It’s easy to forget you live near a coastline in Anchorage. Inland channels fill to shallow depths by centuries-ground glacial silt, so fine it’s called glacial flour. Made from slow deep time, tops of mountains drained into the sea over eons.
As a result, these inlets experience extreme tides, the push and pull of the Moon magnified by a narrow channel and shallow depth. Tutl’uh (Turnagain Arm) is one of the relatively few places in North America where you can witness a bore tide, rushing in one unified wave to fill the shallow channel. As if the Moon cast a tidal spell and opened an invisible lock. Watching the winter sea ice move back and forth can be mesmerizing.
These shallow inlets are also where you can frequently see a fata morgana, mirages of distant mountains that seem to shimmer high above the earth. A stratigraphy of cool and warm air bending the light. It’s a more common occurrence in lands that rarely relinquish a love of cold temperatures. American and European sailors were often fooled by these mirages, believing they had found a ‘new’ land unmarked on maps, raising funds and gathering crews for expeditions North, to finally realize it was a fata morgana. Indigenous inhabitants of those lands had tried to tell them that mountains don’t exist in the sky, but of course, the ‘explorers’ were convinced they knew better.
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Fata morgana is the Italian name for Morgan le Fay—she of sorcery and deception in Arthurian legends. The name, in that sense, is apt, because Morgan le Fay lived in a liminal realm, behind a veil of mist and fog on the Isle of Avalon. In a 12th-century text, the Vita Merlini, or Life of Merlin, Avalon is described as:
The island of apples, which is called the Fortunate
island has its name because it produces all things
for itself. There is no work for the farmers in
plowing the fields, all cultivation is absent except
for what nature manages by herself.
When you see the bent light of a fata morgana, it’s easy to imagine that you might be seeing the veil lifted to that otherworldly Isle of Fortune. At the least, it never fails to cause my mind to wander into myth.
The origins of Morgan le Fay are also where light has been bent into mirage. She is thought to have origins in the myths of Celtic traditions, such as the Morrigan—Irish guardian and phantom queen of battle and prophecy. Or the Breton mari-morgan, sea nymphs akin to sirens. More likely there is a true link to the name Modron, a goddess of ancient Gaul and a divine figure in Welsh myth. There are glimmers of this shape when Morgan le Fay first appears in a written text. In Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, she is described as the high queen on the Isle of Avalon, a healer, wise woman, and a great mathematician, who taught astronomy to her nine sisters. Perhaps she also knew how to speak to Moon, predicting the timing of the tides.
In 2008,1 a 14th-century manuscript of astronomical calculations and lunar tables was found to include several marginal notes in it, primarily in Latin. But one note in particular drew attention—it was written in vernacular English.
Vernacular, meaning the language of a place, of the home. In many histories it was women who wrote and created vernacular scripts, not having access to learn the formalities of Latin or the stylized scripts of aristocracy and priesthood. Wrting in the language of place, of home. Julian of Norwich, 14th-century Anchorite and wise mystic, is believed to have written the first book in vernacular English, for example. So the inclusion of a vernacular gloss at this time, in an otherwise Latin manuscript, was a bit unusual.
But perhaps more unusual is that this note written beneath medieval lunar tables is the voice of a woman—Morgan le Fay. It’s one of the very few Arthurian texts where Morgan speaks in her own voice, the only text that claims to be composed or written by Morgan herself. It 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; to our royal bachelor Pomelyn, guardian of the Perilous Point: Greetings.2
A fata morgana of a text: Morgan le Fay, conjured to assert her own voice, shimmering just beyond a mainland of text, beneath tables with an accounting of the Moon.
The 12th-century Morgan le Fay is known for her skill in mathematics and the ability to shape-shift. “When she wishes, she glides out of the air onto your lands.” Her work is a form of art, compared to the skill of Daedalus, he of the wings and wayward son. As she accompanies a mortally wounded Arthur to her secluded, magic Isle of Avalon at the end of the story, her power of healing is the best hope for the return of Arthur to health, and thus, the best hope for a future Britain. Morgan le Fay was not the witchy sorceress of black magic and jealous ambition that she had become by the time Thomas Mallory wrote some of the most famous Arthurian texts in the 15th century.3
Later texts eroded the image of Morgan le Fay as a healer and wise woman into a woman whose ambition, jealousy, and knowledge of dark arts threatened men’s power. It’s not a coincidence that this is the case as print proliferated in the early modern period. It was also a time when any hint of a woman’s knowledge of healing, medicine, or scholarship came under the suspicion of witchcraft.
And so Morgan le Fay’s origins become further clouded, vanishing into history. She becomes a jilted lover of Lancelot, wildly jealous of Guinevere, foil to all of Arthur’s round table dreams. Far from her healing and knowledge of a magical, shimmering world, Morgan le Fay was written into a trope of woman as temptress, manipulator, and witch. A woman whose learning and ambition are the source of her doom, denied power and agency by those who wrote the stories. A woman who must be kept anchored to earth—because a woman with knowledge, ruler of a peaceful Isle of Fortune, is too dangerous to let fly at will in the reasoned reality of this world.
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In Ptolemaic astronomy, the Moon is thought to divide the heavens. Above the Moon, the universe is a stable, calm realm, reflecting order and perfection. Below the Moon, governed by Fortune, is a transitory realm—a world of wild imagination, of roiling waves, perched on a cliff’s edge. A medieval Latin proverb hints at this when it claims: the course of fortune varies according to the moon.
Perhaps the writer of the note in Morgan le Fay’s voice, set below lunar tables, was also hoping to calculate when the course of fortune might shift in this changeable realm beneath the Moon. A land of fata morgana, where what appears real can just as easily be a truth overlain with bent, broken light. A place that would see a witch or demon in place of a woman who was once a guardian, healer, and protector of a sacred, peaceful land.
How much the world wants to anchor those who can lift the veil and show that what we call reality is a mirage—a world desperate to keep the tide from turning.
Twomey, Michael. 2008. “‘Morgan le Fay, Empress of Wilderness’: A newly Recovered Arthurian Text in London, BL Royal 12.C.IX.” in Archibald, Elizabeth and David F. Johnson (eds). Arthurian Literature XXV. Boydell & Brewer.
Ibid, p. 69.
Not surprising, perhaps, from a man who may have been imprisoned for murder, theft, and rape—his works of courtly love an altogether different type of mirage.
Omg this is so nuanced and beautiful. Thank you Freya for introducing me to Morgan le Fay and world of arthurian legends. I am going to be so obsessed with this in my free time!
This was incredible, just wow. May we continue to break the chains of these anchors. Incredible writing, Freya!