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

wise woman, to a destructive nihilist 7 who wished nothing but the worst for everyone. Later,
feminists found out that she was a great symbol of success and liberty without a man, and as a
woman with stronger will that many of the men she knew, related to, loved and fought. In Bradley
(1987), Morgan says:
In my time I have been called many things: sister, lover, priestess, wise-woman, queen.
Now in truth I have come to be a wise-woman, and a time may come when these things may
need to be known. But I sober truth, I think it is the Christians who will tell the last tale. For
ever the world of Fairy drifts further from the world in which the Christ holds sway. I have
no quarrel with the Christ, only with his priest, who call the Great Goddess a demon and
deny that she ever held power in this world. At best, they say that her power was of Satan.
Or else they clothed her in blue robe of the Lady of Nazareth – who indeed had power in her
way, too – and say that she was ever virgin. But what can a virgin know of the sorrows and
travail of mankind? (p. 5).
Her belief in something beyond Christ, or something that was not Christ, and her supernatural
abilities is somewhat confirmed by Mallory (ibid.) (not a quotation from the original manuscript):
Morgan Le Fay never did get married, but sent to a school in a convent, where she became a
great and skilful master of magic.
In later medieval literature, monks make her evil, and turn her actions into bad, blasfemic plots. She
is said to have betrayed Arthur in many different ways, but in the end, when Arthur is deadly
wounded, she takes him to Avalon, where he stays, and no one knows whether he lived or died
there. About this, Geoffrey of Monmouth writes in his book History of the Kings of Britain:
And even the renowned king Arthur himself was mortally wounded; and being carried
thence to the isle of Avallon to be cured of his wounds, he gave up the crown of Britain to
his kinsman Constantine, the son of Cador, duke of Cornwall.
Can this be said to be Morgan Le Fay? Or is the best explanation simply that Morgan Le Fay was
both the Good and the Bad, and that no line of demarcation can be drawn? Different stories,
interpretations and comprehensions throughout the years have created different pictures and
dissimilar empathies. If one will only read the story through the eyes of the champion of the cause
of equal rights for men and women, Marion Zimmer Bradley, we will see the men as barbarians
who did nothing but raping women, eating and drinking when not fighting and killing. But if we
7 Nihilist: a belief that all political and religious organizations are bad, or a system of thought
which says that there are no principles or beliefs which have any meaning or can be true.
(http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=53723&dict=CALD)