8 - The Return of the Return of Mordred

Summary

At the end of the section of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur that P. J. C. Field titles ‘Uther Pendragon and Merlin’, Arthur famously has a group of infants slain, all to avert a prophecy that one of them – born on May Day (46.8–10) – will eventually destroy his kingdom (36.15–17). One of these children is Mordred, who survives the deliberate shipwreck and who, the reader is told, will be seen coming to Arthur's court ‘as hit rehersith aftirward and towarde the ende of the Morte Arthure’ (46.18–19). This apparent promise to tell the story of how Mordred arrives at Arthur's court is never kept. Mordred in fact appears throughout the Tales of Lancelot and Tristram, the very middle of the Morte, but he is already an established knight by that time. It might be that what Malory signals here is that the end of the Morte will involve Mordred, as is traditional and central to the Arthurian legend, but his wording seems very specific, and this would also not be the only narrative promise Malory makes early in his book and then fails to keep. In 2019, Elizabeth Archibald published an article dealing with Malory's apparently broken promise. Entitled ‘Mordred's Lost Childhood’, the article was part of a special issue of the journal Arthuriana dedicated to ‘Malorian and Scholarly Retraction’. In a fundamental sense, the retraction article is a long-awaited answer to a question she herself posed in 2002: ‘So what about Mordred's recognition scene?’

This interest in Mordred and his destiny, indeed his childhood, also occurs in conversation. I recall discussing, to take one example, the cover of Haydn Middleton's The King's Evil (1995), the first book in Middleton's Mordred Cycle trilogy. The cover depicts a naked young man, curled in a fetal position against what appears to be a pitch-black background. Held to the light, the cover reveals that the background is not an empty black but rather filled with the glossy outlines of dead babies, the victims of Arthur's plan. Mordred is a haunted figure, vulnerable rather than villainous, traumatized by his father's murderous actions.