Who Is Mordred

Who is Mordred? Is he a victim or a villain? Is he evil or is he the one who kills evil?

He is a very mysterious character to me. Does he do what he does because of his circumstances or because he is born evil? As I read our books so many questions arise.

He also reminds me of so many people I’ve met, and characters from other literature and movies. In the next few pages I will try to answer these questions and explain what I see in Mordred.

The first readings I did were in Springer’s “I am Mordred”. Here we have a happy boy, Tad, who mysteriously arrives to his fishermother and just as abruptly is taken away.

We learn of his noble blood, which is no gift to him. He is taken to live where he is not wanted, only feared and despised. We are also told of the mark behind his ear. That intrigued me. As I read this book I was reminded of a homeless man I knew. He was feared by most people and had no real home. I had hired him to do newspapers as a

Circulation Manager in CT. His name was John. I often wondered what had happened to him in his life that he chose to live as he did. He made enough money to live in some sort of shelter, but wouldn’t. Then one day it all made sense. I had met him on the beach to pay him. It was very windy and his sleeve blew up his arm. There it was – marks up his arm from a Nazi camp. Neither of us said a word but our eyes locked and he smiled as if to say it was alright. I did find out what he did with his money. He went the hospital in

New London every Christmas and brought the children toys. As Mordred goes on his quest he is thinking “To love the sea, I knew, was to love my enemy. When I was a baby, the sea had taken me away from my kinfolk and my mother, starved me, sprayed salt on my tender naked skin, tried to freeze me in its chill embrace, tried to kill me. To love the sea was to love what I ought to hate.”(99) I see such parallels in these two men. Both were lucky to have survived, both were so very alone, yet Mordred is going on a quest to save himself and Arthur; and John was giving his money to make children happy, as perhaps he once was. Both are at home on the sea.

In Thomson’s “The Dragon’s Son” we have quite a different portrayal of Mordred, here he is Medraud. The most striking difference is that in this version his mother is

Morgan, and he has a brother. His mother tells him a story of twin brothers, “the dark brother who wandered the shore, crying for the love of the sea. On the edge of the surf, in the white foam, in the place that is neither land nor water, he was killed by his uncle’s spear and his blood flowed into the waves.”(114) This seems to foretell his life. Arthur comes to claim his oldest son to be heir, but Morgan lies and does not send Medraud, though he is the rightful heir. He is not sent to foster homes here but lives with his mother until he eventually goes to Camelot. He ends up getting his revenge and having Arthur call him son and name his unborn child to be the heir. He becomes filled with hate.

Nimue says,” He was muddy, bloodstained, stumbling with exhaustion. But when he looked up, away from me, out over an empty field, his face filled with hatred alight with joy. I thought he would murder like a saint prays, and with the same hope of blessing.”(40) This brings to mind something I read on a website – discussing Mordred as

Arthur’s shadow. Was Mordred evil or was he a manifestation of Arthur’s evil? In other words does Mordred represent or reflect Arthur’s evil side? They have so much in common in a way. Both are king’s sons but don’t know it as children. Arthur gains his kingdom, but so does Mordred in the end through his child. Both do evil things and claim to do them for a justified reason. Some of the things I’ve stumbled upon in surfing websites say that in other versions Mordred, not Lancelot, is the one who has the affair with Guinevere. It gets so confusing, but the premise is always the same. I like this theory of “The Shadow”, it is plausible.

One other point that I keep wondering about is the prophecy of Merlin about Mordred.

Merlin seems to start out as a great sorcerer but ends up being a fool. Yet everyone believes him and is afraid of Mordred. To what extent is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? If everyone had not believed Merlin, would things have been different? But I’m making it too simple. As Steinbeck says in his letters, “It is the problem of simple things, some of them not understood in our time and perhaps some of them not understandable in our time. The preciousness of blood line – that is going to be one to do. The conception that common people were actually another species – as different from gentle people as cows were. There is no snobbishness here. This is just the way it was” (323)