Morgan le Fay- Celtic GodDeity"Queen of Avalon"

The Nine Sisters of Avalon

In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, the earliest text to name her, Morgan rules Insula Pomorum, the Isle of Apples. She is the eldest of nine sisters who govern the island, where crops grow without cultivation and the inhabitants live for a hundred years. Morgan can fly through the air, change her shape, and heal any wound through her knowledge of herbs and enchantment. When Arthur is brought to Avalon after the Battle of Camlann, it is Morgan who receives him, examines his wounds, and promises to heal him if he remains under her care.

In this earliest text she bears no hostility toward Arthur. The antagonism came later, as French and English romancers made her his mortal half-sister and gave her reasons to hate his court.

Blood and Sorcery

In the Vulgate Cycle, Morgan is the daughter of Igraine and Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall. When Uther Pendragon lay with Igraine on the night of Gorlois's death, Arthur was conceived. Morgan was Arthur's half-sister through their shared mother.

She was sent to a convent, where she studied the liberal arts and secretly learned necromancy. Her true education came from Merlin himself, who taught her the deepest arts of sorcery. She proved so apt that she eventually matched her teacher.

Morgan married King Uriens of Gorre and bore him a son, Ywain, who became a knight of the Round Table. In the Post-Vulgate Cycle, Ywain discovered his mother standing over his sleeping father with a sword raised to kill him. He seized her arm and told her he would not show mercy a second time. She set down the blade.

Adversary of Camelot

Morgan's enmity began with Guinevere. The queen discovered and ended Morgan's love affair with the knight Guiomar, and the humiliation turned Morgan against Arthur's court. She sent enchanted objects to Camelot to expose the queen: a magical drinking horn that spilled its contents on any unfaithful wife, and a mantle that would burn any woman who had been untrue.

Morgan once sent Arthur an enchanted cloak, presented as a gift of reconciliation. Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, warned Arthur not to wear it until the bearer tried it on first. When the maiden who brought the cloak was made to put it on, she was consumed by fire and burned to ash. The cloak had been made to kill Arthur.

The Theft of the Scabbard

Morgan stole both Excalibur and its scabbard, substituting counterfeits. The scabbard, not the sword, was the true prize: while Arthur wore it, he could never bleed from any wound. Arthur pursued her, and Morgan, about to be overtaken, threw the scabbard into a deep lake where it sank beyond recovery. She then transformed herself and her followers into standing stones. When Arthur rode past without recognizing them, they resumed their true forms and escaped.

Without the scabbard's protection, the wound Mordred struck at Camlann could not be survived.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

In the late fourteenth-century poem, Morgan is revealed as the hidden architect of the Green Knight's challenge. She sent Sir Bertilak de Hautdesert, transformed by her magic, to Camelot on New Year's Day. He offered his neck to any knight who would strike it, survived his own beheading, and departed carrying his head in his hand, commanding Gawain to seek him in a year for a return blow.

At the poem's end, Bertilak reveals that Morgan devised the test to try the Round Table's courage and to frighten Guinevere to death. Morgan herself appears throughout as an aged woman at Bertilak's castle, her identity concealed until the final lines. The poet calls her "Morgne þe goddes": Morgan the Goddess.

The Barge to Avalon

In Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, after the Battle of Camlann, Sir Bedivere carried the wounded Arthur to the water's edge. A barge waited there, bearing three queens in black hoods. Morgan was among them. She wept when she saw her brother's wounds, took his head in her lap, and the barge moved out across the water toward Avalon, the island she had ruled since the oldest tellings of the story.