French Morgain
Cross-linguistic Arthurian entity reflecting the French-Welsh transmission of Morgan le Fay's name and gender.
French Morgain is an entity attested across Le Morte d'Arthur and Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx, representing the intersection of French and Welsh Arthurian traditions around the figure of Morgan le Fay. The entity appears in 4 citations across 2 sources.
Le Morte d'Arthur contributes 3 citations. In the Preface of William Caxton, the text notes that "many noble volumes be made of him and of his noble knights in French" that are "not had in our maternal tongue" (Le Morte d'Arthur, Preface), and that Arthurian traditions exist "in Welsh be many and also in French, and some in English but nowhere nigh all" (Le Morte d'Arthur, Preface). A third citation from Book XX references "the French book" as a source authority: Launcelot "rode his way with the queen, as the French book saith, unto Joyous Gard" (Le Morte d'Arthur, Book XX, Chapter VIII).
Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx provides a critical linguistic observation: the name Morgan "is meant as the Welsh equivalent of the French Morgain le Fay or Morgan la Fee," but the compiler of the story of Geraint and Enid "had practically no choice but to treat the person called Morgan as a man, whether that was or was not the sex in the original texts on which he was drawing" (Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx, Volume I, Chapter VI). This passage reveals how the transmission of Arthurian names between French and Welsh could alter the gender of characters, since the Welsh form Morgan is grammatically masculine.
Appears in: Beings, Cross-Source Entities, Entities in Le Morte d'Arthur, Celtic Tradition