Morgan le Fay
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- "Morgaine" redirects here. For other uses, see Morgaine (disambiguation).
In Arthurian legend, Morgan le Fay, alternatively known as Morgaine, Morgain, Morgana and a slew of related name variants, is a powerful sorceress and sometime antagonist of King Arthur and Guinevere. Morgan has been conjecturally linked with the Irish Morrígan.
Morgan is the daughter of Arthur's mother, the Lady Igraine, and her first husband, Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall; Arthur is her half brother by Igraine and Uther Pendragon. Morgan has two older sisters, Elaine and Morgause, the latter of which is the mother of Gawain and the traitor Mordred. In Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and elsewhere, she is married, unhappily, to King Urien of Gore and Ywain is her son.
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[edit] Morgan in later medieval literature
"Medieval Christianity had a difficult time assimilating a benevolent enchantress," Brian Rise points out at pantheon.org. The Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian tales finds Morgan still on good terms with Arthur but angry at Guinevere for breaking a romance with one of her lovers. She tries alternately to seduce Lancelot and to expose his affair with the queen, often through magical means. In the Prose Tristan, she delivers to Arthur's court a magic drinking horn from which no unfaithful lady can drink without spilling, hoping to reveal the infidelity.
Sir Thomas Malory mostly followed the portrayal of Morgan in the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles in his book Le Morte d'Arthur, though he expanded her role in some cases. Through magic and mortal means, she tries to arrange Arthur's downfall, most famously when she arranges for her lover Accolon to obtain the sword Excalibur and use it against Arthur in single combat. Failing in this, Morgan throws Excalibur's protective scabbard into a lake.
The Fay turns up throughout the High and Late Middle Ages, generally in works related to the cycles of Arthur or Charlemagne. At the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it is revealed that the entire supernatural episode has been instigated by Morgan as a test for Arthur and his knights, and to frighten Guinevere. In one chanson de geste starring Ogier the Dane, she takes the hero to her mystical island palace to be her lover.
[edit] Modern appearances of Morgan
Modern interpretations of the Arthurian myth sometimes assign to Morgan the role of seducing Arthur and giving birth to the wicked Mordred, though originally (as in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur) it was Morgause who did this. (According to the legend, Mordred grew to manhood away from Arthur's court, and eventually killed his father, bringing an end to the Arthurian age.) In recent years Morgan has been adopted by some feminists as a representation of female power; in this context she is sometimes connected to interpretations of Celtic feminine spirituality. Such is the case in Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which presents a different view to Morgaine's opposition to Arthur, her actions stemming from her fight to preserve the pagan religion against what she sees as the treachery and oppression of Christianity. She also appeared in Roger Zelazny's short story The Last Defender of Camelot, helping an immortal Lancelot fight an age crazed Merlin.
In John Boorman's film Excalibur, 1981 Morgan takes up one of her traditional roles as Merlin's student, though her competition with her mentor assumes a new prominence in the film. She is also a central character in Gene Wolfe's novel Castleview, a retelling of the Arthurian myth set in the modern day United States.
She has been fairly prolific in comic books, for example Treasures of Britain by Simon Bisley, where she helps the hero Slaine recover her brother's lost artifacts. She has also appeared in comics from the two main comic book publishers in the USA: In DC Comics, "Morgaine le Fey" is a villainess who has battled The Demon and Wonder Woman, while Marvel Comics has long featured "Morgan le Fay" as one of their biggest female threats, with notable appearances in comics starring Spider-Woman and The Avengers.
She appears as the character Ru Fe Morgan in the anime film Oh My Goddess!, and showed up on the television series Stargate SG-1,as an ascended Ancient, who assists the characters in their search for a weapon left behind by Merlin (in Stargate continuity, another ascended Ancient). In 2006 she appeared in the middle-grade novel The Revenge of the Shadow King, and in the Magic Tree House Nancy Springer's I am Morgan le Fay is told from her perspective, while she becomes a major antagonist in the Christian fantasy book series Dragons in Our Midst. In the Dresden Files series of books, Harry Dresden's mother's name was Margaret Lefay. Whether or not Margaret and Morgan are related is yet to be revealed
Anthropologist Norma Goodrich claims that Morgan's original name was Morgue and that she was Merlin's student in healing arts.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Rachel Bromwich (1963) Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain, University Of Wales Press. ISBN 0-7083-1386-8. Triad: Peniarth 147
- Norris J. Lacy, editor. The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991.
[edit] External links
- Morgan le Fey at the Camelot project, University of Rochester: brief text and images
- Brian Edward Rise, "Morgan le Fay" 2001da:Morgan le fay
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