For the Healing of His Wounds? The Seeds of Ambiguity in Latin Sources

Abstract

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 Chretien 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.