Morgan is My Name - a medieval sorceress with modern resonance

Morgan is My Name 

by Sophie Keetch

 It’s a long time since a book carried me back to that time of courtly love and legend with such insistent grace. It’s a lean book, not a thousand-page epic, and yet in my mind’s cinema, drawing on all the Arthurian books and movies indexed through the decades since my first Disney Arthur, it’s a tale far greater than the economical, episodic text that pins it to the page.

One great truth is stated, plain as day, in the respect of the falcon Jezebel, a peregrine belonging to Morgan’s father. “Every return to the glove is a courtesy, not a right,” said young Morgan, just before her father rode away to try to draw Uther Pendragon from his woman and his children. The hawk is a recurring image and so are candles, signifying respectively freedom and the light of knowledge, both forbidden to young Morgan, princess of Cornwall, from the moment of her father’s death at the hands of Uther Pendragon.

This is a book about a girl growing up like any other girl of her era and high position, with only hints of the power she will come to wield, and the force of her hatred for Uther Pendragon. She is intimately relatable to modern girls, and the sidelights on her mother’s life and choices as the reluctant consort of Uther are relatable for older readers. There’s familiar territory for the Arthurian legends and a worthy courtly romance that makes the heart beat faster, that yearns for knights and dancing and candlelight and stolen kisses and secret vows of love and fidelity. For all the fire that burns in her blood for one parfait knight, this Morgan relies on other women in ways and depths that she, and they, could never rely on men—and indeed still can’t. It’s a story of sisterhood for survival in a time when men held all the outward cards. Again, very relatable for modern women.  The eruption of Uther into the narrative each time Morgan finds a measure of peace is a storm that reshapes her life and sends it hurtling off in a new direction.

And yet, because we readers raised on Arthurian legend know her doom (or think we do) we cannot but feel the foreboding that looms just over the crest of the hill. We want to change her ending. We hope that this author, with her insights into this prickly but relatable girl, can craft for her an ending that is not, this time, a doom for the ages. We hold our breath. As each turning of the page draws us closer to finding out what chaos Uther’s next thunderbolt will unleash - like a burly Zeus on horseback, his armour rusting in the Cornish rains - we both yearn for and fear the day when Morgan truly comes into her power. 

For then her doom will be truly set. 

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