861, supposed the existence of ‘mother right’, a pre-Classical and pre-Biblical culture of the Bronze Age. Ending around 1200 BC, this was a culture in which the male role in procreation was ignored, and descent was traced only in the female line. Bachofen found examples of such matriarchal societies in places as diverse as Lycia, Athens, Crete, Lemnos, Egypt, Tibet, Central Asia and India.6

  More recently, however, scholars have been stepping warily where such positive statements concerning historical matriarchies are concerned. It is suggested that the archaeological discoveries of women buried with horses and spears – for example the Sarmatian graves of the fourth century BC – may point to the presence of women in the fighting force, but that in itself does not necessarily suppose a matriarchy.*7 After all, if the graves of females who have served in the Israeli army were to be discovered in a thousand years’ time, it would be a mistake on the part of scholars to regard this as proof of a matriarchal organization in the Israeli state. In 1986 shortage of recruits in the prolonged Iraq–Iran war led to girls being sent into battle, pictured in the newspapers dressed in the chador and carrying a gun: their skeletons, surviving by chance alongside their guns, would give an even more distorted picture of the Muslim state if some kind of ‘matriarchal’ conclusion were drawn.

  Replacing the belief in actual matriarchies, it is now supposed that while certain strong-minded Bronze Age queens did exist, just as individual women in certain societies of the past did display at least something of Spenser’s ‘antique glory’, the status of women as a whole was not superior to that of men. The existence of these spirited and respected individuals represents a state of affairs which is a far cry from the dreams of true matriarchy and matrilineal succession, the evidence for which has been described, even in the free Celtic world from which Boudica sprang, as being ‘very dubious’ and ‘best consigned to the large corpus of myths surrounding Celtic society’.8 It seems, as with the clearly legendary goddesses of war, that it is the continued tradition of pre-Classical matriarchies which is important here, rather than the fact of their existence.

  The question of historical truth becomes even more acute in the case of the Amazons and their leaders, including most prominently Penthesilea and Hippolyta. Like the alleged early pre-Classical matriarchies, the Amazons have sometimes been granted a proper historical existence; however in their case the evidence actually comes from the Classical writers, most notably Herodotus.9 If true, this would be another interesting possibility to explore with regard to the nature of the Warrior Queen’s origins: should we look to these colonies of armed and self-mutilated women for inspiration? (They were supposed to remove one breast for the sake of drawing the bow: the name Amazon itself was once thought to derive from the Greek ‘without breast’.) Many of the ancient writers site the Amazons in an area around the Black Sea, and indeed if they are allowed a historical existence, what is now Northern Anatolia seems the likeliest place for the cradle; coincidentally or not, the lands contiguous to the Black Sea will also provide a number of indisputably authentic Warrior Queens. Scythia to the north however also has its claims. Herodotus, on the other hand, supported by Diodorus Siculus, places his armed maidens on the shores of the Mediterranean in Libya, the significant point being that the Classical writers in general situated the Amazons on the outskirts of their known world, and as this world expanded, so the kingdoms of the Amazons receded into more distant territories.

  Outside the known world of the Greeks lay the barbarians – those rude and unfortunate strangers who lacked the brilliant order of the Greek state, and it is to this realm of disorderliness and unnaturalness that the Greek tradition of the Amazons belonged.10 Thus the Greek heroes of legend are frequently found undergoing a kind of ritual encounter with an Amazon, from which the Greek emerges the victor – the point being less the victory of one sex over the other (since the superiority of the male sex would be taken for granted by the Greeks) than the subjugation of the barbarians by the forces of civilization: it was one of the labours of Hercules to secure the girdle of the Amazon Queen Hippolyta. Similarly in art, Amazonomachy was a popular theme for many temple friezes and vases: but the defeated women there depicted actually stood for the Greeks’ victories over their male enemies – such as the Persians.

  Diodorus Siculus, writing in about 40 BC, has, like Homer, Penthesilea involving her Amazons in the Trojan War, in support of Priam, and being killed as a result by Achilles: after that the power and prestige of the Amazons declined. And it was the defeat and death of the ‘Amazonian’ Camilla of the Volscians, described by Virgil in The Aeneid, which presaged the establishment of the new Roman Empire under Aeneas.11

  Camilla is introduced to us at the head of ‘her cavalcade of squadrons a-flower with bronze’. She is among the Italian leaders who have gathered together, hoping to expel the invading Trojans led by Aeneas from their native land: a maiden warrior so fleet of foot that she could run across a field of corn without damaging the blades, across the sea without wetting the soles of her feet. Her description also provides an excellent Classical example of the Tomboy Syndrome: ‘She was a warrior; her girl’s hands had never been trained to Minerva’s distaff and her baskets of wool, but rather, though a maid, she was one to face out grim fights and in speed of foot to out-distance the winds …’. As Camilla passed, wayfarers gaped ‘to see how regal splendour clothed her smooth shoulders in purple, how her brooch clasped her hair in its gold, and how she wore on her a Lycian quiver and carried a shepherd’s myrtle staff with a lance’s head’.

  In the final military confrontation with Aeneas Camilla rides ‘armed with her quiver, exulting like an Amazon, through the midst of the slaughter, having one breast exposed for freedom in the fight. Sometimes with all her strength she would be casting her tough spear-shafts in dense showers, and sometimes without pause for rest her hand would wield a stout battle-axe.’ Camilla is surrounded by her faithful female attendants (‘daughters of Italy’) equally bold in the affray, Larina, Tulla and Tarpeia ‘wielding her bronze axe’; Virgil compares them directly to the Amazons of Thrace, ‘who, warring in their brilliant accoutrements, make Thermodon’s streams echo to the hoof-beats, as they ride, it may be with Hippolyta, or else when martial Penthesilea drives back in her chariot from war, and her soldier-wom
en, shrieking wild battle-cries, exult as they wave their crescent shields’.

  Camilla’s previous exploits – man-killing on a vicious scale – are related in gory detail (‘She battered through his unguarded breast with her long firwood-shafted spear’, etc., etc.), as is Camilla’s pride in her achievements. Here she addresses the mighty hunter Ornytus, whom she has pierced through: ‘Etruscan, did you imagine that you were chasing wild beasts in a forest? Well, the day will come which will prove that you and your fellows imagined wrongly; and it will be proved through a woman’s weapons. Yet you shall carry to the spirits of your fathers no mean fame – the fame of falling by Camilla’s spear.’

  In the end Camilla does fall to a man: it is the javelin of Arruns, whistling out of the blue which smites her down, signalling the defeat of the Italian cause. But Arruns only succeeds with the direct intervention of Phoebus Apollo; and subsequently Diana, the goddess Camilla serves, sees to it that her sentinel Opis avenges the Volscian’s death: ‘Your passing shall not be without fame throughout the world.’

  It is indeed the fame of the Amazons, and prototypes such as Camilla, which foreshadows the Warrior Queen, rather than the historical truth of their existence. Again and again we shall find a Warrior Queen acting out her life voluntarily or involuntarily as an example of the Appendage Syndrome: that is to say, she will either be regarded officially as an appendage to her father, husband or even son (as in the case of Cleopatra) or stress the relationship to give herself validity (as in Elizabeth I’s frequent stress upon her father Henry VIII). The Amazons of legend, however, specifically derived their exotic quality from the fact that they were nobody’s appendage.