Bjärnihild said: For Guenevere, in the Goddodin, the earliest referrence to Arthur and Merlin, there is a woman who fits the description by the name of Winlogee, it may not be her but it may be.

I already dropped this as a message because I was over my posting limit the other day, but I thought it would be good to put it here as clarification.

"Winlogee" is not a character in Y Gododdin. She is a figure on an archivolt in the cathedral at Modena, in Italy. This is a carving dating to about 1100 or so. It certainly does represent Guinevere, as the carving is commonly held to depict a familiar Arthurian scene: Guinevere has been abducted and someone must come to rescue her. This page is as good as any:
http://everything2.com/?node_id=1391465

The Modena Archivolt is of particular interest to Arthurian scholars because it depicts some version of a well-known story before such a story is known to have been written down - in other words, it predates Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, where Guinevere is "Guanhumara."

You can still see "Winlogee" being used as a translation for Guinevere on some European websites today, and it is very widely considered to be one of the many variations on that name.

As far as the King Arthur movie goes... well, the movie is based on folklorist Linda Malcor's theories about a possible historical Arthur. I don't take said theories all that seriously, after seeing how strenuously she's had to defend them on the Arthurnet mailing list, which I quit reading a few years back because of the volume of those particular arguments. That doesn't mean that they're uninteresting, or any worse than a lot of other theories, though. Part of the fun of discussing Arthur is having a pet theory, though I personally get kind of aggravated when that "theory" is just a regurgitation of the plot of The Mists of Avalon or Excalibur or etc. (Not an issue here right now.)

And as far as the Celts having female warriors... sure, definitely earlier, but don't overstate it. I don't know if they ever would have been a major presence or a main part of the fray. Certainly some Celtic tribes were occasionally known to have warrior queens, and the Celtic concept of queenship was pretty different from the Roman and/or Christian one. But I don't have any references that are not strictly "a woman of status leads her tribe in battle" - I've never seen anything like, "There were a lot of women in this tribe's army."

Where are studious people from the Celtia boards when you need them?