Matrona, Morgana and Welsh Mermaids
R
S Loomis,
the author of numerous scholarly works on the Arthurian legends, refers
to the
fragmentation of identities of the river goddess Matrona.
The River Marne in France is named after her and she has a more
widespread identity as, for instance, Modron in Britain, mother or the
god Mabon (<Maponus).
Loomis
identifies the Arthurian character Morgan La Fée as the
literary manifestation
of a number of folklore ‘morgans’ descended from Matrona who
often appear as mermaids or other water spirits, particularly in West
Wales:
“She
has
acquired not only the attributes and activities of Macha, the Morrigan
and
Matrona, but also the mythic heritage of other Celtic deities. She is a
female
pantheon in miniature.
She
was a sort
of naiad or nereid, haunting springs, rivers, fords, lakes, and seas,
or
dwelling beneath their surfaces; she was a foster-mother of heroes, who
took
them in their infancy, trained them for high adventure, and watched
over them
in peril; she
showered wealth on her
favourites; she sometimes appeared in a group of three fays; she
foretold the
future; she was both a beneficent and a sinister power; she lay in wait
for
mortals, offering them her love; she possessed a very swift and
powerful horse.” Wales
and the Arthurian Legend (Cardiff,
1956) pp.127-128
Continuing
the
discussion, Loomis cites a number of other links between this multiple
goddess
and the ‘Matres’, the ‘Parcae’
and the ‘Lamiae’, the latter characterised by
an anonymous Elizabethan writer as “ladies of the fayry,
whyche dooe allure
yong men to company carnally with theym”. Loomis concludes
that “The divergent
lines of Goidelic and Brythonic mythology seem to have converged to
produce the
composite legend of Morgain la Déesse.”