Who is the most fascinating character within the entire universe of King Arthur and the Knights of the Knight Table? Everyone has their own favorite, of course, and certainly with some good reason. Galahad and his purity is kind of interesting. Gawain and that whole business with the Green Knight is certainly worthwhile, but after the Green Knight is out of the picture, maybe not so much? Lancelot and Guinevere are definitely romantic in an awful betray-my-husband-king-BFF sort of way. And, of course, there is Merlin. Let’s face it, you almost can’t be a reverse-aging sorcerer and not be a fascinating character.
But, mostly, it’s Mordred. Is there really any argument here? Mordred is just plain deliriously evil in his actions, but he’s got a perfectly acceptable reason for that malevolence. So even though he is evil, he’s not an inherently bad guy like, for instance, Lancelot. And that is precisely the Mordred that Mary Stewart gives the reader in The Wicked Day. The closest parallel that comes to mind to Mordred’s position in the grander scheme of King Arthur is Edmund the Bastard’s position in the grander scheme of King Lear. Usually, Edmund is played as a straight-up villain even though the text is pretty clear that he is himself playing the role assigned him. In Edmund’s mind he is the hero of his story and he has a point. As a result, it is not beyond expectation that the audience would go along with him and see him as not as a villain but as guy getting what is due by playing the bad guy. This is conundrum at the heart of what makes Mordred so fascinating.
Mordred behaves badly because he thinks he got a raw deal and, like Edmund, he’s not wrong. But because his actions are morally questionable at best and that makes for great drama as well as putting him in juxtaposition against the tragically flawed saintliness of Arthur, he is usually portrayed as pure malevolence. It makes him exciting to watch, but maybe not so much to read. Mary Stewart gives the world the portrait of Mordred it was sorely missing before her book came along. She humanizes Mordred while doing little to undermine the demonstrably wicked actions. The question that must be always asks is why someone acts wicked. Not everyone acts wicked because they are wicked. Malevolence is often engineered in someone from without. Stewart offers one of the first contrarian perspectives on how this reality may apply to Mordred and he becomes all the more fascinating because of it.
