The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

One of the things that always bothers me is when some blogger will insinuate a connection between the Morrigan and Morgan Le Fey from the knights of the round table stories.  

 
I've always found the Arthurian legend a type of fairytale. And fairytales are connected in some way to myths about the gods, heroes, sagas,ect.

As for Morgan le Fay, she was a fairy. according to the older studies of her name. So many want to make links when they're probably isn't any like that. The legends are far too complex because they're ancient.

The Arthur stories have been proven to be vague with history but sits in myth really well for the mainstream.

While I agree that the people conflating the Morrigan and Morgan le Fey usually have lousy evidence for doing so, some of the earliest sources we have about Arthur are actually very Celtic (mostly Welsh, though: he shows up in the Mabinogion. That said, the Tristan and Iseult legends, which also usually reference Arthur, is about Ireland and Cornwall.)

I did a long explanation of the pre-Malory Arthurian sources in a post on this forum a couple of years ago that lays out the rough history and that other people have found useful.

(I was a Medieval/Renaissance Studies major in college, and while it's been a fair while since then, it did include an entire course on the Arthurian Legends, plus reading a bunch of other relevant material in other courses, and I kept many of my books from that.)

 
Agreed! There is actually quite a wealth of scholarship in this area- I took classes on it myself in university.

A good blog post on the issue the OP mentioned is this one: http://bansheearts.com/disambiguating-1morgan-le-fay/

Of course I dont know how much overlap there was between the two groups.  How seperate where they?  Im aware they had different languege and mythologies and distinct cultures.

 
One challenge is that we don't have a lot of written material. The British Isles are, comparatively, not terribly big geographically (though not necessarily easy to move around in, sometimes). And, of course, the modern conceptions of "Welsh" and "Irish" and so on are partly modern (or at least 'more modern than when we're talking about with myths') conceptions.

As I noted, the Tristan and Iseult legend takes place both in Ireland and Cornwall with an implication of ships going between not being an unusual thing. And it's sort of silly to assume they were just ignoring Wales entirely given it's on the same coast.

On the other hand, it's really hard to date things from a legend that was retold many times before anyone wrote it down, so your question would probably be easier to answer if you were looking at specific kinds of connections, or specific places (where you could then look at things like archaeological evidence to support interactions.) Having a specific time period also helps a lot, since obviously, interactions change over time (and especially as technology improves the ability to sail in certain ways, or whatever.)

Of course I dont know how much overlap there was between the two groups.  How seperate where they?  Im aware they had different languege and mythologies and distinct cultures.

 
Disclaimer: I have quite a foggy head at the moment and may be misremembering some details, apologies if so, however I think I'm more or less correct here:

On the language front, Irish and Welsh both (in very simple terms) grew out of an earlier language. There are (unless I'm forgetting one) six 'surviving Celtic languages/cultures' in modern times - Irish, Welsh, Gaelic (Scottish Gaelic), Cornish, Manx and Breton. (Manx is from the Isle of Man, Breton is from the Brittany region of France). They all still have at least a few people who speak them (Cornish and Manx have, IIRC, the smallest number of actual native speakers, i.e. people who spoke it from childhood as a first language, or bilingually) and have at least to some extent an ongoing culture that has links to the language (which doesn't necessarily mean - in fact, probably doesn't - surviving pre-Christian practices - the Celts weren't really a religious or even ethnic group, mostly they had a shared, more or less, language, and some similar cultural practices.)

Anyway, they fall into two groups - "P Celtic" or "Brythonic" languages - Welsh, Cornish and Breton - and "Q Celtic" or "Goidelic" languages - Irish, Gaelic and Manx. Essentially this means that a speaker of Breton would probably have a decent chance of making themselves understood to a speaker of Welsh, but a much harder time trying to converse with a speaker of Irish. (It's also worth noting that Welsh has kind of split into two main varieties, with a fairly big difference between North and South Welsh (and then Mid Welsh is kind of a mishmash of the two) but for whatever reason these are classed as dialects of the same language rather than distinct languages, even though they are, to my eye, about as similar/distinct as, say, Irish is from Gaelic...)

I won't go on much longer, but as I understand it, Gaelic (as in, the Celtic language now spoken in some parts of Scotland) actually moved over relatively late, from Ireland. I'm a little hazy on what the local language of non-English speakers was before that, Pictish, I suppose? Cornwall is reasonably close to Wales by boat, and I think that Breton may have transfered to Brittany from Cornwall/Wales at some point (before that the local language would have been Gaulish, or something to that effect). So, basically there's yer sort of Southwest Britain language which probably is what evolved into Cornish/Welsh/Breton, and then yer Ireland language which moved over to Scotland and presumably also the Isle of Man.

It might be worth looking at info on Celtic Studies - either a formal course if that's available in your area, or in terms of a search term for book lists that aren't simply neopagan books. This looks like a decent 'starter kit' - I'm kinda rusty (or at least, a lot of what I studied more formally was a fair while ago and is probably outdated, though I've read up on the language stuff fairly recently and I think I'm pretty much correct there, like I say) and might well check out the books on it myself: http://www.digitalmedievalist.com/reading-lists/starter-kit/