by Kris@WLP » Sat Dec 08, 2007 4:57 pm
There's something much more important you're missing: most of the Arthurian legends that were -written down- were written by priests and monks, the most notable being Geoffrey of Monmouth.
At the time monks didn't write anything without tacking on morality lessons, whether or not they fit. It wasn't just Germanic peoples that subjugated women- and let's recall that the English who adopted the Arthur legends as their own were Germanic themselves, Angles, Saxons, Danes and Normans. The Catholic Church was also extremely hot on keeping women in their place. Any and all stories that involved strong women had to be converted to show that being a strong, independent woman was sinful- or else that those women were sinful for other reasons.
Hence Morgan and Morgause became witches, and Guinevere an adultress. Mordred was pretty much invented by the monks to signify how Arthur's reign collapsed due to his own sins- Mordred, remember, is both Arthur's son and nephew, by either Morgan or Morgause depending on the source. Even the Ladies of the Lake- first Vivian and then Nimue- became wicked enchantresses, each with their own agenda. Femininity itself was regarded as innately sinful, to be controlled, mistrusted, and guarded against.
The Grail Quests, Tristram and Isolde, and numerous other legends- including possibly Marrok himself, since there's an identical legend of a werewolf knight in southern France- were slapped into the Arthurian mythos in an ongoing attempt to make Arthur an example of how an attempt at noble goals and holy ideals collapsed due to the sinful nature of man.
Remember: virtually all history from the medieval period was written not by the victor, but by the priest- who was even more biased than the victor would have been.