Question:
King Arthur and Morgan le Fey?
Melissa
2009-03-26 14:54:23 UTC
In the story of King Arthur and his royal court, Morgan le Fay was shown as his evil half sister that always tried to bring an end to him and his reign. So why did she bring him to Avalon to heal him after he was hurt by Mordred?
Three answers:
Jallan
2009-03-26 19:11:57 UTC
In earlier poems Morgaine the Fay is not shown to be evil, but has her own agenda, which may not always be compatible with Arthur’s, After all, she is a fay, although sometimes also identified as Arthur's half-sister or step-sister.



According to the “Prose Lancelot" (and the English poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”), Morgaine did have a dislike of Guenevere. Morgaine had earlier lived in court and had an affair with Guyomar, a nephew of Guenevere. Guenevere found them sleeping together and declared that unless this stopped at once, she would tell Arthur that Guyomar was fooling around with Arthur's sister. Guyomar feared for his life and immediately gave up Morgaine. Morgaine, in anger, went off to Merlin where she learned magic. When Morgaine discovered that Guenevere and Lancelot were having an affair, she attempted to take vengeance by revealing it, but Arthur would never believe her, especially as events tended to confound what Morgaine claimed.



The story of Guyomar may be an adaptation of any earlier story in which a knight named Guigomar was Morgaine’s secret lover, but she left him when he revealed the affair to Guenevere when Guenevere attempted to vamp him. Eventually, when Guigomar was at point of being put to death in a trail for insulting Guenever, Morgaine came back and rescued him. Guigomar/Guoymar is probably in origin the same as Sir Gringamore or the Isle of Avalon in Malory’s story of Sir Gareth in his “Le Morte d'Arthur”.



In later romances Morgaine, as an enemy of Guenevere and Lancelot and a notorious seductress of knights, is sometimes blackened further in character, and made an enemy of Arthur himself. In the so-called “Post-Vulgate Merlin”, we have the story of how Morgaine attempted to take over Arthur’s kingdom and to slay her own husband King Urien with the aid of her lover Accolon. This story passes into Sir Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte d'Arthur".



Note that this is almost the only Arthurian tale in which Morgaine is married to Urien. In other tales she is not married to Urien and is not the mother of Yvain/Uwaine the son of King Urien. There was a Welsh tale that Owein son of Urien was the son of an encounter between Urien and the fairy daughter of the King of Annwn and this seems to have been adapted by some French writers.



But the story that Morgaine rescued Arthur in the end still remains.



Note that the tale that Mordred was a son of Morgaine and that Morgaine was one of the plotters of Arthur’s final battle is pure invention of modern novelists who tend to copy one another rather than bother with the actual medieval stories.
?
2016-05-26 02:46:11 UTC
Morgan Le Fay (Morgana, Morgraine) was the half-sister to the legendary King Arthur. She was the daughter of Igraine (Ygerna) and Duke Gorlois. When King Uther married her widowed mother she and her older sister, Morgause, were both married off to royal husbands, she to King Urien in the south and Morgause to King Lot of the Orkney Isles in Scotland. Some say that Morgan took as her lover Sir Accolon, Urien's son from another wife. She was also said to have been a very powerful enchantress. As most Arthurian writers agree, Morgan bore Arthur an illegitimate son, Mordred, when they unknowingly (some authors will say Morgan knew) slept with one another. However the Howard Pyle version of the story will say that it was Morgause that bore Mordred and raised him as one of her 5 sons. The majority of scholars will also agree that Morgan was quite vehement about Arthur declaring Mordred as his son and heir. She suppossedly stole the sheath to Arthur's sword, Excalibur. While the sword was magnificent, it was it's sheath that was more valuable, for it allowed it's wearer to shed no blood. As the story goes, Morgan plotted and stole the sheath to Excalibur, allowing Arthur to be mortally wounded in the epic battle between him and his son. Although, Morgan mostly played the part of an evil temptress, she was the one to drag Athur's body back from the Battle of Badon to a barge where they floated away to Avalon (some say present-day Glastonbury in England, the same place where the Holy Grail was said to be buried by Joseph of Arimathea) to recuperate in the chance that the Britain may once again call upon him in the hour of their greatest peril.
jaime
2009-03-26 23:38:41 UTC
Different versions, and different stories were written by different people with different points of view.


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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