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MORGAIN THE FAY AND THE LADY OF THE LAKE IN A BROADER 

MYTHOLOGICAL CONTEXT

A great affective chasm separates Morgain as she appears in the 
beginning of English Arthurian literature, in Geoffrey of Monmouth 
and Layamon, and her nature in the later medieval tradition, as seen in 
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the former she appears as the 
leading lady in one of the best known scenes of medieval English
literature, a beautiful young fairy, all sweetness, coming on stage after 
Arthur has been fatally wounded in battle to take him to the Edenlike 
island of Avalon. There she will heal him to live on after death in a 
heavenly existence from which it is hoped he will one day return again 
to bring his heroic help to the problem-beset world his once and future 
subjects still inhabit. In the latter she is Arthur’s wily, old rival and 
secret ennemy, the force of wildness and evil that opposes the
Christian morality and civilization that Arthur’s court stands for. It is 
not the Green Knight himself who wants to cut off Sir Gawain’s head, 
we learn in the surprise ending, but the ominous Morgain, a figure 
whose name alone seems to conjure up the realm of evil.

Laura Hibbard Loomis observes that “the might of Morgan le Fay 
(vs. 2446) was, for Gawain himself, a sufficient explanation and
exculpation for all that he had endured and made him able to part from 
the Green Knight “on most friendly terms.”1 How can such a radical 
change be explained? Where did such a sweet, young goddess go 

1.- See Laura Hibbard Loomis, “Gawain and the Green Knight,” in R.S. Loomis, Arthurian
Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (London: Oxford University 
Press, l959), p. 535.



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wrong? In France, of course, and not long ago Alexandre Micha 
wondered in print about why before the French prose romances she 
was a “feé et guérisseuse” while in them and thereafter she is a 
“magicienne et une ensorceleuse”.1 The present study addresses the 
same question.

Prof. Micha proposes that Morgain’s thorough schooling, a later 
addition to the fairy’s traditional character, offended the medieval
sense of women’s proper role. The idea is similar to the explanation 
offerred for the creation of the archetypal femme fatale in the
character of Vivianne/Niviane, destroyer of Merlin, by reference to 
the Medieval topos of the scholar made a fool of by a comparatively 
ignorant yet clever young woman of whom he is enamoured, as was 
commonly believed to have happened to Virgil and Aristotle.2

Still, this explanation for the change in Morgain is not entirely
satisfying, as one is left with the question of how and why such a 
totally attractive figure, at least to a male hero like Arthur and, one 
supposes, to a male  audience in general, could have been a candidate 
for such a switch to a woman who not only uses her power to
accomplish the hero’s destruction but is also a rival to Arthur’s
kingship. Something must be, one feels, behind the topos, something 
that triggers the topos, something derived from traditional attitudes 
toward women, some image rooted in the forest primeval - oh, perilous 
hunt - of myth and psychology. Dame Prudence urges us to stop here, 
rather than plunge into the murky depths of mythologically oriented
criticism.

1.- Alexandre Micha, Étude sur le “Merlin” de Robert de Boron: Roman du XIII siècle
(Geneva: Droz, l980), p. 55.
2.- See Carlos García Gual’s introduction to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vida de Merlín
(Madrid: Siruela, l984).



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And yet, somewhat like the irresistibly tempting Ring of Power 
guarded by the Rhine Maidens, the suggestive possibilities of myth call 
to us. If one could only use it judiciously, not letting it destroy us by 
leading us to jump to conclusions or to select out from the bewildering 
cornucopia of fables it offers what will fit our pre-conceived ideas, if 
we only knew better what it meant and how much of it survives in 
some signicant way in the hard texts we have in our hand, we might 
better understand the amazingly persistent appeal of Arthurian
literature -which even its Renaissance aficionados berated for being 
“far from reason and sense”,1- and more specifically, why its delicious 
maidens often turn into loathly ladies and viceversa.2

The case against the mythological approach has been summed up 
by Carlos García Gual. While “romanistas” stick to written texts,
which provide something resembling a secure base, “celtistas” make 
extensive use of oral tradition, which is difficult to date and “no
siempre bien comprendida de los escritores, doctos clérigos que toman 
sus noticias de un trasfondo mítico celta y que transforman los
«cuentos de aventura» en relatos corteses para ofrecerlos así a su 
público refinado.”3 The most intrepid reply, albeit undeniably quixotic, 
to the objections raised by this school of criticism has been succinctly 
expressed in this inaugural issue of the SELIM journal by Prof. María 
Luisa Dañobeitia: “Some events hardly make sense unless an

1.- The phrase was used by Elis Gruffydd in commenting on the birth of Taliesin. See 
Patrick Ford, The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales (Berkeley: University of 
California Press,  l977), p. 165.
2.- See Patricia Shaw, “Loathly Ladies, Lither Ladies and Leading Ladies: The Older 
Woman in Middle English Literature,” Actas del Primer Congreso Internacional de la 
Sociedad Española de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa Medieval (S.E.L.I.M.) (Universidad de 
Oviedo, l988), pp. 209-243.
3.- See García Gual, pp. xvii-xviii.



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exhaustive analysis is done of the underlying philosophy of life and 
religion of the ancient Celtic races...”1

Audeamus igitur, calling for strength on our Lady Condwiramurs, 
or Dulcinea, and ask the question: could the topos of the scholar 
outsmarted and pushed onto the next boat to humiliation and death by 
the woman he lusts for, as well as the remarkable change in Morgain 
that occurs in the evolution of Arthurian literature, have grown out of 
a tradition familiar to author and reader alike because derived from 
pagan mythology and surviving in folklore? Might the sort of
problematic relationship between a hero and a powerful woman that 
emerges have been suggested, or reinforced, or shaped, by a pre-
existing pattern that, when recognized, would put it in a new light?

It has been a long time since another lady, Lucy Paton, published in 
1903 her study that became this century’s standard reference on the 
subject of Morgain’s and the Lady of the Lake’s Celtic mythological 
origins. R.S. Loomis, as part of his monumental contribution to
Arthurian studies, continued and enriched her research, but followed, 
as he always did, a norm of focusing on the Breton tradition,
complemented by the Welsh and Irish mythologies closely tied to it.2

However, just two years ago Hilda Ellis Davidson has finally given 
us a more comprehensive study of the myths and symbols of all of 
pagan Europe.3 It is a solidly-grounded book that, at last, puts aside a 
fear of taking a broader view of European mythology, a fear provoked 
by the earlier overgeneralizations made by the dazzled pioneers in the 

1.- María Luisa Dañobeitia, “Two Sides of a Triangle: The Beginning of Gawain’s
Pentangle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” elsewhere in this volume, note 3.
2.- See the references in R.S. Loomis, “The Legend of Arthur’s Survival,” in Loomis, pp. 
64-71.
3.- H.R. Ellis Davidson, Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse 
University Press, l988).



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field, and makes wide-ranging comparisons that establish connections 
among Scandinavian, Germanic and Celtic religion and folklore. It was 
the Norman French, after all, who transformed Morgain and created 
Vivianne.

On digesting the information Prof. Ellis Davidson has gathered and 
organized, one comes to the conclusion that the early Morgain, in the 
form with which she enters the Arthurian world created by Geoffrey 
of Monmouth and Layamon , while still thoroughly Celtic and
undeniably present in the Irish and Welsh tales, offers a dimension that 
is more prominent in Germanic and Scandinavian traditions. The
difference in the lady’s character is simple, apparently unimportant, 
but it points in a different direction. In Ellis Davidson’s words,
Morgain is an Otherworldly Being, and when heros are with her or 
with similar ladies they are not subject to the frustrations of this world, 
including that of not getting along with one’s woman. Still, to be blunt 
about it, although in happy circumstances and with charming ladies, 
they are dead (the fact that the Celts were fond of the idea of the 
dead returning for visits notwithstanding). I would stress, though, that 
Morgain did not kill them, that her primary function is to “heal”, not of 
course for a continuing life in this world but for a new life in the other, 
and in general to make them feel better there.

In Scandinavian and Germanic myths, too, these fair maidens exist, 
and we are familiar with them under the name of valkyries. Ellis 
Davidson’s description is similar to the Wagnerian conception: “battle -
goddesses ... attendant on the god Odin ... sent to carry out the will of 
the god in apportioning victory in battle and deciding which warriors 
must fall.... Her duty was to conduct dead kings and heroes to Odin. 
In the Edda poems we find another aspect portrayed. She appears 
here as the spirit wife of the hero, appearing to announce his future 
greatness as a leader, to urge him to heroic deeds, perhaps to present 
him with his sword, and finally to receive him as husband and lover 



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after he dies in battle.”1 They often are encountered in groups, having 
been compared to bees by the Anglo-Saxons, and there are several 
lists of their names.2

I would like to underscore three of these maidens’ traits. First, they 
escort heros, that is warriors, to a heavenly home after death in battle 
and personally administer the pleasurable rewards for their valor and 
strength; the men stay on there forever in a sort of unending bachelor 
party where worrying about anything is unthinkable. Secondly,
valkyries are attendants on the god of battle, and although they
themselves as goddesses wear armor and provide weapons, they are 
part of the world of men and warfare.

A third quality of valkyries that seems particularly relevant to the 
Arthurian tradition is that they, like Tinkerbell and the boys who
haven’t grown up whom she takes to Never-Never Land, get around 
by flying. As Ellis Davidson points out, valkyries are related (in some 
way I wish we could define more thoroughly) to ravens, who eat the 
dead on the battle field, and to the wise spirit wives of the shamans3

who in pre-historic Gaul, as to this day in Siberia, went into trances 
and sent out their spirits to roam the world beyond the normal human 
limits of time and space in order to bring back powerful knowledge to 
set things right in the here and now. The shape-shifting druids, as has 
often been recognized of late, believed they gained knowledge in a 
very similar way, as “The Song of Taliesen” makes clear. The
valkyries, too, have hidden knowledge, though it is limited to foretelling 
the hero’s life and then bringing him to healing once and for all when 
he enters Valhalla. Their supernatural powers, like the early
Morgain’s, are beneficient.

1.- Ellis Davidson, p. 92.
2.- See Ellis Davidson, p. 96.
3.- See Ellis Davidson, p. 96.



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A comparison with the description of Morgan as drawn by Geofrey 
of Monmouth in his Vita Merlini in the scene of Arthur’s death
reveals that for him her shamanistic and healing nature was
paramount: “Morgana es su nombre, y conoce la utilidad de todas las 
hierbas para la curación de los cuerpos enfermos. También conoce el 
arte de mudar su figura, y como Dédalo sabe cortar los aires con 
plumas nuevas. Cuando quiere, en Bristo, Carnoto o Papias se deja 
caer del cielo en nuestras playas, y esta ciencia dicen que han
aprendido sus hermanas: Morónoe, Mázoe, Gliten, Glitonea, Gliton,
Tirónoe, Titen y Titon, famosísima por su cítara.”1 A similar concept 
of Morgain is visible in the Bataille Loquifer (c. 1180), in which 
Morgain and two of her sisters, also fairies, take the hero through the
air to a luxurious Avalon, where he encounters the greatest Arthurian 
knights: Arthur, Gawain, and Yvain.2

The Morrígan, whose name immediately recalls the Arthurian
character, presents several similarities to vallkyries. “In Irish tradition 
also we find female spirits associated with battle and death. They
appear in the tales under the collective name of Morrígan, which 
may be used either of a single goddess or of a group of three. There is 
a strong erotic element in the Morrígan, as in the Scandinavian
valkyries who offer themselves to warriors. The name has been
interpreted as Great Queen, or Demon Queen; other names given to 
the battle goddesses are Nemain (Frenzy), Badb and Macha (both 
probably meaning Crow).”3 The grouping of Geoffrey’s nine heavenly 
hostesses in three groups of three, each of which begins with a
distinctive letter, seems to recall this goddess’s triple nature. One 

1.- Geoffrey of Mommouth, Vida de Merlín, ed. García Gual, p. 33.
2.- See R.S. Loomis, “The Legend of Arthur’s Survival,” in Loomis, p. 65.
3.- Ellis Davidson, p. 97.



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notable difference is that she does not always fly, but then one of her 
alter egos, Badb, is associated with birds.1

In Layamon’s account of Arthur’s death the name for the
Morgainlike goddess is Argante. Jean Markale informs us that
Budicca, the British woman warrior who leads a revolt against the 
Romans, was Breton and offerred sacrifices and thanks to a war 
goddess called Andrasta or Andarta. He goes on to say, “Pues bien, 
hay una diosa Andarte cuyo culto está atestiguado entre los voconces 
de la Drôme.”2 I find the comparatively short phonetic distance from 
Andarte to Argante suggestive.

In the Mabinogian the name of the god Bran, whose head
presides over an otherworldly feast after the battle in which he is 
killed, means “crow,” the same valkyrie -related bird in whose shape 
Arthur was popularly believed to live on.3 In establishing connections 
that point toward the goddesses who in several versions accompany 
Morgain when she comes to heal Arthur, Idris Llewelyn Foster calls 
attention to the link between Morrígan and crows. In the Didot
Perceval ravens are revealed to be Urbain’s mistress and her
maidens, while in other contexts they are his mother: “If, therefore, the 
correspondence of Morrigan, Modron, and Morgain la Feé is
established, then Owain’s (= Urbain’s) ravens in Rhonabwy’s Dream
can be recognized as the helpful forms of his mother Modron and her 
sisters (or companions).”4

1.- Since a conflation of Badb and Macha would yield Mab, Shakespeare’s inheritance of 
this tradition seems a reasonable hypothesis.
2.- See Jean Markale, Druidas (Tradiciones y Dioses de los Celtas)  (Madrid: Taurus, 
l989), p.126.
3.- On Arthur’s survival as a crow see the references in R.S. Loomis, “The Legend of 
Arthur’s Survival,” in Loomis, p. 65, n. 6.
4.- Idris Llewelyn Foster, “Culhwch and Olwen and Rhonabwy’s Dream,” in Loomis, p. 
43.



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A final observation on valkyries, by way of a possible objection, 
might be that they were not sisters, but helpers and eventually lovers, 
of the men they nurtured, while Morgain came to be considered
Arthur’s sister or half-sister. Still, in myth divine syblings sometimes 
mate. In any case, as Owain’s story shows, help from an affectionate 
sister or mother, even if she is not a lover, could still be a comforting, 
valkyrielike prospect. Geoffrey, in his Historia, does not mention
Morgain in his account of Arthur’s death, saying merely that he was 
“carried off to the Isle of Avalon, so that his wounds might be
attended to.”1 In the Vita Merlini, as we have seen, Morgain
appears, but she is not presented as a relative of Arthur’s: “Allí nueve 
hermanas gobiernan según ley que no está escrita a los que a ellas de 
nuestras partes llegan. La mayor de ellas es sabia ....”2 Layamon’s 
Arthur does not refer to Argante as a relative: “And I will fare to 
Avalun, to the fairest of all maidens, to Argante the queen, an elf most 
fair, and she shall make my wounds all sound, make me all whole with 
healing draughts.”3

If we hypothesize, then, that there is a healthy dose of valkyrie in 
the initial Arthurian Morgain, do we encounter an anti-valkyrie, an 
alternative image of woman, that might explain Morgain’s later
aberration? Ellis rejects Dumézil’s often cited three-part division of 
Indo-European divinities, a scheme that assumes that myth reflected a 
social structure of warriors, priests and producers, and maintains that, 
while its social orientation does reflect what we now know about 

1.- Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, transl. Lewis Thorpe 
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, l986), p. 261.
2.- Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vida de Merlín, p. 32.
3.- Wace and Layamon: Arthurian Chronicles, trans. Eugene Mason (London:
Everyman’s Library, l962), p. 264.



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European mythology, a two-part one fits the data better. “The
difficulty in applying Dumézil’s theories to Scandinavian evidence,
however, is that the Norse deities refuse to fit satisfactorily into the 
niches which he has provided for them, and the same is true of the 
Celtic gods.... On the other hand, the dichotomy between the ruling 
and war gods on one hand and those associated with fertility and the 
land on the other appears to be an essential part of the structure, and 
helps to explain the distinction between the two groups of
Scandinavian deities, Aesir and Vanir.”1

From this perspective it seems logical, as we pursue the broader 
question of Morgain in Arthurian tradition, to ask whether, then, there 
are two basic sorts of Western European goddesses that become 
sexually involved with men. Ellis Davidson seems to say as much
when she affirms that Irish heroes marry either battle goddesses or 
rivers.2 The Vanir, earth spirits and fertility goddesses, were
associated more with women, who were active in their cult, while the 
much more commonly male gods responsible for imposing order on the 
world and war-making, the Aesir, reflect predominantly male social 
roles. The Vanir were concerned with bringing forth life and not 
surprisingly had a particular dislike for violence.

As far as the availability of this worldview to storytellers in the 
Middle Ages, the evidence is clear that the male gods faded sooner 
and more completely than the Vanir, while the later were transformed 
and long remained alive in popular culture. And it is not beside the 
point to add parenthetically that the Vanir included both a male god, 
Freyr, as well as a goddess, Frejya, and it has been the latter that 
survived more strongly.

1.- Ellis Davidson, pp. 200-201.
2.- See Ellis Davidson, p. 203.



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The fertility goddesses, let me hasten to add, are not unrelated to 
the battle goddesses, and in attempting to differentate them I find that, 
especially in surviving literary works, the two categories overlap in 
some important regards. For example, both sometimes appear at a 
man’s birth or entrance into puberty, predicting his future and making 
him gifts.1 One is reminded of the alven that appear in Layamon at 
Arthur’s birth. Similarly, even if we return to myth, there are fair 
maidens , again particurly well known in the Scandinavian tradition and 
seemingly corroborated by archeological remains of ship graves, who 
recall valkyries in that they take the dead to heaven, but whom Ellis 
Davison identifies with fertility goddesses and who come for the dead 
in ships.2 The circumstance that it is by ship that Morgain arrives at 
the sea shore and then departs with the expiring Arthur would seem 
clearly derived from Celtic myths, identified by Lucy Paton, derived, in 
turn, from this broader tradition.

Ultimately the two probably come, one can dare to suggest in 1991, 
from the same pre-historic goddess that is currently the subject of so 
much study and discussion, i.e., from one centrally important earth 
mother, now thought to have split into more than one personality to 
produce several goddesses. In a study related to the more general 
discussion of the theme of the creation of patriarchy, in which this 
figure has been traced back to the ancient Near East, María Luisa 
Dañobeitia has argued that the pentangle in SGGK, and so the sinister 
Morgain whose power it ostensibly combats, is related to ancient rites 
in honor of a goddess who combined fertility, Eros and Thanatos.3

1.- See Ellis Davidson, pp. 92 and 123.
2.- See Ellis Davidson, p. 118.
3.- See María Luisa Dañobeitia, “A Triple Progression in the Pentangle: A Study of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Actas del primer congreso internacional de la 
Sociedad Española de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa Medieval (S.E.L.I.M.), (Universidad 
de Oviedo, 1988).



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Jean Markale has pursued the idea of such an ur-divinity with real 
élan: “Rodeada de terribles y eficaces dioses auxiliares, revestida de 
múltiples nombres, partícipe de las tres funciones indoeuropeas,
maestra de poesía, de magia y de profecía, sabia en técnicas diversas, 
madre de todos los dioses, un poco ninfómana y animada de furor 
guerrero, triple diosa pero siempre mujer única, probablemente
heredera de la Gran Diosa de los tiempos prehistóricos, así se
presenta la Minerva céltica. Su complejidad es tan grande como la del 
Dagda.”1

Closer in time and space to Arthur, descriptions of the Irish Other 
World show Lug, the god of war, sitting in state accompanied by the 
goddess who represents the sovereignty of Ireland, just as Odin is 
attended by the valkyries. But as Patrick Ford and likeminded critics 
have sought to demonstrate, this goddess is essentially the same as 
Rhiannon of the Mabinogian, the Continental Epona, the horse
goddess of fertility.2

If we follow this line of thought, supposing that fertility goddesses 
were not originally separate from battle goddesses, it becomes
apparent that, at least in their role as escorts for the dead, they may be 
thought of as the non-warrior’s version of the valkyrie. In a period 
when the gods and goddesses had split into distinct and even opposed 
personalities and functions, at the hour of death they would have 
provided the protection of maternal divinities who were especially
comforting in that they formed part of the woman’s or the farmer’s 
world.

But the subject at hand is not caste differences between these two, 
essentially similar and nurturing imges of women, but rather more 

1.- See Markale, p. 130.
2.- See Ford, p. 9.



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fundamental distinctions that bring us closer to the threatening
Morgain of SGGK. Many myths and tales from folklore involving
fertility goddesses, particularly prominent in Gaul and Britain, do not 
stress the escorting of the dead to the next world and the joys of 
existence there. On the contrary, such figures are very much part of 
the vexations of living in this world, attracting men with the alluring 
possiblities of sexual pleasure and the wealth of fertility but at the 
same time taking away control over their own fates and often
destroying them. While they may at the end take them to the Other 
World, the focus is on the shock experienced when pleasure is
followed by the anxieties and horror of being done in by the desired 
woman herself, not on the comfort of being carried off to be healed 
afterwards.

The Lai of Graelent, whose widespread basis in folklore has been 
thoroughly documented,1 can serve as a good example. The lady, who 
turns up in a pool and says she loves the surrounding land, obviously 
has immense, supernatural powers, which include both the attraction 
of her face and body and her cornucopialike wealth, with which she 
outfits and supports her man until he fails to honor the one requirement 
she lays upon him. Thereupon she lets him, like a lovesick fool, drown 
himself while trying to recover her, only resuscitating him and taking 
him off to fairyland at the insistent request of her horrified servants. 
Connections to fertility goddesses are not hard to find in such a story.

Just as valkyries move through the air, these goddesses, known in 
Roman Europe as “mother earth,” or “the mothers,” inhabited water 
and were worshiped at shrines near it.2 There, sacrifices of gold, as 
well as fruits of the earth, were thrown into the water in the hope of 
receiving in return the multiplied wealth and fruitfulness magically

1.- See the references in Ernest Hoepffner, “The Breton Lais,” in Loomis, pp. 112-21.
2.- On the earth mothers and their cult see Ellis Davidson, pp. 110-111.



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brought about by the combination of earth and water. This is the 
source of Graelent’s rent money. But the sexual pleasure and wealth 
are dependent on the goodwill of the lady and so part of the nerve-
wrackingly perishable while maddeningly desirable good things of this 
world, not the perfect and enduring ones provided by one’s valkyrie in 
Valhalla.

Examples of this sort of powerful water goddess can be adduced 
from many European cultures, but let us consider another one, less 
widely known but still Celtic. In northwestern Spain there is a robust 
folklore surrounding, in Galicia, donas, and in Asturias, xanas, whose 
similarities to nymphs in other western European myths were pointed 
out early in this century.1 These attractive young women live outdoors, 
usually in water or caves, where they can be spotted on the summer 
solstice or at other magical moments combing their red hair with a 
golden comb or hanging out their washing. They can be recognized as 
preternatural by both the fact that they are said to be enchanted and 
their magical powers. Like Irish fairies, they steal human babies and 
raise them out of society, substituting their own infants to be raised by 
women. Like Rhine maidens, they guard golden treasures. These they 
offer, along with their fair hand, to men of their choosing who have 
come across them and are willing to try to disenchant them, though 
they come with strings attached. The man must pass a test - the
answer to a riddle or the faithful observance of a single prohibition -
and if he fails, as he almost invariably does, the girl either is not freed 
from or returns to her enchanted, i.e., magical, state. At the same time 
all the gold she has given the man turns into something worthless or 
repulsive.

1.- See Eliseo Marías Pinto, Correspondencies entre les lleendes gallegues y asturianes. 
El so estudiu comparativu so los motivos del folclor celta  (Oviedo: Lliga Celta d’Asturies, 
l987), pp. 29-32; and Aurelio de Llano Roza de Ampudia, Del Folklore Asturiano: Mitos, 
Supersticiones, Costumbres (Oviedo: Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, l983), pp. 29-50.



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Some tales stress that the couple was living happily together until 
the man could no longer avoid breaking the one rule, whereupon the 
fairy mercilessly abandoned him.1 Donas have the additional trait of 
setting a date for the disenchantment, but then turning into a
frightening, dragonlike snake which on the appointed day the man
must dare not only to approach but even to kiss three times in order to 
return the lady to her more beautiful, alternative form.2 The men are 
usually not up to it and so lose everything the woman so tantalisingly 
offers. Similarly, Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain fights for and wins the 
lady of a fountain, who comes with the wealth of a kingdom, but she 
breaks with him when he proves himself unable to meet the one 
condition she sets upon him.

The word ‘xana,’ often pronounced ‘xiana,’ was shown by
Menéndez Pidal to derive from the Latin ‘Diana.’3 It appears that the 
pre-Roman xanas were assimilated to that classical goddess. The 
similarity, I would argue, is both real and germane to our larger
subject.

The story of Diana, Artemis in Greek, and Actaeon, has long been 
one of the better known plots of classical mythology. A hunter,
Actaeon comes across Artemis in the woods, where she is bathing in
a pool. Avoiding being seen himself, he watches her and becomes 
filled with desire. She, virgin goddess of the hunt who does not submit 
to men, becomes angry when she discovers the presence of her 
unwanted admirer. Turning him into a stag, she watches with
satisfaction as his own hounds tear him to pieces.

1.- For example, “El viudo y la Xana,” “El pastor y la Xana,” and “La Xania del Castiellu 
de Aguilar,” Llano Roza de Ampudia, pp. 42-47.
2.- On such goddesses’ dual aspects see Ellis Davidson, p. 111. On fairy ladies in Irish 
popular tradition who both seduce and resist see p. 112.
3.- Cited in Llano Roza de Ampudia, p. 30.



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While it might be objected that Artemis does not manifest any
interest in a sexual realationship with the man who encounters her, it 
should be remembered, first, that she was also the goddess of
childbirth and at a school consecrated to her in Athens adolescent girls 
learned how to become wives and mothers. While Artemis seems to 
represent the attitude of young girls fearful of men, society assumed 
that those fears should and would be overcome. Secondly, even
though she may actively reject the man’s desire for her, she has 
provoked it. From the male perspective, illustrated by Renaissance 
love poetry in which men accuse women of cruelty because they
refuse to quench the passion their beauty has kindled, she has created 
the man’s need and then fails to meet it. The implied attitude is explicit 
in Graelent, where we learn later that the lady has intentionally
bathed naked near where the hero would pass in order to attract him.

I began by joking that Morgain went wrong in France. Laura 
Hibbard Loomis has pointed out the time and place more specifically. 
Just as in SGGK Morgain is an old witch who seeks to have the 
hero’s head cut off and to that end sends a young woman to try to 
seduce him, similarly in the prose Lancelot she uses her magic 
charms with the purpose of destroying the hero and, once again, sends 
a young woman to seduce him. Morgain is the lurking power of wild 
and deadly impulses that always threaten to, and eventually do, devour 
the measured joys of Camelot, and her portrait is already drawn in the 
much earlier French work.1

The parallels, indeed are close and numerous. Just as the Green 
Knight goes hunting to arrange for Gawain and his seductive wife to 
be alone in the mornings prior to the grisly appointment at the Green 
Chapel, in the French model Morgain sends her most beautiful maiden 
to travel cross-country alone with Lancelot as his guide to the

1.- See Laura Hibbard Loomis, in Loomis, p. 535.



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Dolerose Tor. Both young women are provoctive dressers and skillful, 
non-stop talkers; Morgain’s maid even sings lays to him: “ beles
paroles et rit et gabe et joe en chevalchant. De totes les choses le 
semont de quoi ele le cuide eschaufer, si se deslie sovent por moster 
son vis et son chief qui de tres grant bialté estoit et chante lais bretons 
e t autres notes plaisans et envoisies, et ele avoit la vois et haute et 
clere et la langue bien parlant et breton et francois et mains autres 
langages.”1

In both cases there are three assaults on the hero’s chastity, mainly 
set in bed, and for reasons of duty he can neither accept the offer nor 
refuse it with blunt discourtesy. We sympathize with these two
famous lovers at the same time we laugh at their predicament. And if 
the proposition by the Green Knight’s wife is notoriously brazen, her 
French counterpart is even more self-assured and direct: “Et por ce 
que vos estes buens chevaliers et je suis bele damoisele, por ce vos 
requier je et pri que vos gisés a moi orendroit...”2

The negative version of Morgain had been sketched out in some 
detail a few years earlier than even the prose Lancelot, about 1190 in 
Hartmann von Aue’s Erek, and he clearly did not invent it. Paton’s 
and Roger Loomis’s studies on Morgain show what contradictory
figures she could represent, and one comes to the time-honored
conclusion that fairies and witches are two sides of a coin that is 
women’s power. But the question a study directed toward her origin 
as she appears in SGGK calls for us to ask is whether or not the 
specific image of the dangerous water fairy was an essential element 
in the prose Lancelot, whether a sinister lady of a stream, or a 
fountain, or a lake was part of the author’s picture of women and 

1.- Lancelot: roman en prose du XIIIe siécle, ed. Alexandre Micha, 4 vols. (Paris, Droz, 
1978), I: 317.
2.- Lancelot, I: 318.



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contributed to his decision to opt for and develop the frightening
instead of the comforting version of Morgain, both of which traditions
he knew. It now turns out, as everyone knows, that Lancelot is
associated with a certain Lady of the Lake. He did not appear in the 
Historia Regum Britanniae along with Gawain and Keu and the rest 
of the boys; instead, as Jean Frappier has shown, he had separate 
roots in folklore: “the most primitive feature of his biography was his 
childhood in the palace of a fay, who stole him from his mother and 
reared him on an island of the sea or at the bottom of a lake.”1 In 
Chrétien de Troye’s Lancelot of the Lake, written ten years before 
Hartmann von Aue’s Erek, the fay adheres to the traditional xanalike 
pattern, steals him from his mother when he is a baby and raises him 
outside of society. This unconventional upbringing in a woman’s world 
makes him what he is, the devoted servant of ladies. Chrétien insisted 
that the story was not his, that its form and content were dictated by 
the Countess of Champagne,2 and certainly it represents much more 
of a woman’s love fantasy than a man’s. Charles Foulon also suggests 
a move away from inherited attitudes when he observes that,
“Chrétien lighted his torch at the flame of Wace, ... but that, beginning 
with Lancelot, his indebtedness steadily waned.”3

The Lady of the Lake, however, is not herself the femme fatale,
that role being turned over to Guenevere. In fact, she is a strangely 
benevolent and socialized water goddess, in her actions more a
valkyrie than a dragon lady, for after selflessly raising her adopted son 
she herself takes him away to court, the world of warriors, and there 
asks that he be made a knight to serve his lord. We know there was a 

1.- Jean Frappier, “The Vulgate Cycle,” in Loomis, p. 296.
2.- Jean Frappier remarks that, “It is the current opinion that Chretien followed the 
countess’s instructions with reluctance: after all, the Lancelot is a sort of palinode, a 
recantation of Cligés.” See “Chrétien de Troyes,” in Loomis, p. 175.
3.- Charles Foulon, “Wace,” in Loomis, p. 102.



105

reaction against the book’s over-all tone of exaggerated deference to 
women, but was there also a reaction against its defanged portrayal of 
a water goddess?

Before looking in more detail at the magical ladies in the prose 
Lancelot let us turn to another romance written not long after
Lancelot of the Lake and which is closely tied to the prose Lancelot
in plot, characters and the presence of similar anti-feminine
sentiments. I am referring to the Suite du Merlin, in which Morgain, 
as in the prose Lancelot, is a wicked sorceress who directs her 
powerful arts toward Arthur’s destruction. Micha’s focus on her
extensive education, somehow tied up with her evil nature, is easy to 
justify in the text. She is Arthur’s sister, and when she was young, “on 
the recommendation of the whole family, the king sent the daughter 
named Morgan to school at a convent. She was so gifted that she 
learned the seven arts and quite early acquired remarkable knowledge 
of an art called astronomy, which she used all the time. She also
studied nature and medicine, and it was through that study that she 
came to be called Morgan the Fay.”1 Merlin shows his susceptibility 
to dangerous women by falling in love with first her and then, as the 
amorous side of his character evolves, with a woman who
unmistakably recalls a water fairy, Vivianne. Jean Markale proposes 
that the latter’s name derives from Boinn-Bé Finn, a Gaulish water 
goddess.2

In the Suite the name is Niviane, and her ties to Artemis are 
explicit. Merlin tells her the story of a young woman from Roman 
times named Diana, an independent spirit who likes to hunt. An ardent 
admirer named Faunus convinces her to live with him by a lake she 

1.- The Prose Merlin and Suite du Merlin, trans. Samuel N. Rosenberg, in Romance of 
Arthur II, ed. James J. Wilhelm (New York: Garland, l986), p. 248.
2.- See Markale, p. 129.



106

likes, but she is fickle and after two years she tires of him, cruelly 
liquidating him to make way for another lover by pouring molten lead 
on his body while he is beneath the waters of her lake. That she is the 
lady of the lake is stressed by Merlin’s paternalistic ending to the 
story, in which she is killed in punishment and the lake, into which her 
body is thrown, given her name. Niviane is not deterred and proceeds 
to imitate Merlin’s metafictional heroine, with the important difference 
that she succeeds where her role model failed, cleverly doing in Merlin 
and getting away with it, too. Now that, one can imagine the
anonymous author wishing Chrétien were still around to be told, is a 
real Lady of the Lake. As Niviane, using magical spells symbolic of 
the power her sexual attractiveness gives her, seals up Merlin to be 
buried alive she gloats in the best fabliau style: “Look how the 
enchanter is enchanted.”1 Merlin cries out from his tomb: “His cry 
came from the sharp pain he felt when he realized that he was being 
killed by a woman’s cunning and that a woman’s craft had defeated 
his own.”2

The prose Lancelot echoes the myth of the water fairy just as 
explicity and, in relation to Morgain, more insistently. The narrator 
introduces her with the information that she was Arthur’s sister and 
the woman who knew the most about enchantments, so much, in fact, 
that many foolish people said she was not a woman at all, but a 
goddess.3 We learn later that it is not learning that corrupted her, but 
rather lust, for as soon as she came of age she was “si chaude et 
luxuriose que plus chaude feme ne convint a querre.”4 While serving 
as one of Guenevere’s ladies in waiting she has an affair with a 

1.- Suite du Merlin, p. 265.
2.- Suite du Merlin, p. 265.
3.- See Lancelot, I: 275.
4.- Lancelot, I: 300.



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nephew of the queen, who royally threatens and cajols the young man 
to break off what is really just a lark. Finding herself pregnant and 
abandoned, Morgain misguidedly - if, indeed, showing real pluck -
searches the whole country until she finds Merlin, whom she seduces 
- as though she were Rhiannon - with not only her fair person but also 
“molt grant avoir et molt bele chevalcheure.”1 In return he teaches 
her powerful magic, which she uses vindictively against Guenevere 
whenever possible. Learning, then, is only a means in this view of 
Morgain, there being other base origins and ignoble ends to her 
actions.

A woman badly wounded in love, reminiscent of Orgelleuse in
Wolfram’s Parzival, she creates a magical Valley of No Return, also 
known as the Valley of the False Lovers. In it become trapped all 
knights who undertake the adventure, since any who has ever been 
unfaithful to his lady in thought, word, or deed faces the prospect of 
living out his days and dying there, unless someday, of course, some 
perfect lover should choose to enter the valley and release all the 
captives. It is rather like Valhalla, with walls of air, plenty of food, 
drink and men’s sports, a celestial prison where fallen knights, killed 
by Morgain for their perverse male falseness, are living on in the 
afterlife. The knights’ sweethearts, however, are at liberty to come 
and go as they like, acting the role of mobile valkyries, but with no 
Odin to obey or any mandatory attentions to their lovers. It is a 
woman’s remodeling of Valhalla, with women in charge, when they 
choose to be, of men who cannot leave or misbehave, a fantasy very 
much along the lines of the feminist fin amour that characterizes 
Chrétien’s Lancelot.

Yet in the palace at the center of the valley lies on her luxurious 
bed a Morgain who is unquestionably as much a water fairy as a 

1.- Lancelot, I: 301.



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valkyrie. At the entrance to the enchanted region there are two
dragons, as well as a deadly, cliff-lined pool to be crossed; the latter’s 
frightening nature is stressed. In going across it on a plank Lancelot is 
preceded by some days by the duke and by Yvain. The former
overcomes the two dragons but, reeling with fear, is knocked into the 
dark and roiled waters by his three opponents. He feels himself
drowning and on being pulled out and opening his eyes cannot tell if he 
is alive or dead. He fails, as it were, to kiss the snake three times, but 
like Graelent is brought out to a post-drowning land of love. Yvain, too, 
falls in, and the sergeant-at-arms escorts him to the enchanted jail.

Lancelot slays the two dragons, then, like Yvain in Chrétien’s 
romance bearing his name, defeats the guardian - in this case the 
three guardians - who protect the pool and keep anyone else from 
gaining access to the lady of the land. This test of bravery and
prowess passed, the pool and its defenders vanish, and the purely
symbolic nature of the episode is revealed. Then it is a wall of fire 
with two guardians that block his way. He kills one, while the other 
flees, throws himself from its high banks into a pool, and miraculously 
emerges on the other side, taunting him to follow. Begged by an
accompanying damsel to desist so as not to drown, he replies that he 
was raised in the water and so has an advantage over other men, an 
aside that calls the reader’s attention to his feminine upbringing and 
consequent skill in matters of love. He plunges in fully armed, pursues 
his enemy to a pavillion, turns over Morgain’s bed to get at him, and 
finally presents her with the severed head, a feat emblematic of how it 
is Gawain finds himself in bed with the Green Knight’s wife, Yvain 
with Escalados the Red’s, and of wooing in general in many Celtic 
tales.

Several pages later, after leaving the valley and having successfully 
just said no to Morgain’s beautiful substitute, he comes to another pool 
in a steep ravine, in which lie the bodies of two courtly lovers, he 



109

dispatched by her husband and she by dispair. No one has been able 
to retrieve them, but Lancelot is such a perfect lover that he can and 
does, thus making it possible for them to have a decent burial. The 
Valley of the False Lovers, it is apparent, is tied up in an essential way 
with pools that the sorceress uses to kill practically anyone who
plunges into love.

In sum, the Morgain of the prose Lancelot, who represents a very 
closely followed model for her counterpart in SGGK, takes the
heavenly, essentially valkyrielike qualities of Geoffrey and Layamon’s 
Morgains and gives them a different value, equating them with the 
characteristics of a water goddess, desirable and desirous but
dangerously powerful, smart, devious, and vengeful. The sweetly
mothering, or sistering, virgin has become the man-eating siren.

If I have successfully made the case that this image of women is in 
part responsible for the late Morgain, then the question arises of why 
this tradition was less important in the early period of Arthurian
literature. Two plausible explanations come to mind. First, the Vanir 
were associated not with the nobles, about and for whom most
narrators wrote, but with non-warriors, whose fears and fantasies 
were less commonly recorded in “high” literature. Secondly, tales of 
femmes fatales let a nightmarish version of unpleasant realities, i.e., 
that women have always had real power in the realm of love and 
children, intrude on a heroic male fantasy in which, inspite of an
unfaithful wife and a treacherous son-surrogate, the fallen hero gets a 
golden parachute and a more tender woman than his ex-wife ever 
was. This rosy view of how a man’s life may well turn out strikes me 
as appropriate in the context of the twelfth-century creation of the 
ideal of chivalry. By the different time of SGGK, and in the different 
place of the French prose romances, a more tragic sense of chivalry 
rang truer.



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Clark Colahan

Whitman College, Wa.

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