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

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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.
Vulgate Cycle 5 , who is bitter towards Queen Guinevere and tries to reveal the Queen's sexual relationship with the knight Lancelot. She tries to split up Arthur and Guinevere and seduce Lancelot, but it does not succeed. Can one person have so many personalities? In a children's book by Crossley-Holland (1998), it says: The good Morgan ruled the island west of England known as Avalon. She was the first in a sisterhood consisting of nine healers, and when Arthur got badly wounded, she took him to Avalon and promised to cure him. (...) This good Morgan had magic powers: she could fly, she could change shape, and she was also a gifted poet and musician. (...)The evil Morgan was a fascinating, but dangerous witch, and a enemy of Camelot 6 . She fell in love with Merlin, and learned to practice magic. She was jealous of Arthur, so she stole his scabbard, and after the King killed one of her many lovers, she tried to murder him (p. 78). Is is that simple, or is it just an attempt at making a logical explanation to her schizophrenia? That the good Morgan Le Fay is the one mentioned in the works of Geoffrey (ibid.), the work of Chrétien (ibid.) and the one the 60's feminists loved and cherished as a symbol of women, and the bad Morgan is the one who tries to kill Arthur, steal his sword, his scabbard and his best friend? However, it is an important point that it is said that she learned to practice magic, and that she was a healer. It is safe to say that she had healing powers, as all of the sources can agree on that point. She was not a Christian, at least not in the way that the Christian priests were. Not very long before Arthur is said to have lived, the Romans left Britain after they had interfered for many centuries. What they left was a country that was about to be christianized. They had left enough believing men and women behind to finish their task. Morgan Le Fay was said to be a witch by many. Is this because she was not Christian? A brief account: Morgan was, or was not the half-sister of Arthur. In the very first Arthurian legend, she was merely a healer, a woman with special powers, and she had many qualities we humans do not have. Was she some kind of a supernatural creature, a fairy, as the name Le Fay suggests? The understanding of Morgan Le Fay has changed during the centuries from a magician or simply a 5 The Vulgate Cycle is a collection of texts which we can presume originally sprung out from one text. Several authors, amongst them Cisternian Monks, wrote additions, comments and so on. It is no longer possible to see what was the original piece and what has been added by many others later, and one cannot even say who the authors were. 6 Camelot: the capital of King Arthur's kingdom; according to the legend, truth and goodness and beauty reigned there. (http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/)
Page 1: Morgan Le Fay: Who was she? A paper
Page 5 and 6: will only read stories such as Arth
Page 7 and 8: Holloway, P., Caerleon Net: Geoffre
Page 9: Appendix The sources that I can fin

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