The Enemy Who Carries Him to Avalon

Malory's Le Morte Darthur gives Morgan le Fay a long history of open hostility toward Arthur's court across the body of the text: she steals Excalibur's protective scabbard and gives it away, conspires with other queens against Arthur and Guinevere, and works repeatedly to expose and destroy Lancelot, motivated in various episodes by resentment, thwarted desire or simple malice. Against that record, the ending Malory gives her is genuinely striking. As Arthur lies dying after Camlann, it is Morgan, alongside a company of other queens, who arrives by barge to carry him away to Avalon, an act that restores, without any explanation or reconciliation scene, something very close to the purely healing role Geoffrey of Monmouth first gave her three centuries earlier in the Vita Merlini. Malory offers no account of how or why the enemy of so much of the story becomes, at its very end, the one who might save the king she spent so long working against, and later writers and readers have filled that silence with everything from genuine reconciliation to a colder reading in which Morgan's presence at the end is ambiguous rather than redemptive, an enchantress fulfilling an old otherworldly duty to carry a wounded king to Avalon rather than a sister making peace with her brother.