Morgan le Fay and the stolen scabbard
Arthur's sister arranges for him to fight her lover — with his own sword in the wrong hands.
Morgan le Fay wants her brother dead and her lover Accolon on the throne. Her method is precise and it depends on knowing what Merlin told Arthur years earlier: that the scabbard of Excalibur is worth more than the sword, because whoever wears it will lose no blood however badly he is wounded.
She takes Excalibur and its scabbard, gives both to Accolon, and has a counterfeit sword made that looks exactly like it. Then she arranges, by enchantment, for the two men to be brought to a combat neither understands, in armour that hides their faces.
The fight is horrible. Arthur strikes and his sword will not cut. Accolon strikes and Arthur bleeds from every blow, while Accolon takes no hurt at all. Arthur, cut to pieces and losing blood steadily, works out only that his sword is not his sword.
Nimue, watching, sees that the king will die otherwise, and uses her craft to make Excalibur fall from Accolon's hand. Arthur takes it up, recognises it, gets the scabbard back, and beats him. Dying, Accolon tells him everything.
Then comes the part that matters for the whole rest of the book. Morgan, hearing that Accolon is dead, goes to where Arthur lies sleeping, takes the scabbard, rides for a day, and when she sees pursuit coming, throws it into the deepest water she can find. It is never recovered.
Seventeen books later, at Camlann, Arthur takes a wound from his son's hand. There is no scabbard. He bleeds, and dies of it.
A plot that fails still succeeds. Arthur survives the day and loses the thing that would have saved him at the end, and neither he nor the reader is told that this is what has just happened.
In the sources
- MaloryEnglish · c. 1415–1471
the protection removed, seventeen books early
The trap fails, and the loss it causes is permanent: the one object that would have kept Arthur from bleeding to death is at the bottom of a lake from Book IV onward.
“he threw the sword as far into the water as he might; and there came an arm and an hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water”
Le Morte d'Arthur, XXI.v · read in place - GeoffreyChronicle · c. 1100–1155
a healer, not an enemy
Geoffrey's Morgen is the chief of the nine sisters of Avalon and skilled in healing, and it is to her the wounded Arthur is carried. There is no enmity at all.
“the renowned King Arthur himself was wounded deadly, and was borne thence unto the island of Avalon for the healing of his wounds”
The History of the Kings of Britain, Bk XI, ch. II - The Gawain RomancesEnglish · late 14th–15th c.
the unseen author of the plot
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the entire test is revealed at the end to have been Morgan's design, arranged to frighten Guinevere — and she does not appear in a single scene of it.
“For quat gome so is gorde with þis grene lace, While he hit hade hemely halched aboute, þer is no haþel vnder heuen to-hewe hym þat my3t”
Syr Gawayn and the Grene Kny3t, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Geoffrey's Morgen heals Arthur. Malory's Morgan spends the book trying to kill him — and is in the barge that carries him to be healed.