Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-184.88.25.24-20131112235645/@comment-87.2.236.141-20200801112219

I personally think that Morgana is older than Arthur: just because someone loves someone else deeply, doesn’t mean they will not cheat. We know that Uther is a very emotional person, maybe the fact that Ygraine could not naturally conceive a son caused him pain, and he went to the wife of one of his best friends for confort, event that resulted in the birth of Morgana; to find out if someone can’t conceive, without modern technology, usually consists in years and years of trying and trying, something that can be very frustrating and causes a lot of and distress. Also Uther could not have had intercourse with a magic user during the purge (it is assumed that Morgana’s and Morgause’s magic comes from their mother), that just doesn’t make sense, and Morgana never speaks of her mother in the series, so I would assume that she never knew her, probably because she was killed during the purge. Morgause probably wasn’t smuggled outside Camelot when she was an infant, but when she was slightly older, probably 5 or 6, because she said that she had known Ygraine.

Merlin is probably around 17-18 years old when arthur is 20: Arthur was born and the purge started, then at the end of the purge more or less Balinor summons Kilgharrah to make peace and is captured (it is stated at the beginning of the series that it gas been 20 years from the capture of the great dragon); Balinor flees to Ealdor where Uther can’t get because it’s outside Camelot’s borders, and meets Hunith there, begins a life and probably after a couple of months starts to have a relationship with her (he said he had a life there) then Hunith gets pregnant but Balinor escapes before Merlin is born, probably because he was afraid for Hunith, so that couldn’t have been after a lot of time he was in Ealdor. So, to summorize: 1 year of the purge + let’s say 5 months to conceive Merlin + 9 months of pregnancy = Merlin is at least 2 years younger than Arthur, if not more, probably 3 years.

Also there is to say that during the middle ages there was no concept of age, there was the celebration of the birthday but mostly for kings, peasants had other things in mind than counting how many seasons had passed since the were born, they did not have calendars in their homes like we do; someone could more or less know their age in their younger years, but after they were perceived as adults in society that was not important anymore. I swear I am not making this up, my middle ages professor at university said this, people didn’t even know at what age Charlemagne died, just more or less what decade of his life, because it did not matter at the time. So, I would assume that when in the script it is said that “morgana was similar in age to merlin”, that doesn’t state that she must be necessarily younger than Arthur, just that she was not like 7 years older, or much younger, like 11.