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| Morgan Le Fay |
How should he know the wily witch,
With sweet white face and raven hair?
Who, through her art, bewitched his heart
And held him there.
Eftsoons his soul had waxed amort
To wold and weald, to slade and stream;
And all he heard was her soft word
As one adream.
And all he saw was her bright eyes,
And her fair face that held him still.
And wild and wan she led him on
O'er vale and hill. ...
For she was Queen of Shadowland,
That woman of snow. ...
Morgan Le Fay first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouths "Life of Merlin" (12th cent.) in which she is depicted
as one of the 9 sisters ruling the Isle of Apples or Avalon; she is a healer , mathematician, and shape-shifter, and Arthur
is brought to her for healing after his last battle. Later authors ascribed her magical powers not to her otherworldly home,
but to the teachings of Merlin and, in Malory, the study of necromancy she undertook in the nunnery (!) to which she was sent
as a girl. Her mixed reputation includes not only the image of the caring healer, but also one of implacable enmity
toward Arthur, who, in Malory's Morte DArthur (15th cent.), is her half-brother, born to her mother after
her father is killed by Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon, and toward Guinevere, who, in a medieval story of Lancelot ends
Morgan's affair with Arthur's nephew--Morgan got her revenge by revealing the Queen's affair with Lancelot. In Malory she
is also said to be the wife of Uriens, a king of the ancient northern British kingdom of Rheged ,and having taken as a lover
the knight, Accolon of Gaul, she plotted with him to steal Excalibur in order to render Arthur defenseless.
In the 14th cent. English romance, "Gawain and the Green Knight," she sends the monstrous Green Knight to Arthur's court in
order to frighten Guinevere and test the mettle of Arthur's knights.
The character of Morgan may have ancient Celtic roots, in the British mother-goddess, Modron, daughter of the king of the
otherworld. She may also have some resonance with the Irish goddess, the Morrigan, who like many ancient Celtic deities displayed
triple, often opposite aspects: she representing both sexuality or fertility and death, war and wisdom (magical and healing
powers), and appearing as both young and beautiful and frightening and phantom-like. These ancient powers in the later Middle
ages earned her the moniker "Le Fay," or "The Fairy"one of the fairy-folk of myth and legend, who shifted from entities venerated
and feared in the pre-Christian world to being viewed as superstitions or romantic notions by the Christian populace in the
Middle Ages.
The prominent opposition between the characters of Guinevere and Morgan, beginning in the Middle Ages, perhaps contains
an intriguing remnant of these opposing characteristics of the Celtic goddesses: Guinevere a young beautiful bride, queen
of a bright, rational, civilized court and Morgan, wise-woman, sorceress, queen of the otherworld: one is day, the other night,
one is springtime, the other winter. The irony in medieval literature is that, despite these differences, they were both portrayed
as betraying Arthur for love (perhaps this says more about a medieval male author's view of women!), but that Morgan,
rival and nemesis, bore him in the end to his healing rest.
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