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Introduction: to Be a Shapeshifter 1 NOTES Introduction: To Be a Shapeshifter 1 . Sir Thomas Malory, Malory: Works , ed. Eugene Vinaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 ), 716. 2 . Carolyne Larrington, for example, points out that “Enchantresses . sometimes . support the aims of Arthurian chivalry, at other times they can be hostile and petty-minded.” See King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2007), 2. While Larrington’s book provides a review of many of Morgan’s literary appearances, my study focuses on close reading, attention to translation issues, and discussion of social concerns. In her review of Larrington’s King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition , Elizabeth Archibald laments that “it would have been interesting to hear more about the ways in which Arthurian enchantresses do or do not resemble their Classical precursors, or indeed Celtic ones, in their use of magic and in their challenges to male heroic norms.” See Elizabeth Archibald, “Magic School,” Times Literary Supplement (February 2, 2007), 9. My study answers this cri- tique by reexamining pivotal scenes in critical texts and by dismantling the archetypal approach that Larrington follows. 3 . Norris J. Lacy, ed., The Fortunes of King Arthur (New York: D. S. Brewer, 2005 ), 94–95. 4 . Helaine Newstead, Bran the Blessed in Arthurian Romance (New York: AMS Press, 1966 ), 149. 5 . Elisa Marie Narin, “‘Þat on . Þat oÞer’: Rhetorical Descriptio and Morgan La Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ,” Pacific Coast Philology 23 (1988): 60–66. Morgan only partly fits the description of a supernatural ‘enemy’ provided by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudri; see n. 13, below. 6 . Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 115. 7 . Raymond Thompson, “The First and Last Love: Morgan le Fay and Arthur,” in Arthurian Women , ed. Thelma S. Fenster (New York: Routledge, 2000 ), 340–41. 158 NOTES 8 . Elizabeth S. Sklar, “Thoroughly Modern Morgan: Morgan le Fey in Twentieth-Century Popular Arthuriana,” in Popular Arthurian Traditions , ed. Sally K. Slocum (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1992 ), 28–29. 9 . 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), 61. In multiple articles, Fries sees Morgan as “the oldest and most persistent example of the female-counter-hero.” She traces Morgan’s behaviors to mythological archetypes, concluding that her degeneration from a healing fay to a malevolent witch is the result of “the inability of male Arthurian authors to cope with the image of a woman of power in posi- tive terms” (61). 10 . Also known as the Madonna/Whore syndrome, this refers to the two ‘types’ of women that are in Christian thought represented by, respec- tively, the Virgin Mary and Eve. Mary, as her title indicates, is honored as virgin, while Eve is viewed as the cause of the Fall and has become emblematic of the sexual temptation of men. Culturally speaking, this dichotomy attempts to polarize women into ‘good’ (pure, demure, sub- servient) and ‘bad’ (promiscuous, wild, independent). 11 . Sarah Appleton Aguiar, The Bitch is Back: Wicked Women in Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 13. 12 . Aguiar, Bitch , 13–23. 13 . Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudri, Supernatural Enemies (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2001 ), viii. Italics mine. 14 . Aguiar, Bitch , 22. 15 . Aguiar, Bitch , 31. 16 . Stephen G. Nichols, The New Medievalism , ed. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 1. 17 . Nichols, New Medievalism . New Medievalism “may be best understood as arising initially from the need to interrogate the nature of medi- eval representation in its differences and continuities. We saw that the Middle Ages continually improvised new genres and modes of repre- sentation. In the Middle Ages, one senses a fascination with the potential for representation even more than with theories or modes of repre- sentation, something like an attempt to seek ways for extending the range of what was known of the material and the world beyond matter through alchemy, through science, through physical and psychical voy- ages, oneric narratives—dream visions—can be seen as an attempt to penetrate the boundaries of the known” (1–2). 18 . Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini , trans. and ed. Basil Clarke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973); Etienne de Rouen, “Draco Normannicus,” ed. R. Howlett, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I vol. 2, Rolls Series 85 (London, 1885 ); Gerald of NOTES 159 Wales, “De Instructione Principis,” in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, et al., vol. 4, Rolls Series (London, 1873); Gerald of Wales, “Speculum Ecclesiae,” in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, et al., vol. 4, Rolls Series (London, 1873). 19 . 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 Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952 ), 3–4. 20 . Norris J. Lacy, ed., The Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation (New York: Garland, 1993). 21 . Thomas Chestre, Sir Launfal , ed. A. J. Bliss (London: T. Nelson, 1960 ). 22 . 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). 23 . Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales , ed. Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995); Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. Cyril Edwards (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2004). 24 . Sir Thomas Malory, Malory: Works , ed. Eugene Vinaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 ). According to P. J. C. Field, the best candidate for the author of Le Morte Darthur is the Sir Thomas Malory from Newbold Revell, an alleged rapist, extortionist, and thief (among other crimes), whose uncle Sir Robert may have been one source for Malory’s treatment of chivalry. See chapter 3 . 25 . Geoffroi de Charny, The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny: Text, Context, and Translation , ed. and trans. Richard W. Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). 26 . Edmund Spenser, Faerie Queene , ed. Thomas P. Roche (New York: Penguin, 1978); John Pfordresher, A Variorum Edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973 ). 27 . Arthurian Literature by Women , ed. Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack (New York: Garland, 1999); John Blades, ed. John Keats: The Poems (New York: Palgrave, 2002 ). 28 . Arthurian Literature by Women, ed. Lupack and Lupack. 29 . Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 ); Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon (New York: Del Rey, 1982 ); J. Robert King, Le Morte D’Avalon (New York: Tor, 2003 ); Nancy Springer, I Am Morgan le Fay: A Tale from Camelot (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001 ). 30 . A s m a ny author s have poi nted out, the def i n it ion of ‘ f a nt a sy,’ pa r t icu la rly in relation to the term ‘genre,’ is nearly impossible to pin down. For the purpose of this work I follow Rosemary Jackson’s assertion that while “Liter a r y f a nt a sie s h ave appea red to be f ree f rom m a ny of t he convent ion s and restraints of more realistic texts,” “Fantasy is not to do with invent- ing another non-human world: it is not transcendental. It has to do with 160 NOTES inverting elements of this world . to produce something . apparently ‘new’, absolutely ‘other’ and ‘different’. Such violation of dominant assumptions threatens to subvert (overturn, upset, undermine) rules and conventions taken to be normative.” Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1995), 1–14. Retrieved from Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id =k2aboboVP5MC& printsec=frontcover&dq=rosemary+jackson+fantasy&source =bl&ots =IUq7JiTUYb&sig=JoXb0z18RauA3EeD9R1Bt0EXJcE&hl=en&sa =X&ei=xnE-UPK1MIz68QSBtYGoBw&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v= onepage&q=rosemary%20jackson%20fantasy&f=false, accessed June 14, 2012. 1 For the Healing of His Wounds? The Seeds of Ambiguity in Latin Sources 1 . For a discussion of some of the chansons de geste not treated here, which also tend to cast Morgan in a positive light in relation to knighthood, see Carolyne Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2007), 92–96. 2 . Although outside the scope of this project, a related character in medieval literature who also exhibits paradoxical qualities is Melusine, Morgan’s lamia-like, half-serpent and half-human niece, in Jean d’Arras’s Roman de Mélusine (1393). See Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France , eds. Donald and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996 ). 3 . Norris J. Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe, The Arthurian Handbook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988 ), 58. 4 . Raymond H. Thompson, “Morgan le Fay,” in The Arthurian Encyclopedia , ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986 ). 5 . 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), 69. 6 . Carolyne Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2007), 8, 18–19. 7 . For one example, see Linda Gowans, Cei and the Arthurian Legend (Cambridge, UK: D.
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