Morgan le Fay, Shapeshifter

Jill M. Hebert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349437931, 9781137022646
• eBook ISBN: 9781137022653
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: History

This study re-examines Morgan le Fay in early medieval and contemporary Arthurian sources, arguing that she embodies the concerns of each era even as she defies social and gender expectations. Hebert uses leFay as a lens to explore traditional ideas of femininity, monstrousness, resistance, identity, and social expectations for women and men alike.

CHAPTER 1

FOR THE HEALING OF HIS WOUNDS? THE SEEDS OF AMBIGUITY IN LATIN SOURCES

As the corpus of Arthurian literature grows, Morgan most often appears to take on an increasingly malevolent role in relation to Arthur, becoming the primary agent of mischief against him and his court. By 1500, Malory’s Morte Darthur shows her attempts to expose the infidelity of Guenevere and Lancelot, her tests of the integrity of knights, and her attacks on Arthur himself. But Morgan or a Morgan-like figure also appears in many preceding works, among them Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal (ca. 1380) and its antecedent, Marie de France’s Lanval (ca. late 1100s), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1400), the Vulgate Cycle (ca. 1225), and Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec and Enid, and Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion (ca. 1170), where she often tries to help knights. While she is sometimes read as malicious in these medieval works as well, she is at the same time still the woman who transports Arthur to Avalon to care for his wounds. And in several Latin sources, she is even read as entirely benevolent, a knowledgeable healer with no hint of her later enmity toward Arthur.¹ Critics are at a loss, generally, for a satisfactory explanation of this contradictory characterization.² For this reason, a reexamination of certain Latin sources beginning with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini promises to shed light on the ambiguous nature of Morgan’s character. The passages discussed here (from the Vita Merlini, the Draco Normannicus, the Speculum Ecclesiae, and the De Instructione Principis) all relate the story of Morgan’s healing of Arthur in Avalon. While Etienne de Rouen’s Draco Normannicus and the Vita’s particular phrasings introduce a subtle unease about Arthur’s treatment at Morgan’s hands, Gerald of Wales’s Speculum Ecclesiae and De Principis strive, with varying degrees of success, to avoid any indeterminacy introduced by supernatural elements inherited from early antecedents. Some of the uncertainty surrounding Arthur’s fate in these four works is strongly influenced by Celtic mythology and folklore.

Critical discussions of Morgan are often reluctant to admit any ambiguity in her portrayal in these Latin sources, dismissing her characterization by these Latin writers as simply benevolent. Contrasting a seeming beneficence in sources like the Vita with Morgan’s apparently malevolent actions in later medieval literature, critics often conclude that she began as a ‘good’ character and developed into a ‘bad’ one over time. For instance, in the Arthurian Handbook, foremost Arthurian scholars Norris J. Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe assert that “Geoffrey makes her a benign healer who takes charge of Arthur as a patient. The romancers’ blackening of her character is still far off.”³ The entry on Morgan in The Arthurian Encyclopedia is similar: “In the French verse romances, Morgan remains a powerful and generally benevolent fay, but in the prose romances her reputation declines. Morgan degenerates into a mortal; the famed healer now schemes to destroy others.”⁴ More recently, Maureen Fries grants Morgan a ‘literal wholesomeness’ in the Vita and says that “this portrait changes” in later literature, “turn[ing] Morgan from a nurturing healer of a sea-girt paradise into a destructive sorceress who entraps men sexually rather than healing them.”⁵ Likewise, Carolyne Larrington reads Morgan in the Vita as “learned, kindly, and beautiful,” adding that “nowhere is the debasement of Morgan’s magical powers in the later thirteenth century and beyond more clearly illustrated than in her employment of poison instead of healing in the story of Alexander the Orphan.”⁶ Each of these readings reflects wholly positive interpretations of Morgan’s role in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita.

What is most interesting about these claims is that each of these critics points to Morgan’s appearance in the Vita as grounds for inferring her benign intent. However, her role there is the most ambiguous of her appearances in the four Latin sources examined here; the extended description of her abilities and connection with Avalon provide a much richer sense of complexity in her character, as well as a stronger sense that harm may attend healing, than in other texts. Rather than present Morgan as unambiguously caring and kind, then, a closer look reveals that the Vita in particular plants the seeds of indeterminacy—Morgan’s potential to cause injury and death as well as to ensure health and life—that foreshadows the widespread critical acceptance of this important character’s supposed malevolence in later literature. Her mutability is also indebted to the multivalent behaviors of Celtic and Roman goddesses and folkloric figures, such as the Morrigan and Sequana, who encompass multiple contradictory aspects and still resonate in public consciousness at the time of these Latin works.

Like many Arthurian characters, including Gawain, Kay, Mark, Tristan, Isolde, and Arthur himself, Morgan has been traced to Celtic sources,⁷ and Morgan le Fay is no exception, as even the brief entry in the Arthurian Encyclopedia shows. In the early twentieth century Lucy Allen Paton and Roger Sherman Loomis, for instance, wrote extensively on the possible connection between the Celtic Morrigan and Morgan le Fay, only to incite criticism that the link to such deities is too tenuous. Though both scholars offer widely ranging correlations between Morgan and the Morrigan, they offer no firm etymological support for their claims. Rather, their evidence relies on similarities between the late medieval tales in which Morgan appears and Celtic sources that feature Morgan-like characters such as the Morrigan. Despite striking resemblances between the names and characteristics of the Morrigan and Morgan, some critics find the etymological descent of Morgan from Celtic goddesses doubtful. Nonetheless, Loomis supplies evidence for an unusual connection between Morgan and the Morrigan through Modron of Welsh literature:

Welsh literature supplied us with a daughter of Avallach. One of the triads tells us that she was Modron. She is represented as the mother of Owein by Urien. If we consult the Huth Merlin we find Morgan le Fay the wife of Urien; pretty generally in Arthurian romance we find Urien named as the father of Ivain; and in Malory Morgan is herself called the mother of Ewain le Blachmains. Thus as daughter of Avalloch, wife of Urien, mother of Ewayne, Morgan le Fay corresponds exactly to Modron, daughter of Avallach, wife of Urien, and mother of Owein.⁸

Loomis defends his argument, saying that “what is phonetically impossible is factually probable,”⁹ and both scholars are still widely regarded as authorities on the Celtic-Arthurian connection.

The potential resonances between Morgan and goddess figures of various sorts remain a tantalizing possibility. Certain contradictions stem from authorial manipulation, to be sure, but another feasible explanation for Morgan’s variable representations is that goddesses are expected to be capricious and multidimensional. Such a connection to Morgan provides an overarching explanation for the inherent complexity and volatility of her character and acknowledges the range of her behavior. Morgan’s descent from a Celtic goddess, for instance, supplies at least a partial explanation for, if not reconciliation of, her contradictory portrayals in later literature. A link to goddess figures also counters the impulse to dismiss this female shapeshifter as simply evil, an impulse that seems to be inspired in part by her very changeability. As Roger Loomis explains:

Inconsistency accounts, at least in some measure, for the gross discrepancies between the versions of the Grail quest [and] accounts in part for the fact that characters are differently conceived, and the hero of one author receives shabby treatment from another. Morgan le Fay may be the most beautiful of nine sister enchantresses and the nurse of her brother Arthur in Avalon, or she may be an ugly crone who plots his death.¹⁰

Associating her with multifaceted Celtic deities would allow us to do for Morgan what we do not seem able to do for women in real life: take her out of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy inspired by the Christian denigration of ‘pagan’ mythology and allow her to be contradictory, inconsistent, and unclassifiable.

Although Lucy Allen Paton begins by acknowledging Morgan’s complexity, she finds that being able to place her firmly into one cate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: To Be a Shapeshifter
• 1.  For the Healing of His Wounds? The Seeds of Ambiguity in Latin Sources
• 2.  Sisters of the Forest: Morgan and Her Analogues in Arthurian Romance
• 3.  Morgan in Malory
• 4.  Morgan’s Presence-in-Absence in Renaissance, Romantic, and Victorian Works
• 5.  Imprisoned by Ideology: Modern and Fantasy Portrayals
• Conclusion: Beyond Limits
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index