If there is little contemporary source material relating to Arthur, there is none about Mordred, the crown prince who was to come after Arthur. It’s Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Great Britain, written in the twelfth century A.D., who brings king Modred to light, and it’s not a very nice light. All we can truly say is that Modred died at the battle of Camblan, the same battle where Arthur is mortally wounded. According to Norma Lorre Goodrich in her book, King Arthur, she says, “Regarding Modred, the voices of the Scots, raised in protest over the centuries, were drowned in contumely. ‘Modred was no traitor, nor a murderer,’ they argued during the Renaissance. ‘He was our beloved king.’” He becomes a puzzle.
So here’s how the Hollywood version of the story goes. Ygrain, Arthur’s mother, had two to four daughters before she gave birth to Arthur. Once she married Uther, she had one more daughter called, by some accounts, Anne. Legend tells us that one of Ygrain’s older daughters is the notorious Morgause or Morgan la Fey, a woman learned in the arts of enchantment. It is said she ensorcelled Arthur and forced her to lay with him. From this ‘incestuous’ union came the child Mordred who was raised to hate his father. He is pictured as power hungry and a scoundrel. Through treachery, he helped bring about the downfall of Arthur’s kingdom.
Other legends tell us that Arthur and Guinevere had at least one son named Lohot. So why was Modred, the supposed illegitimate child of an incestuous relationship, designated the crown prince and not Lohot? It was a puzzle.
In the meantime, as I read from various books and sources, other questions began to arise. For the important person Merlin was, we only know his mother’s name – Nun. The same is true for Saint David, that patron saint of Wales. His mother’s name is, interestingly enough, St. Non. But we do not know the father’s names for either of these very important men. In fact, as you go through the list of saints in Scotland and Wales, the mother’s names are most often noted, but not the father’s.
In fact, within the legends women play extremely powerful roles, so powerful, the authors of the old histories make them quite villainous in some cases.
1. Guithelinus, a father of the church in Briton, seeing the desperate cause of the Bretons after the collapse of Rome and the removal of its troops from the islands, goes to Brittany on the mainland seeking a battle commander. He offers him the marriage of a landed and wealthy princess. This sets the whole Arthurian legend in motion.
2. The lovely Ygrain. Men fought and died because of her. She is the mother of at least two very prominent children, Arthur and Morgause, and seems to be the matriarch of a vast royal lineage and household.
3. Guinevere, Arthur’s queen, is more than just an ornament to the crown and someone to provide an heir to the throne. She was a battle queen in her own right and had lands and wealth that were her own.
4. And then there’s Morgause, or Morgan la Fey. I believe they are one and the same person. Whoever she really was, she was very powerful, insomuch that later ages feared her.
5. Nimue is the woman who is said to have tricked Merlin into trapping himself into a cave at a critical point of the story of Camalot.
Now, let me add to this puzzle another intriguing piece. Centuries before Arthur, a band of displaced Scandinavians sail to the shores of Ireland. First off, they abduct the women, looking for wives. The local men chase after them and find them before they can take off with their bootie. The locals agree that the Scandinavians may choose wives from among their daughters, however, they must agree that all wealth and property belongs to the women and is to be inherited by their firstborn daughters. This is agreed to and the Scandinavians depart with the women who agree to go with them. They sail to northern Scotland. This is the origin of the Picts, a people fearless in battle and so wild, the Romans could only build a wall in some vain effort to control them – the wall of Hadrian, which parts of can still be seen today in Scotland.
Now, the Picts eventually got around this injunction that all property was inherited through the women. They would marry, then wait until a daughter was born, then murder their wives and become regents to the property, controlling it until their daughters were of age. Hmmm.
Well, my curiosity was piqued. Remember, histories are written by the conquerors. The British Isles may not have been fully conquered by the state of Rome, but it was fully conquered by the Roman Catholic Church, which was immersed in Roman ideology, values and virtues. Rome was highly patriarchal, monogamous, steeped in Greek philosophy and very anti-Semetic. These are the people who wrote the histories of Great Britain.
I wondered what I would find if I could strip away the Roman view. What kind of culture would emerge among the Bretons? What I found not only startled me – it made the Bible split wide open.
Happy 80th Birthday to my Dad, July 13, 2010.
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