Fata Morgana

The first text to name her is Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, written around 1150, not the Historia Regum Britanniae of 1136: that one says Arthur was carried to the isle of Avalon to be healed, but it does not say who healed him there. In the Vita, Morgen is the first of nine sisters who govern the Insula Pomorum, the island of apples. She knows herbs, changes shape and flies, and it is she who receives the wounded king after the battle of Camlann.

Nor is she the daughter of any «King Pendragon» or the sister of Uther, as is often repeated: were that so she would be Arthur's aunt and not his sister. Later tradition makes her the daughter of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, and of Igraine, so that she is Arthur's half-sister on their mother's side.

What brings her to the Mediterranean are the Normans. Between 1061 and 1091 they conquered Sicily and Calabria, and the Matter of Britain travelled with them, taking root on the island more firmly than anywhere else in southern Europe. There the fairy stayed and changed trade: she stopped healing kings and set about raising cities of air over the water that separates Messina from Reggio. Ludovico Ariosto still treats her as a character in Orlando furioso (1532), where Morgana is sister to the fairies Alcina and Logistilla.

What is seen from the Calabrian shore is not a figure but an architecture. Along the line of the water there appear walls, towers, colonnades and sometimes whole fleets, stacked in bands that alternate upright and inverted, stretching and collapsing within minutes. On the Sicilian coast opposite there is nothing of the kind: what is being looked at is that same coast, or the empty sea, deformed by the air.

The mechanism is an atmospheric duct. When a layer of warm air settles over a colder one, light passing through them bends instead of running straight; the eye reads it as though it had arrived in a straight line and places the image where it is not, spread over several superimposed tiers. Hence the towers: they are a stretch of coast pulled upward and repeated. The strait, narrow and deep between two landmasses that warm at different rates, is one of the places in the world where that condition occurs most often.

The first to describe it methodically was Antonio Minasi, a Dominican born at Scilla on the Calabrian shore, who observed it from the friary at Reggio. His Dissertazione prima sopra un fenomeno volgarmente detto Fata Morgana, printed at Rome in 1773, is the first monograph devoted to the phenomenon: it treats it already as a question of optics and still keeps in its title the name the people had given it.

In the end the name beat the character. «Fata morgana» ceased to denote a fairy and came to denote a class of mirage, and in that trade it entered untranslated into the technical vocabulary of half of Europe, from Italian to Russian. Whoever uses the term today is naming, without knowing it, Arthur's half-sister.

It is worth saying too what she is not, because she is confused with two things. She is not the sorceress who conspires with Mordred and steals the scabbard of Excalibur: that is Morgan le Fay as fixed by the Vulgate Cycle and Thomas Malory, the same figure in her British branch, not the Sicilian one. And she is not a death omen: she foretells none. What she does is show land where there is none, and whoever is lost is lost for following her, not because it was written that he would be. It is the same difference that separates the marsh light from the banshee weeping at the door.