Morgan Le Fay: Who was she? A paper written to enlight the woman ...

elations to her. For example, in Lawhead (1996), Myrddin or Merlin, Arthurs good friend and
consultant, says this about her:
It is this that is her downfall. O Great Light! This is her infirmity. The Queen of the Air and
the Darkness can never grant herself fear, she cannot admit it's existence, not even to herself.
She must always display herself as if she has the powers she is really lacking. She seems to
be capable of doing all that is really impossible for her. (p. 99)
In the very same book it is spoken of a Holy Grail, the same Grail that Josef of Arimathea
supposedly brought to Britannia, that is supposed to be a great weapon to defeat this evil woman,
Morgan Le Fay. I will return to the subject of Morgan Le Fay and her faith and religion later in this
paper.
What did Arthur himself think of her? In Malory (1994), Arthur speaks to her husband King Uriens
about her, after she has sent his son and her lover Accolon to fight Arthur:
Then was the king [Arthur] wonderly wroth, more than he was to-forehand, and said unto
King Uriens, My sister, your wife, is always about to betray me, and well I wot either ye, or
my nephew, your son, is of counsel with her to have me destroyed; but as for you, said the
king to King Uriens, I deem not greatly that ye be of her counsel, for Accolon confessed to
me by his own mouth, that she [Morgan] would have destroyed you as well as me(...)
(ch. 16, p. 126).
As this is a told as a saga, there is not much feeling in it, and it is all said in a very matter-of-fact-
way. But in the same fashion as other tales, it is clear that she had done something to harm him. Her
betrayals against him are obviously as many and as various as the literature mentioning it.
What was her purposes? Did she at all have any, was she determined? Did she succeed? It varies,
because the purposes of Morgan changes with everyone who writes about her. To Geoffrey (ibid.),
she was one of nine sisters, the leader of them, furthermore she was a shapeshifter and a healer. She
did not have any blood relations to Arthur, and equally, she didn't try to harm him in any way. In
Chrétien de Troyes' Erec and Enide 4 , she was primarily a healer and Arthur's sister, however, in this
book she is not an important character.
A hundred years later, in the early 13 th century, she changes into some kind of seductress in The
4 De Troyes was also a medieval poet who wrote Erec and Enide in 1140. You will find the
sources I have used to understand his works in the Webgraphy.