To Change Her Shape

Morgan le Fay, the infamous enchantress of Arthurian legend, has worn many faces across the centuries: healer and villain, seductress and savior, sister and sorceress. Her story is often a mirror, reflecting the anxieties and desires of the cultures that tell it. This episode brings you the shapeshifting faces of Morgan le Fay.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

Episode sources

Chapters

• 0:00 Pre-roll
• 0:07 Intro
• 2:37 Her Name Is Morgen
• 9:19 Counterfeit, Brittle, and False
• 16:33 Morgan the Protagonist
• 21:09 Conclusion
• 24:00 Outro

Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
In the fourteenth-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Green Knight of the title bursts in on a celebration held at the castle of Camelot, led by King Arthur and Queen Guinevere and attended by the Knights of the Round Table. The Green Knight challenges the knights to a test of chivalry. The story that follows is an epic adventure that tests the virtue and courage of the knight Gawain. Toward the end of the story, the Green Knight reveals his true purpose to Gawain, saying: “Through the might of Morgan le Fay, who remains in my house,/ Through the wiles of her witchcraft, a lore well learned—/ Many of the magical arts of Merlin she acquired,/ For she lavished fervent love long ago/ On that susceptible sage: certainly your knights know/ Of their fame/ So “Morgan the Goddess”/ She accordingly became;/ The proudest she can oppress/ And to her purpose tame./ She sent me forth in this form to your famous hall/ To put to the proof the great pride of the house,/ The reputation for high renown of the Round Table;/ She bewitched me in this weird way to bewilder your wits…”

Morgan le Fay, the infamous enchantress of Arthurian legend, has worn many faces across the centuries: healer and villain, seductress and savior, sister and sorceress. Her story is often a mirror, reflecting the anxieties and desires of the cultures that tell it. To trace Morgan’s evolution is to walk the razor’s edge between myth and memory.

In this episode, I bring you the shapeshifting faces of Morgan le Fay.

Her Name Is Morgen
Morgan le Fay has enjoyed a number of reincarnations, and even the origin of her name is steeped in mystery. Before she was the enchantress of Arthurian fame, before she bore the epithet le Fay or plotted beneath Camelot’s towers, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini or “Life of Merlin,” composed sometime around 1150 CE, depicts Morgan as a mystical healer and inhabitant of the Isle of Apples, which in later texts will be renamed Avalon. She is learned, powerful, and seemingly benevolent, skilled in astronomy and herbal medicine. There is no explicit malice here. Instead, she is the guardian of Arthur’s body after the Battle of Camlann, more divine than dangerous. The island she inhabits and governs is an idyllic one. However, she still carries an air of mystery and the supernatural about her. As Geoffrey tells it:

The island of apples which is called Fortunate/ Gets its name from the circumstances [of] producing everything through itself./ It does not need farmers cultivating the land…/ It produces fruitful crops and grapes of its own accord,/ And apple trees born in its woods, with sheared grass/ The soil produces all things in the manner of grass, abounding everywhere./In that place one lives for a hundred years or more./ In that place nine sisters give laws by means of genial rule/ To those who come to them from our lands./ She who is eminent among them is more informed in the skill of healing…/ Her name is Morgen and she knows what of advantages/ All the grasses bear so that she might cure sick bodies./ There is also a skill familiar to her by which she knows how to change her shape/ And how to cut through the sky, just as Daedalus with new feathers…/ When she wants she glides out of the air into your borders./ They say this woman taught mathematics to her sisters…/ There, after the war of Camlaan, hurt by a wound,/ We led Arthur, with our leader Barinthus,/ To whom were known the seas and constellations of the sky./ With this man being the pilot of the boat we came to that place with the prince,/ And Morgen received us with which honor as was fitting,/ And she put the king on the golden bed in her own room,/ And with her hand, that honored woman uncovered the wound for herself,/ And she inspected it for a long time, and at last she said/ It was possible for her to return him to health, if he were with her for a long time/ And he were wanting to finish her medicine./ Therefore we gladly committed the king to her.”

This Morgen is a healer, with whom the knights are happy to leave the wounded Arthur, but she is still a powerful entity. She not only has knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, and healing far beyond most women, but she can fly, gliding “out of the air into your borders.”

The Latin fata, from which Morgan’s later title of “le Fay” is derived, ties her to the fairy world, but Geoffrey’s Morgan is human enough, embodying the almost divine wisdom reserved for exceptional women, like the sibyls or saints, who defied the constraints of medieval gender roles by becoming something other. This earliest form, Morgen, likely drifts to us from the currents of Old Welsh or Old Breton, meaning “sea-born,” rooted in the Common Brittonic Mori-genā. Her name, then, conjures the image of a woman who rises from the waves: elemental, ancient, and deeply tied to the sea’s unfathomable power.

A recently rediscovered Arthurian text contains a letter purportedly written by Morgan le Fay herself. In the letter, which is written in Anglo-Norman and was found spanning two pages in a fourteenth-century astrological text, Morgan is identified by a series of extraordinary titles. The text reads, “Morgan, by the grace of God empress of the wilderness, queen of the damsels, lady of the isles, long time governor of the waves [of the] great sea.” There is a wildness to Morgan, who reflects a world still connected to Celtic otherworld traditions, where female figures of power were not inherently evil but awe-inspiring and wise, associated with healing and mystery, rather than harm and malevolence. This sea-born identity was no mere poetic flourish. Her masculine counterpart, Mori-genos, lived on in Middle Welsh as Morien, and a linguistic cousin surfaces in Old Irish as Muirgen, a name borne by a shapeshifting female saint whose own legend blurs the line between sanctity and sorcery, Christianity and the older, wilder traditions of Celtic belief. It was Lucy Allen Paton who, in her 1903 book Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance, first dared to trace Morgan’s lineage even further back, into the shadowed domain of the Morrígan, the Irish goddess of war and fate, mistress of ravens and battlefield prophecy. The Morrígan was not one woman, but many: maiden, mother, crone; one face today, another tomorrow. Like Morgan, she shapeshifted. She refused a single story. This connection also seemed sensible to Roger Sherman Loomis, who reinforced this connection between Morgan le Fay and the Celtic goddesses in his 1926 bookCeltic Myth and Arthurian Romance. For Loomis and others, Morgan was not merely a fairy or a sorceress but the fragmented memory of a goddess, a survivor of the pre-Christian pantheon, now disguised as a mortal.

Counterfeit, Brittle, and False
As the Arthurian tradition expanded in twelfth- and thirteenth-century French romances, especially in the works of Chrétien de Troyes and the Vulgate Cycle, Morgan’s role shifted toward something more unsettling. She was increasingly portrayed as Arthur’s half-sister, a detail that grounded her in the human realm but also made her proximity to the throne suspect. At the same time, she began to adopt traits that would mark her as a threat: sexual autonomy, magical knowledge, and a tendency to scheme. In these texts, Morgan becomes a woman of dangerous desires. She traps lovers, plots against queens, and meddles in the affairs of knights. Her identity is now doubled: noble by birth but suspect by action. She reflects a growing medieval discomfort with women who operate outside male control, especially those who possess power beyond the domestic sphere.

Chretien de Troyes reimagines Morgan as Arthur’s sister, now a threat to courtly order and chivalric love. The male anxiety around powerful, autonomous women—especially those who dared to live and love on their own terms—surrounds her character. She is dangerous because she desires a woman who takes lovers, a woman who cannot be contained by the domestic roles of queen or mother, and, worst of all, a woman who knows magic. By the time we arrive at Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur in the fifteenth century, he has rechristened her with an air of chivalric exoticism: Morgan le Fay. The phrase is a faux-French invention, cobbled together from the older la fée, literally “the fairy.” Malory oscillated between spellings, but his intent was clear: Morgan was not merely a woman. She was something other.

Sir Thomas Malory lived a life only slightly less adventurous than the knights of King Arthur’s court at Camelot. Living in England in the midst of the Wars of the Roses, he found himself at the mercy of the Lancaster monarch Henry VI and his York challengers. He spent a significant amount of time in this period imprisoned by Yorkist supporters of Edward IV and most likely died in prison in 1471. His distaste for political scheming, court intrigue, and civil war may have colored his retelling of the Arthurian legends and led to a transformation in depictions of Morgan le Fay.

In the Morte, Morgan le Fay is at once Arthur’s half-sister, a former lover of Merlin, a would-be usurper, and the relentless thorn in Camelot’s side. She plots and poisons, traps knights, and tests queens, and still, she lingers at the edge of the story, simultaneously central and peripheral. She is a character defined not only by what she does but by the threat of what she could do. She seeks vengeance, power, and often Arthur’s downfall. Her magic is dark, her intentions suspect, and her femininity weaponized. She represents the inverse of the courtly ideal: where Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, is refined and tragic, Morgan is unruly and vengeful.

In one example, before a battle with the knight Accolon, Morgan sends a woman to bring Arthur a counterfeit sword. Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, had been granted to him by the Lady of the Lake and gave him magical protection in battle. By switching out his sword, Morgan clearly means to render Arthur powerless. Malory writes, “And right as Arthur was on horseback there came a damsel from Morgan le Fay, and brought unto Sir Arthur a sword like unto Excalibur, and the scabbard, and said unto Arthur, ‘Morgan le Fay sendeth here your sword for great love.’ And he thanked her, and weened it had been so, but she was false, for the sword and the scabbard was counterfeit, and brittle, and false… And so they went eagerly to the battle, and gave many great strokes, but always Arthur’s sword bit not like Accolon’s sword; but for the most part, every stroke that Accolon gave he wounded sore Arthur, that it was marvel he stood, and always his blood fell from him fast. When Arthur beheld the ground so sore be-bled he was dismayed, and then he deemed treason that his sword was changed.” As the fight progresses and it seems inevitable that Accolon will kill Arthur, since Accolon is wielding the true Excalibur, the damsel who brought Arthur the false sword takes pity on him, and yet another enchantress intervenes, this time to save the king. She enchants Accolon, so the next time he strikes at Arthur, Excalibur falls from his hand and Arthur can recover his true sword. After confessing Morgan’s treason, Accolon dies.

As part of this plot, Morgan also plans to kill her husband, King Uriens of North Wales. She summons one of her women and tells her, “Go fetch me my lord’s sword, for I saw never better time to slay him than now.” When the maid reveals the plot to Urien’s son, Uwain, he intercepts Morgan, saying, “Ah, fiend, what wilt thou do? And thou were not my mother, with this sword I should smite off thy head… men saith that Merlin was begotten by a devil, but I may say an earthly devil bare me.” At this, Morgan pleads mercy, saying, “O fair son, Uwain, have mercy upon me, I was tempted with a devil, wherefore I cry thee mercy; I will never more do so.” Reassured by her promise, Uwain lets her go and keeps her plot secret.

Yet even in the Morte, Morgan is not one-dimensional. She is often betrayed by lovers, dismissed by men, and driven by a sense of injustice. Her villainy is not innate, and crucially, in the end, she is one of the women who returns to escort Arthur to Avalon. The final image of Morgan in Malory is not of a villain, but a mourner. Her purpose seems to circle back to the beginning: caretaker of a grievously wounded king.

Morgan the Protagonist
She has outlived her legend. Morgan le Fay, once the shadowy sorceress haunting the margins of Arthurian romance, has slipped the bonds of medieval narrative and reemerged in modern literature, film, and television as something more than an antagonist. She is a prism now, fractured and refracted across feminist retellings, dark fantasy epics, and gritty origin stories. No longer merely the scheming half-sister or the enchantress-in-the-tower, Morgan is reborn with every telling, and each rebirth says more about us than her.

In the Victorian era and the inception of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement between 1860 and 1900, some 140 oil paintings depicting scenes from the Arthurian legends appear, but only seven feature Morgan. If the medieval and Victorian Morgan embodied masculine anxieties—powerful, erotic, and unknowable—then the modern Morgan is the reclamation of that fear. She is what happens when we stop asking, Who did she betray? and start asking, Who betrayed her?

Nowhere is this clearer than in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s 1983 novel The Mists of Avalon, the watershed feminist retelling that centers Morgaine (Morgan’s reimagined name) as both narrator and priestess. Here, the once-maligned sorceress becomes the custodian of a vanishing goddess tradition, resisting the rising tide of patriarchal Christianity. Morgaine’s magic is not a threat to order. It is the memory of a different order altogether. Bradley’s Morgaine is not just a character; she is a liturgy for forgotten women’s voices. She feels deeply, mourns powerfully, and watches her world recede beneath the rising tide of Roman priests and Christian kings. For many readers, she was the first Morgan who was allowed to be the protagonist of her own myth.

Modern reimaginings continue to peel back layers of Morgan’s mythos. In television shows like the BBC’s 2008 Merlin, the character of Morgana Pendragon begins as a sympathetic, conflicted young woman, one whose powers are a burden. Her slide into villainy is not inevitable. Instead, it is slowly shaped by betrayal, isolation, and fear. We watch her fall, which is slow, human, and compelling. The message is clear. Morgan is not born evil; she is made to be.

Later retellings, like Netflix’s 2020 series Cursed, experiment even further. This Morgan, known simply as the Widow, wears black not just as a costume, but as armor. She speaks with the dead and walks between worlds, and, once again, her sorcery is entangled with trauma and marginalization. She is feared and misunderstood and yet essential to the world’s survival. This thread runs through all modern Morgans: the idea that exile is not failure but power waiting to be claimed.

And Morgan has, perhaps surprisingly, become a staple of young adult fiction. In books like Legendborn by Tracy Deonn or Half Sick of Shadows by Laura Sebastian, Morgan and her avatars emerge as women grappling with inherited legacies and rewritten fates. They carry magic not as a curse, but a choice. In these stories, Morgan le Fay becomes a cipher for young women facing their own transformations. Her powers—once the stuff of male nightmare—are now sources of agency, identity, and even justice.

Conclusion
From healer to sorceress to feminist icon, Morgan’s arc mirrors history: the Christianization of older myths, the demonization of female magic, and the eventual reclamation of feminine power. In Morgan, medieval literature encodes its contradictions about women’s power. In Malory’s retelling, she may even stand in for the many influential queens of the Wars of the Roses, women whose closeness to the throne and ability to wield power rendered them a threat. Morgan is not evil because she has magic. She is evil because she wields it without male sanction. Her power is seductive, but it is also sovereign and self-possessed. Her growing association with seduction and betrayal reveals medieval (and later, Victorian) discomfort with women’s autonomy and sexual power, and as the Arthurian cycle grew more courtly and moralistic, Morgan served as a convenient foil to the ideals of chivalry and feminine virtue. In the modern era, authors and creators have turned this relationship on its head, using Morgan to critique patriarchal power. Where Guinevere embodies the delicate ideal of constrained femininity, Morgan is its liberated counterpoint: a woman who claims her body, voice, and story.

What binds all these Morgans together is not uniformity but resistance. They resist the scripts handed to them: the seductress, the villainess, the madwoman. They are given space to be complicated, to be wounded, to be angry. And most importantly, they are given space to change. Whether sea-born, fairy-blooded, or goddess-disguised, Morgan le Fay has always been a shapeshifter. Modern reimaginings of her story are not simply about rescuing Morgan le Fay from villainy. They are about letting her become something new. They ask us to sit with her story without rushing to judgment or reaching for a moral. After all, it’s not Guinevere who survives the fall of Camelot; it’s Morgan le Fay.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more about Morgan le Fay and her history, be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Bluesky at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.