The tricky thing is, she wasn't evil when she started. In her first portrayals, she wasn't even of relation to Arthur. Just one of the healers from Avalon.

But with the wave of Christianity, people started to portray her as evil. That's one of the really interesting aspects of The Mists of Avalon. A lot of the story is about the struggle to hold onto feminine spirituality in the face of Christianity.

But the type of woman that Morgan le Fay exemplified then didn't mesh with Christianity's view of women. A magical healer. Enchanting. Many lovers. That was the norm in Celtic tradition. But Christians interpreted her through their moral lens, so she morphed into a witch. Evil.

Yep, her name changes spelling many times. Morgen, Morgan le Fay, Morgaine. I think maybe a Morgana in there somewhere. Same person.

"Fay" is fairy. Fairy, goddess...no truly reliable recorded records that I know of. From what I understand those who've studied this much more closely suspect it to be a mesh of a couple. I'm going to write that in a separate comment.

I would recommend it if you really like the story. I've been fascinated with it since I was little. I hadn't read it in years but for some reason I was reminded of all this recently so I pulled it off my shelf again. I just thought she did such a good job of keeping the story while telling it from a totally different side.

I have not read that one, but I did read his Mad Merlin and I pulled that one off the shelf too. Would you recommend that one? He has another one on the subject I think as well.

Le Fay means "the fairy". Fairies at the time were very complicated creatures - passionate, selfish, self -sacrificing, loving and indifferent all in one creature, very unlike the fairies of later legend.

(And yeah, I've heard all the jokes.)

It's been a while since I've read Arthurian history, so forgive me if this isn't 100%:

Morgaine and Morgan le Fay are the same. "Le Fay" is as French as it sounds -- it's titular, meaning 'the fay'. In the earliest sources she was a fairy -- never a Goddess, but I think Hilary was speaking in archetypes more than literal terms.

Hard to say when or why she became evil in the retellings, though her association with magic likely didn't help her case when Christianity came to Britain. Even Merlin was the devil's son, but his mother was baptized before he was born so he came out OK.

The Mists of Avalon are a good read, and an interesting angle on the legend. If you're interested in the historical Arthur, I'd recommend Leslie Alcock's Arthur's Britain and Norma L. Goodrich's King Arthur. Goodrich takes a lot of flack for some, ah, liberties taken in her research and conclusions, but I found the book interesting all the same.

On the name itself, it might be helpful to remember that although the story takes place in what is now called England, the models of the stories and the tradition of tat time come from the French, and that French was the new language spoken on in England and Normandy. English was a "lower" language. The Arthur legend comes to us as a courtly genre, that means French not English.
I doubt that the actual name would have any similar variant in older Celtic languages. I could be wrong. But those names would start with the Celtic, not working back from the French.

I know Morgaine and Morgan le Fay are the same - my question was poorly formulated, sorry. What I was really asking about is why does the same character need two different names?

I only read it once and loved it. It has a primo spot on my bookshelf though. I'm about halfway through it for the second time and I love it just as much this time around.

My other favorite is definitely The Once and Future King. It might be #1 on the list, actually.

You know, Egyptian gods have dualistic natures because, I think, these gods were very real to these people with a kind of similar existence in which good, evil, immorality, morality, kindness and cruelty are as much a part of the gods world as it is humans.

The same can be said of Greek/Roman gods and Native American gods. And, I think, Norse gods and Hindu gods, too, though I know little about those. In fact, I can think of a polytheistic system where the individual gods aren't capable of both cruelty and kindness in extremes.

Did Christianity/Judaism/Isalm/et al. simply recombine those myriad personas and split then into the conceptually simpler representations of "good" and "evil"?

Oops, it Knightley, not Knight.

Carry on.

It made me wish Guinnevere had never come along.

Funny, right? To the superficial telling she's the heroine. She's the one in the love story. Everybody loves Lancelot, so you identify with Guinevere. (Come on, I know you've seen First Knight! I love that stupid movie even though it totally warps the story.)

But really she was the portrayal of what women were, or were supposed to be then. Virgin-like. And in the real story, they never got it on. Never kissed. And Lancelot was ugly! Certainly no Richard Gere.

Correction: Fata Morgana = mirage.

So does that make you a mirage?

Way cool though. I never met anyone named Morgaine. I wouldn't have thought there were any.

I read all of Mary Stewarts books in Middle School. She was speaking from Merlins perspective, if I recall correctly.

Historical Fiction is fun. I liked her other stuff, too.

Cricket - No apologies for dissent! Spices things up.

I think that one of the reasons for the enduring fascination with the Arthurian legend is because it is always a quest. Who is real? What is real? Even as a little girl I wanted those answers. But what truth is there? And if we knew everything surely, knew when and whence the characters came from, would it be so intriguing? Because it is not a story rooted in solid attainable facts, there is room left for imagination, which for me at least, is half the fun.

Which is, I think why I enjoyed The Mists of Avalon so much. It's a different read now than it was then, surely. Levi touches a bit above on how these myths and stories are different for every person. I know that many of the retellings, particularly the movies on the subject, frustrate the Arthurian scholars because it's often so inaccurate.

As Demosaur says above, "Goodrich takes a lot of flack for some, ah, liberties taken in her research and conclusions, but I found the book interesting all the same." (One I also haven't read, by the way. I'm going to have a great list coming out of this thread.)

But I kind of like that we can do that. Because we can't quite pin down what was, we're free to imagine what could have been. I know that's not the attraction for everyone, but it's part of why I like it.

I suspect that if there was one particular book out there that you could sit down and read and get every single fact of the story, I wouldn't have read nearly as much Arthurian literature.

wonderful pic-face

if you could get some gyration going in it,
and the chimp would go back to his id-picking avi,
the two of you right next to the other would be ballet--Christe Eleison.

The Arthurian legend is clearly a major theme in our culture... and a compelling story to boot.