Good evening Mr. Cornwell,

I hope you are well. I am an armchair Arthurian scholar (as well as an attorney by profession, though I have yet to find a way to integrate the two – not for want of trying).

I recently enjoyed your phenomenal Arthurian trilogy, which I have put off reading for over a decade because I did not want to be disappointed if the books failed to live up to the amazing hype. Needless to say, they far exceeded my expectations.

At any rate, I have perhaps an odd question for you regarding Mordred’s parentage. Reprove me if I am trying to hard to read between the lines.

In the first chapter of the first volume, you write that Uther states, in pertinent part: “‘My son is dead,’ he went on bleakly, ‘so who else could give Norwenna a boy child fit to be a King?’ Morgan paused. ‘You, High Lord?’ she said at last. Uther chuckled at the thought…”

Then, shortly thereafter Derfel narrates that “[t] winter-born babe would be named after his father. He would be called Mordred.”

Reading and re-reading this passage, I could not but help to be struck by the (perhaps irrational) suspicion there there may have been a hidden meaning to this passage, that perhaps Mordred was not the son of his alleged father.

At long last, my question: did you in fact intend the reader to interpret Uther’s response, and Saint Derfel’s matter-of-fact statement regarding Mordred’s parentage, as indicating that perhaps someone else was Mordred’s father; perhaps Arthur?

Clearly you never explicitly developed this idea further in your trilogy, but I just can’t help but wonder if you intended, in any way, for the reader to doubt the truth of the matter as asserted by Derfel and as left unanswered by Uther? Did you intentionally insert a slight ambiguity as to the question of his parentage?

Thank you so much for your time and hopefully for your response to my burning question.

Sincere best regards,

Dan

p.s.

I’ve always enjoyed Geoffrey of Monmouth’s portrayal of Modred as Arthur’s cousin alone, and the ravisher/lover(?) of Guanhumara, and found the absence of the later-created Lancelot (though an enjoyable character in his own right) to not detract in any way from the story Geoffrey intended to tell.

I have long suspected that Lancelot’s assumption of Mordred’s role as despoiler of Guenever may have been an attempt to excise the socially scandalous element of a nearly-Biblically-prohibited familial sexual union (by my reading, Leviticus chapters 18 and 20 only prohibit relations between a man and the wife of his father’s brother, which does not apply to Mordred as Arthur’s sister’s son), and replace it with good, old-fashioned adultery/courtly romance, perhaps in deference to prevailing social sensitivities of the readers of the time. (But then I wonder how, by the time Malory compiled his work, it was less scandalous for Mordred to be Arthur’s incestuous natural child, than for Mordred to lie with Arthur’s Queen.) I wonder if you have any insight on my suppositions?