Morgan le Fay

A black barge slides across flat water at dusk, and the women aboard it are weeping. One lifts the head of a wounded king into her lap, looks hard at the gash under his helmet, and tells him he has stayed away too long, that the hurt has gone cold for want of her, and that she can still mend it if he will only come to her island. She wears a hood. When she puts it back the king knows her face. Her name is Morgan, and however dark the stories grow around her, most of them return her to this boat in the end, bending over the man she is supposed to hate.

She began as a healer, and nothing worse. In the first surviving account that names her, set down in Latin around the middle of the twelfth century, she is Morgen, eldest and most accomplished of nine sisters who govern an island of apple orchards where no one ploughs and the ground gives grain of its own accord. She knows what property lives in every herb. She can change her shape and cut the air on new wings like a swallow crossing a field. She teaches her sisters mathematics and the movements of the stars. When the broken king is ferried to her after his last battle, she settles him on a bed worked with gold, examines the wound with the calm of a physician who has seen worse, and says she can heal him if he stays. There is no cruelty in her anywhere. The island is Avalon, and she is its wisest woman.

That figure did not come from nothing. Behind her stands a Welsh mother-goddess, Modron, daughter of a lord called Avallach, whose name descends from a Gaulish word for the great or divine mother, and whose own son Owain is the same child that later romance hands to Morgan. Along the Breton coast the fishermen spoke of the mari-morgans, fairy-women of the sea who drew men down into the water. Some have wanted to make her the Irish Morrigan, the battle-crow of prophecy and slaughter, and the two names chime enough to tempt the ear, but the thread that actually links them is thin and much argued, and no one can prove it. Even her earliest chronicler seems to have leaned on an old Roman description of nine priestesses on an island off Gaul who could raise storms, take animal form, and cure the incurable. She was assembled, then, from several older women at once, and she never quite lost the seams.

Then the storytellers turned on her. The centuries that produced the great French prose romances and, later, the English book that fixed the legend for the modern world were more suspicious of a woman who healed, flew, and read the stars without asking anyone’s leave. Morgan came down in the world and up in importance. She stopped being an unrelated queen of a magic island and became Arthur’s half-sister, youngest daughter of his mother Igraine by her first husband, sent as a girl to a convent and there, the tale says, learning the dark arts before she was married off to King Urien. She took Merlin himself as a teacher, and some versions add as a lover, and she used what he taught her against the court that had used her. She kept a special, patient hatred for Guinevere.

Her cleverest stroke was aimed at her own brother. She had been entrusted with Excalibur and its scabbard, the sheath that kept its wearer from losing blood, and she had counterfeits made and slipped the true blade and sheath to her lover Accolon, then arranged for him to fight Arthur with neither man knowing whom he faced. Accolon carried the real sword and could not be wounded; Arthur bled from every blow and swung a blade that would not bite. Only when the sword turned in Arthur’s favour by another enchantment did the plot fail. Accolon died of it. Morgan, hearing this, rode to where the king slept, could not draw the sword from under his hand, and took the scabbard instead, and when he woke and gave chase she flung the sheath into a deep lake and turned herself and all her riders to standing stones beside the road until he had ridden past. He never recovered it. Years later, on the field where he takes his death wound, that missing scabbard is why he bleeds.

No single text agrees on her face. The oldest calls her the fairest of the nine and leaves it there; later writers, uneasy, sometimes made her old and hard-featured, or beautiful in a way meant to be distrusted, or simply let the shape shift as she pleased, since shifting shape was half her art. This is the truth of her appearance: there isn’t one. She is a woman who wears whatever form suits the hour, and the stories describe her disguises more readily than the wearer.

Her powers all grow from that first island learning. She heals wounds beyond any surgeon. She raises illusions solid enough to hold a knight for a year, as she does in the valley from which unfaithful lovers cannot walk out. She sends gifts that kill, like the fair mantle offered to Arthur that would have burned the wearer to ash had another woman not been made to try it on first. In one late English poem the whole supernatural test set before the court, a green giant who calmly picks up his own severed head, turns out to have been her doing from the start, arranged to frighten the queen. And yet her reach has edges. Everything she knows she was taught, by Merlin and the cloister, not born to as a goddess is born; her schemes are undone by counter-magic and by luck as often as they land; and when a plan collapses she does not stand and fight but slips away as a stone or a bird. She is bound, in the end, by her own passions, the jealousy and wounded pride that set the plots going in the first place.

Which is what makes the barge so strange. After every poisoning and every ambush, when the king is dying at last, it is Morgan who comes for him across the water, Morgan who takes his head in her lap and promises to heal what looks past healing and carries him off to the island of apples to wait. The enemy and the healer were never two women. They were always the same one, and the oldest story had her right.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Morgan le Fay?

Morgan le Fay is a powerful enchantress and healer of Arthurian legend, best known as the half-sister of King Arthur. She first appears as a benevolent ruler of the magical island of Avalon and later becomes Arthur’s most dangerous magical adversary, though she ultimately returns to carry the dying king to Avalon for healing.

Is Morgan le Fay good or evil?

Morgan le Fay is portrayed as both, depending on the era of the story. In her earliest account she is a wise and benevolent healer, but medieval French and English romances recast her as a scheming, vindictive sorceress who plots against Arthur’s court. Even at her most villainous, she is the one who ferries the mortally wounded Arthur to Avalon at the end.

What powers does Morgan le Fay have?

Morgan le Fay is a healer, shapeshifter, and illusionist who can cure wounds beyond any physician, change her own form, and weave enchantments strong enough to imprison knights. Her earliest depiction also credits her with flight and deep learning in herblore, mathematics, and astronomy. In later legend she is said to have learned much of her magic from Merlin.

How is Morgan le Fay related to King Arthur?

In most medieval romances, including Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Morgan le Fay is Arthur’s half-sister, the youngest daughter of his mother Igraine by her first husband. She is married to King Urien and is the mother of the knight Yvain. In her very earliest appearance, however, she is not related to Arthur at all, but the unrelated queen of Avalon who heals him.

What did Morgan le Fay do with Excalibur’s scabbard?

Morgan le Fay stole the scabbard of Excalibur, which kept its wearer from losing blood, and threw it into a deep lake where it could never be recovered. She had earlier passed the real sword and scabbard to her lover Accolon to use against Arthur in a duel, and after that plot failed she took the scabbard from the sleeping king and escaped by turning herself and her followers to stone. The lost scabbard is the reason Arthur bleeds to death from his final wound.

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Arthur, Merlin, Green Knight, Morrigan, Rhiannon, Cailleach, Scathach, Korrigan, Melusine, Banshee, Selkie, Hecate, Baba Yaga