Morgan le Fay is remembered as the sorceress who tried to murder King Arthur with poisoned cloaks and stolen swords, yet she is also the weeping sister who carries him to Avalon in his final moments. This episode traces her shifting biography across centuries of medieval literature, starting with Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th-century Vita Merlini, where she is a divine healer, mathematician, astronomer, and shape-shifter ruling the Isle of Apples as chief of nine magical sisters, and following her transformation into the traumatized human daughter of Igraine in the 13th-century French prose cycles.

The conversation unpacks the Celtic and classical roots of her name and powers, the political marriage to King Urien, the affair exposed by Guinevere that sparks her rage, and her manipulation of Merlin to acquire dark magic. It then walks through  ...