Team 5 of Series 2 were warned by the
Oracle of Confusion to "Dread Mog who causes all disruption". A later Oracle gave
Team 11 of Series 3 a warning to "Dread Mog who causes all confusion". Were these characteristic gibberish, or could there have been something in it?
Another
Lexicon entry discusses how the word
NILREM in Series 1 could have had unrealised significance as an anagram. It seems plausible for Dread Mog to be an oral anagram in the same vein: swap the words round and it becomes 'Mog Dread':
Mogdred.
Mogdred was the
Dungeon's resident 'baddy' during the time of the Oracles, and the alter ego of resident 'goody' powerhouse
Merlin, who was supposedly responsible for a lot of the workings and cohesion, or unity, of the Dungeon. It makes sense, then, for Mogdred to be credited with ultimate responsibility for disruption (though surely Temporal Disruption was beyond his ken?). Arguably, the prime form of disruption an early
dungeoneer would encounter was that affecting their quest object, leaving it split into fragments and strewn across the
levels, necessitating their journey through dangerous climes.
The Series 2 Oracle went on to declare that "
the cure for disruption is unity." This could be taken to mean that the key to thwarting Mogdred was to defy his destructive tendencies by collecting all the quest object pieces and uniting them (as demonstrated in the
Talisman quest), sealing victory over the perils of the Dungeon. This theory would also provide a clue to the purpose of the
unused spell UNITAS, which came from Merlin.
Knightmare fan Canadanne shared this theory on the
Knightmare.com forum in 2015:
Mogdred's name is obviously an allusion to Mordred of Arthurian legend, but I wonder if there's a
Tolkien influence in there too. A couple of his evil characters were named Gothmog in the Elvish language, where the Mog part is an adjective meaning 'tyrannous, cruel, oppressive', and the Goth part is a noun meaning 'dread'. So a partial translation gives you 'Dread Mog', as in "Dread Mog who causes all disruption/confusion". Stick the adjective before the noun as we do in English, adjust the spelling for your Camelot reference, and you end up with 'Mogdred'.
[Earlier versions: 2013-06-15 17:27:07, 2011-11-11 19:37:54, 2007-12-12 00:29:03, 2006-05-05 17:36:02]
Provided By:
David, 2018-11-17 10:16:36
