Morgan le Fay

The poem presents Morgan le Fay through two registers that do not resolve into a single portrait. In the physical descriptions of Part II, she is rendered with unflinching detail: "yellow" and "rough and wrinkled," her forehead "wrapped in silk with many folds, worked with knots, so that naught of her was seen save her black brows, her eyes, her nose, and her lips, and those were bleared, and ill to look upon" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Part II). She is "short and broad, and thickly made -- far fairer to behold was she whom she led by the hand" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Part II). Yet in the revelation scene, she is identified as "Morgain the goddess," and "there is none so haughty but she can bring him" low (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Part IV).

The source itself flags an internal discrepancy. A scholarly note observes that "it is curious that Morgain should here be represented as extremely old, while Arthur is still in his first youth. There is evidently a discrepancy or misunderstanding of the source here" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Part IV). The poem also identifies the enmity between Morgan and Guinevere as "no invention of the author, but is found in the Merlin, probably the earliest of the Arthurian prose romances" (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Part IV).