DARK LORDS AND DARK KNIGHTS

Just as Tolkien acknowledged that the cataclysmic end of the First Age in the War of Wrath was informed by the Norse legends of Ragnarök, so the cataclysmic end of the Second Age in Sauron’s war with the Last Alliance of Elves and Men was informed by the legends of the downfall of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Although Tolkien employed Arthurian motifs throughout his writing, he did not care for the largely French-inspired courtly elements of medieval Arthurian romance. Consequently, his own unfinished Fall of Arthur – largely written in the early 1930s, and posthumously published in 2013 – is an alliterative poem of nearly a thousand stanzas in the style and meter of the Old English poem Beowulf. Its focus is Arthur as a British military leader fighting a dark shadowy army of invaders out of the East led by his nemesis, the evil knight Mordred.

In the Fall of Arthur, Tolkien describes Mordred’s dark forces: “The endless East in anger woke, / and black thunder born in dungeons / under mountains of menace moved above them.” These lines could be directly transferred to Tolkien’s Middle-earth, where they are used to describe the dark forces of Mordor. It is tempting, moreover, to link the forces of Mordor led by the Nazgûl with Tolkien’s description of Mordred’s “wan horsemen wild in windy clouds” who appear as almost spectral warriors “shadow-helmed to war, shapes disastrous”.

In the War of the Last Alliance, the name of the High King of the Elves, Gil-galad (meaning “Star of Radiance”) cannot help but conjure up Galahad and the Knights of the Round Table. However, most obviously, in Mordred, the Dark Knight, we have the Arthurian villain who is most akin to Sauron the Dark Lord. Since his first appearance in literature in the 12th century, Mordred has become synonymous with treason and the forces of evil. In Dante’s Inferno, Mordred is discovered to be in the lowest circle of Hell, the domain of traitors: “[Mordred] who, at one blow, had chest and shadow / shattered by Arthur’s hand.”

Consequently, it is ironic that the name Mordred – which one might assume appropriately to have its origin in the homophone “More-dread” – is actually derived from the Latin meaning “moderate”. However, in terms of Tolkien’s nomenclature, Mordred would be a perfect villain’s name. Just as Morgoth in Sindarin means “Black Enemy”, Moria means “Black Chasm”, Morgul means “Black Sorcery” and Mordor (sounding like “Murder”) means “Black Land”, so the name Mordred would suggest something akin to his Arthurian epithet, “Black Knight”.