A Healer Before She Was an Enemy

Morgan le Fay's very first appearance in the Arthurian tradition gives no hint of the hostility that later defines her. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, a Latin poem written around 1150 as a shorter companion piece to his earlier Historia Regum Britanniae, describes an island called Avalon ruled by nine sisters, the eldest and most skilled of them named Morgen, praised for her knowledge of healing herbs, her ability to change shape and fly, and for teaching the other sisters mathematics. It is to this Morgen and her island that the wounded Arthur is carried after his final battle, in the expectation that her healing skill can restore him, a purely benevolent role with no trace of the family conflict or sorcerous rivalry that would come to define her in later centuries. The shift begins in earnest with the French prose romances of the following century, above all the Vulgate Cycle, which gives Morgan a hostile relationship with Arthur's court, jealousy of Guinevere, and a training in magic under Merlin himself that she turns against the very court that raised her. The two Morgans, healer and enemy, are not easily reconciled, and much of her later medieval and modern reception amounts to different writers choosing which inheritance, Geoffrey's or the French romance tradition's, to foreground.