Abstract
The ambiguity surrounding Morgan in the Latin sources is expanded and deepened, shifting from the ‘end’ of Arthur’s life to the shaping of his court and his knights in later medieval literature. In many of the selections studied in this chapter, Arthur’s court and his knights display an immaturity that, while a natural point in development, needs to be overcome. This youthfulness is most clearly stated in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but also appears in Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. In each work, the advice to or treatment of the knight by an immature court is shown to fall short of the task of encouraging necessary growth. The additional training that a knight requires, then, must be found elsewhere, outside the confines of courtly custom. Knights must wander or become ‘errant,’ if they are to expand their experiences, and they most often accomplish this necessary errancy in the forest.
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Notes
Corinne J. Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 22–23.
Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ix.
Joseph Bedier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, trans. Hillaire Belloc (New York: Vintage, 1973), 85.
Manuel Aguirre, “The Riddle of Sovereignty,” Modern Language Review 88 (1993): 273–82.
Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 19–20.
Jacques le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 51–53.
I follow Christine Herold in using the more ambiguous term ‘loathly lady’ rather than ‘hag’: “Significantly, I think, Chaucer does not himself call his figure of ancient femininity a ‘hag,’ referring to her instead as ‘lady,’ perhaps suggesting her connection to the courtly world of fairy. And, interestingly, the English analogues which share the hag-description used by Chaucer also fail to use the term, whereas the Irish sources do use ‘hag.’ ‘Loathly lady’ appear to be the terms of choice.” Christine Herold, “Archetypal Chaucer: The Case of the Disappearing Hag in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’,” in Archetypal Readings of Medieval Literature, ed. Charlotte Spivak and Christine Herold (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 52.
Elizabeth M. Biebel-Stanley, “Sovereignty Through the Lady: ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ and the Queenship of Anne of Bohemia,” in The English “Loathly Lady” Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs, ed. S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 73–82. “Nature [is] the locus of power in the Celtic sovereignty tales” (75).
See Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origins of European Otherness, trans. Carl T. Berrisford (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 81–83 and Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, 3–4.
At least two other critics have identified Morgan as a loathly lady figure. Ellen Caldwell points out that “another Loathly Lady, Morgan le Fay, tests the ethics of the Round Table in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” while Mary Leech cites Lorraine K. Stock as seeing a connection between Morgan, the loathly Sheela-na-Gigs, and Dame Ragnell: “Stock draws… comparisons between the Sheela figures and Morgan le Fay of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, [and] much of what she describes relates to Dame Ragnell as well.” See Ellen M. Caldwell, “Brains or Beauty: Limited Sovereignty in the Loathly Lady Tales ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale,’ ‘Thomas of Erceldoune,’ and ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle’.”, and Mary Leech, “Why Dame Ragnell Had to Die: Feminine Usurpation of Masculine Authority in ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’,” in The English “Loathly Lady” Tales. Ed. Passmore and Carter, 245, 216, and Lorraine K. Stock, “The Hag of Castle Hautdesert: The Celtic Sheela-na-gig and the Auncian in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries. Ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas: Scriptorium Press, 2001), 121–48.
Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 118. All quotations are from this edition.
“The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle,” in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), 47–80. Susan Carter, “Coupling the Beastly Bride and the Hunter Hunted: What Lies Behind Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’,” Chaucer Review 37 (2003): 329–45. All quotations are taken from this edition.
Her description includes ‘rough wrinkled cheeks,’ a ‘short thick’ body, and ‘broad buttocks.’ See J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 2nd ed., revised by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). 27.
Norris J. Lacy, “The Lancelot-Grail Cycle,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169–70.
Alexandre Micha, ed., Lancelot: roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, vols. 1–8 (Geneva: Droz, 1978–82), 314–17, Vol. 5.
Norris J. Lacy, The Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation (New York: Garland, 1993), 106.
Michelle Sweeney, Magic in Medieval Romance from Chretien de Troyes to Geoffrey Chaucer (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2000), 79.
“Elle vint a Guiamor, si li dist que mors estoit, se li rois le pooit savoir et si fist tant, que par proieres que par manaces, que il ne l’amoit mie de tele amor que bien ne s’en consierrast.” [She (Guenevere) came to Guyamor and said that he was as good as dead if the king learned of the affair, and with pleas and threats she succeeded in making him give up the young woman (Morgan).]” Micha, Lancelot, 301; translation from Lacy, Lancelot-Grail Cycle, 311. Morgan is very upset, especially as she is ençainte, pregnant, with Guigomar’s child. This is one of the very rare times Morgan is depicted as a mother, but a later line mentions only that the child becomes a great knight, and he is never named or explained further. Chrétien de Troyes also mentions the love affair between Morgan and Guigomar: “Et Guigomars, ses frere, I vint; / De l’Isle d’Avalon fu sire / De cestui avons oi dire. / Qu’il fu amis Morgain, la fee, / Et ce fu veritez prove” [And his brother Guinguemar came too, who was Lord of the Isle of Avalon. We have heard it said of him that he was a lover of Morgan le Fay, and that had been proven true” (ll 1954–58)]. Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, trans. Michael Rousee (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 148; translation from Chrétien de Troyes, “Erec and Enide,” The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans. David Staines (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 25.
Thomas Chestre, Sir Launfal, ed. and trans. A. J. Bliss (London: T. Nelson, 1960). All quotations taken from this edition.
Alan Lupack, The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 119.
Chester, Sir Launfal, 20. Bliss points out that “The Celtic origin of Lanval and its analogues leaves little doubt that the lady in the story, whose supernatural powers are so conspicuous, is to be identified here with the fee, a recurring figure in Celtic mythology and romance whose most familiar manifestation is as Morgan la Fee in the Arthurian cycle.” See also Constance Bullock-Davies, “Lanval and Avalon,” The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 23 (1969): 128–42.
Chrétien de Troyes, “Erec and Enide,” 25. See also Bliss, ed., Sir Launfal, 18, 20. For more on the connections between Morgan and Guigomar, see especially Lucy Paton, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance, 2nd ed. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1960), 60–73.
The most comprehensive examination of Morgan as the fairy mistress to date is Paton’s Studies. For a more recent examination of Morgan, see Carolyne Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2007).
Bliss, points out that “the stories of these Breton lays follow a common pattern. A man or woman becomes involved by some means in a liaison with a fairy” (Chestre, Sir Laufal, 18). See also Anne Laskaya, “Sir Launfal: Introduction,” in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), 204–5.
Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (New York: Dover, 2003), I: 317–58. Briefly, the story relates that fairies grant Ogier strength and other gifts at his birth: Morgan gives him the promise of coming to Avalon after his life on earth is done. In his hundredth year, Morgan brings him there to live for two hundred years in perfect bliss. His presence being again required in the world, Morgan sends him back to France to “vanquish the foes of Christianity,” and then returns him to Avalon.
Maureen Fries, “Female Heroes, Heroines and Counter-Heroes: Images of Women in Arthurian Tradition,” in Arthurian Women: a Casebook, ed. Thelma S. Fenster (New York: Routledge, 1996), 59–76.
“Her accusation of the standard ‘secret vice’ is not only uncourtly but also in vivid contrast to the idealistic stance taken earlier by the fee” (136). Patrick John Ireland, “The Narrative Unity of the Lanval of Marie de France,” Studies in Philology 74 (1977): 130–45.
Elizabeth Williams points out that fairies may perhaps be regarded in sexual matters as a special case: they are exotic outsiders, free from social and moral constraints, and may be expected to act accordingly. Elizabeth Williams, “‘A Damsel By Herselfe Alone’: Images of Magic and Femininity from Lanval to Sir Lambewell, ” in Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative Presented to Maldwyn Mills, ed. Jennifer Fellows, Rosalind Field, Gillian Rogers, and Judith Weiss (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), 155.
Thomas Hahn, “Gawain and Popular Chivalric Romance in Britain,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 218–34.
Many critics are entirely unsatisfied with that abrupt explanation at the end. Albert B. Friedman says that the author “fails to convince us Morgan is organic to the poem” (274); Larry D. Benson states that “Morgan appears too late in the action, and Guenevere’s role is too slight to justify the importance she suddenly assumes at the end of the adventure” (33). C. M. Adderly takes a slightly different tack in deciding that this abrupt revelation of Morgan’s agency was a deliberate choice on the part of the author, and the ‘feeling of disconnectedness’ this engenders helps the reader appreciate the structure of the poem and the poem’s movement between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ worlds (49). Sheila Fisher argues that the poem is revising Arthurian history, and that it therefore “deliberately leaves Morgan aside, positioning her at the end of the narrative when she is, in fact, the means: the agent of Gawain’s testing” (78). She concludes that finally, women cannot be truly marginalized, either in life or legend, hence the uneasy conclusion to the poem. See Sheila Fisher, “Leaving Morgan Aside: Women, History, and Revisionism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Arthurian Women, ed. Thelma S. Fenster (New York: Routledge, 1996), 77–96;
C. M. Adderly, “Meeting Morgan le Fay: J. R. R. Tolkein’s Theory of Subcreation and the Secondary World of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Mythlore 22 (2000 Spring): 48–58;
Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965);
Albert B. Friedman, “Morgan la Faye in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Speculum 35 (1960): 260–74.
Although not the primary focus of my discussion here, those interested in exploring the connections between Morgan le Fay and medieval witchcraft are referred to MaryLynn Dorothy Saul, “A Rebel and a Witch: The Historical Context and Ideological Function of Morgan le Fay in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur” (PhD dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1994).
Stephanie Hollis points out that magic did not always equal evil in medieval romance: “What is remarkable about medieval literary representations of the faery otherworld is that medieval authors found it possible to make creative use of this particular form of the non-Christian supernatural, despite the fact that Christian hegemonic thinking regarded all forms of the supernatural which had not been assimilated to Christian belief as opposed to it, and therefore diabolical” (176). She adds in a later footnote that “The narrator [of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight], by contrast, appears bent on disassociating Morgan from witchcraft and the demonic” (n. 41, p. 184). Stephanie Hollis, “‘The Marriage of Sir Gawain:’ Piecing the Fragments Together,” in The English ‘Loathly Lady’ Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs, ed. S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 163–85.
Whether the Green Knight expects Gawain to attempt a decapitating blow may be a matter of debate, adding ambiguity to the moment. From Cuchulainn to Gawain: Sources and Analogues of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selected and trans. Elisabeth Brewer (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973) provides a clear antecedent for the episode in the folkloric motif of the Beheading Motif, but Victoria L. Weiss points out that “the stranger’s challenge is presented only as an exchange of blows rather than as an invitation to chop off his head” (361); Gawain’s “aggressive response demonstrates a lack of concern for human life” (363), a concern the Green Knight does demonstrate in his return nicking. Weiss concludes that “the uneasy anticipat ion of death that Gawain is forced to live with through the course of most of the narrative points to the evil inherent in rashness and excessive valor” (365–66), qualities encouraged by Arthur, who “seems unable to grasp the concept of game without dangerous combat” (363). However, “at the end, Gawain’s concern with ‘larges’ [generosity] reveals a new respect for the life and well-being of others” (366). Victoria L. Weiss, “Gawain’s First Failure: The Beheading Scene in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Chaucer Review 10 (1976): 361–66. Sheri Ann Strite echoes Weiss, adding that “a careful literal reading must render the challenge far more ambiguous than that insisted upon by the traditional reading” (3), emphasizing the significance of the choice being in Gawain’s hands. Strite also adds that the challenge is, given the Christmas season, placed in a Christian context. This suggests that forgiveness, rather than violence, is the more appropriate response to the Green Knight’s challenge, but Gawain clings firmly to his (violent) chivalric values instead.
Sheri Ann Strite, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: To Behead or Not to Behead: That is A Question,” Philological Quarterly 70 (1999): 1–12.
Sarah Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Art of Perception (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 7.
James Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2011), 132. See also Carolyne Larrington: “Whether Morgan’s designs are good or evil in this poem depends on how she is read…. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight deliberately gives us too little information to decide about Morgan”. Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, 68.
Sandra Hindman, Sealed in Parchment: Rereadings of Knighthood on the Illuminated Manuscripts of Chretien de Troyes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994), 86–87.
Harvey de Roo, “Undressing Lady Bertilak: Guilt and Denial in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” The Chaucer Review 27 (1997), 313.
G. F. Dalton, “The ‘Loathly Lady’: A Suggested Interpretation,” Folklore 82 (1971): 124–31. “However, in view of the known Irish origin of the theme it seems reasonable to identify the King Henry of the ballad with Henry II, the only one of the name who had any special connection with Ireland” (125).
Also associated with the sovereignty goddess is the Sheela na gig; see particularly Maureen Concannon, The Sacred Whore: Sheela, Goddess of the Celts (Cork, Ireland: The Collins Press, 2004), 25–26; Stock, “The Hag of Castle Hautdesert,” 121–48;
and Russell A. Peck, “Folklore and Powerful Women in Gower’s ‘Tale of Florent’,” in The English “Loathly Lady” Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs, ed. S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 100–145.
S. Elizabeth Passmore, 7. “Through the Counsel of a Lady: The Irish and English Loathly Lady Tales and the ‘Mirrors for Princes’ Genre,” in The English “Loathly Lady” Tales: Boundaries, Traditions, Motifs, ed. S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 3–41.
Robert J. Meyer, “Chaucer’s Tandem Romances: A Generic Approach to the Wife of Bath’s Tale as Palinode,” Chaucer Review 18 (1984): 221–38. “The hag… tells the bachelor a secret which he needs to save his life, but she realizes that this is not the end of the matter. By exacting his vow to do the next thing which she requires of him, she provides for the next stage in the bachelor’s growth. The role of Chaucer’s Hag might be compared to that of Morgan le Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Indeed, in view of the tale’s Arthurian provenance and setting, she may even be Morgan. Like Morgan in Sir Gawain, the hag controls the testing process which results in the hero’s re-education and new self-knowledge” (228).
See also Esther C. Quinn, “Chaucer’s Arthurian Romance,” Chaucer Review 18 (1984): 211–20. She argues that Chaucer’s version needs to be compared to other Arthurian romances, not just to tales where the hag’s analogue exists, and that once this comparison is made, we can see that “Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale echoes Sir Gawain [and the Green Knight] at several points and may be viewed as an ironic parallel” (213).
Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 70. “This time, male surrender leads not only to marital peace and harmony, but also to the magical transformation of the ugly old hag into a beautiful young wife. Miraculous as it is, this transformation is no whit more miraculous than the transformation of a rapist into a meekly submissive husband; the magical change in the woman is merely the external projection of this even more magical change in the man.”
Sheryl L. Forste-Grupp, “A Woman Circumvents the Laws of Primogeniture in The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell,” Studies in Philology 99 (2002): 105–22.
Alcuin Blamires highlights Alisoun’s potentially ‘excessive’ generosity and the moral propriety, in this case, of such excess, adding that “counsel was certainly associated with generosity in medieval moral literature…. A woman’s unrestraint is what saves the knight’s life in the tale” (66–67). Alcuin Blamires, “Refiguring the ‘Scandalous Excess’ of Medieval Woman: The Wife of Bath and Liberality,” in Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 57–78.
Norris J. Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe, The Arthurian Handbook (New York: Garland, 1988), 104. There are several other medieval versions of the Parzival tale: Chrétien’s unfinished Perceval and its continuations, the Welsh Peredur, the French Didot-Perceval and Perlesvaus, and the fourteenth century Middle English Sir Perceval of Galles.
Andree Blumstein, “The Structure and Function of the Cundrie Episodes in Wolfram’s Parzival,” German Quarterly 51 (1978): 160–69. 161.
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. Cyril Edwards (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 142.
Dennis Green points out that having to ask the question means “he is now confronted with a novel type of situation in which more than a knight’s readiness to help by military means or the tactful self-restraint imposed by courtly breeding is called for” (155). Dennis Green, “Parzival’s Failure (Books V and VI),” in Perceval/Parzival: A Casebook, ed. Arthur Groos and Norris J. Lacy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 155–74.
Jean Frappier, “Perceval or Le Conte du Graal,” in Chretien de Troyes: The Man and His Work, trans. Raymond J. Cormier (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1982), 150.
Evelyn Jacobson, “Cundrie and Sigune,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 25 (1989): 1–11. 1.
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Hebert, J.M. (2013). Sisters of the Forest: Morgan and Her Analogues in Arthurian Romance. In: Morgan Le Fay, Shapeshifter. Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137022653_3
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