It’s just a request: I can easily understand people shipping Morgana and Arthur in the show because Katie McGrath and Bradley James are a very attractive young actors and since Merlin is an Alternative Version of the Arthurian legend, you can ship any characters you want, for it’s “open bar”. But I just wish to correct the widespread but utterly wrong belief that Morgana was a good character or that she ends up being a good one or that she saves Arthur in the end of the actual legend or even that they were in love. In literature she’s the archetype of the beautiful, powerful, heartless,cold and ambitious Vamp or “femme fatale” capable of manipulating men to get what she wants, she hates her brother for he’s an obstacle to her ambitions and she enchanted him and seduced him to her bed in order to have a child (an heir); while he ignored that she’s his sister. He never loved her and she never saved him but did all she could to see him dead. Good Morgana appears only in 1979 in an ALTERNATIVE version of the Arthurian legend called “The Mists of Avalon” a series of novels in which Merlin is the immoral and manipulative character while Morgana is the good one. It was written by Marion Eleanor Zimmer a wonderful author and a great feminist; she wanted to give “The good part” to a traditionally mistreated female character and made her more human by creating an incestuous, sweet and harrowing love story in which the witch saved her beloved brother. You can love Armor to your hearts’ content (as I do) but please, don’t refer to their “love story” as a part of the actual Arthurian legend, thanks.
For the record, the first time Morgan le Fay was mentioned by name in Vita Merlini, which was written in 1150, she was not Arthur’s sister, nor was she his enemy. She was a healer from the Isle of Avalon, where Arthur was taken to be healed, as mentioned in Historia Regum Britanniae. She was not his sister until Étienne de Rouen’s Draco Normannicus in 1169, which was quickly followed by the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. She was on good terms with Arthur until The Post-Vulgate Cycle. Her quarrel was with Guinevere in the beginning rather than Arthur, at that. She was also not traditionally Mordred’s mother - that was Morgause.
I don’t think it’s really fair to say that the belief that she was a good character was “utterly wrong,” or to declare that she is a “the archetype of the beautiful, powerful, heartless,cold and ambitious Vamp or “femme fatale” capable of manipulating men to get what she wants,” or that “she hates her brother for he’s an obstacle to her ambitions and she enchanted him and seduced him to her bed in order to have a child (an heir); while he ignored that she’s his sister” without actually taking the legends into account.
No, they were not lovers to begin with - that was a later addition by other authors. It is not said that Morgan le Fay healed Arthur, but Geoffrey of Monmouth does imply it with Historia Regum Britanniae and Vita Merlini. It is, however, absolutely unfair to say that “Good Morgana appears only in 1979,” since that is incorrect. Yes, she is commonly seen as an evil sorceress now, but that is what she has been made into over time, not who she originally was.
