Mordred's Curse - Ian McDowell
Apr. 11th, 2025 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxApparently the universe has decided to fuel my Arthuriana kick, because I recently checked my local Little Free Library and found that someone had left a bunch of 1970s-90s Arthurian-retelling novels— it didn't feel fair to take the lot, but I did grab Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex (1978) (with an inscription indicating that it was a birthday(?) gift from the original owner's grandfather(?) in 1979) and Ian McDowell's Mordred's Curse (1996). Read the McDowell first, which is an ~EdGy~ retelling* (impressive, really, given the starting premise): Merlin is an ancient, child-sized creep who was banging Arthur's dad and tried to molest Mordred as a child! Mordred has sexual feelings for his mom! When Morgawse dies,** she haunts Mordred into cutting off her head and taking it with him to Camelot! If there is an opportunity to mention genitalia, McDowell will do it!
All that aside, McDowell's Mordred is a foul-mouthed little freak*** and I love him; his Arthur is, as one character describes him, half priest and half soldier, a bit of a prig but not wholly unsympathetic, even as he passes from the object of Mordred's hero-worship to betrayed rage to a sort of not-quite-apathy. This book also goes full-on Mordred/Guinevere, and it's actually... really cute? They're close in age and education, bonding over Roman poets and games of chess (no, seriously, WHERE did the "playing chess with Guinevere" trope come from?); Mordred ends up rescuing her from the Other World when she's kidnapped by a fey king just before her marriage to Arthur. This involves them having sex, of course. To Break The Curse. I am increasingly amused by how many Arthurian retellings have whatever knight is central to said retelling be in love with Guinevere (Kay in The Idylls of the Queen, Mordred in The Wicked Day) because she is kind of the only option unless you want to make up an entirely new character.
* More of a remix, I guess? I discovered via the author's afterword that this is the first book of a duology, with a sequel covering the fall of Camelot (Merlin's Gift) and Mordred taking Lancelot's (or Bedivere's) place in the traditional doomed love triangle.
** In a sort of parallel to the usual "Morgawse is killed by Gaheris (or Agravaine) for sleeping with Lamorak," here Morgawse is killed by her terrible husband King Lot while attempting to seduce her own son (Mordred) before he leaves for Camelot. All the Orkney brothers except for Gawain and Mordred died in infancy in this one, by the way.****
*** He cuts up MULTIPLE corpses, including his mother's, to perform magic.
**** Relatedly, Nimue gets a passing reference as Guinevere's four-year-old half-sister, which is a new one to me and makes more sense in the context of belatedly discovering this was half of a duology.
All that aside, McDowell's Mordred is a foul-mouthed little freak*** and I love him; his Arthur is, as one character describes him, half priest and half soldier, a bit of a prig but not wholly unsympathetic, even as he passes from the object of Mordred's hero-worship to betrayed rage to a sort of not-quite-apathy. This book also goes full-on Mordred/Guinevere, and it's actually... really cute? They're close in age and education, bonding over Roman poets and games of chess (no, seriously, WHERE did the "playing chess with Guinevere" trope come from?); Mordred ends up rescuing her from the Other World when she's kidnapped by a fey king just before her marriage to Arthur. This involves them having sex, of course. To Break The Curse. I am increasingly amused by how many Arthurian retellings have whatever knight is central to said retelling be in love with Guinevere (Kay in The Idylls of the Queen, Mordred in The Wicked Day) because she is kind of the only option unless you want to make up an entirely new character.
* More of a remix, I guess? I discovered via the author's afterword that this is the first book of a duology, with a sequel covering the fall of Camelot (Merlin's Gift) and Mordred taking Lancelot's (or Bedivere's) place in the traditional doomed love triangle.
** In a sort of parallel to the usual "Morgawse is killed by Gaheris (or Agravaine) for sleeping with Lamorak," here Morgawse is killed by her terrible husband King Lot while attempting to seduce her own son (Mordred) before he leaves for Camelot. All the Orkney brothers except for Gawain and Mordred died in infancy in this one, by the way.****
*** He cuts up MULTIPLE corpses, including his mother's, to perform magic.
**** Relatedly, Nimue gets a passing reference as Guinevere's four-year-old half-sister, which is a new one to me and makes more sense in the context of belatedly discovering this was half of a duology.
