Merlin

Two Merlins

Merlin is a composite, and medieval writers knew it. One strand is a Welsh prophetic poet driven mad by battle and living wild in the forest. The other is a fatherless boy in a ninth-century Latin chronicle who out-argues a king's magicians. Geoffrey of Monmouth fused them in the 1130s and invented, more or less single-handed, the figure that later Europe would call a wizard ^7,8. As with the whole Matter of Britain, this is legend and literature rather than religion: no one ever sacrificed to Merlin.

Myrddin the Wild

The Welsh Myrddin appears in poems preserved in the Black Book of Carmarthen and the Red Book of Hergest, though the tradition behind them is older. He is a warrior who loses his lord and his reason at the battle of Arfderydd, flees to the Caledonian forest, and speaks his prophecies to an apple tree, a piglet and his sister Gwenddydd ^2,7. Crucially, this Myrddin has nothing to do with Arthur. He is a northern British wild man of the same type as the Irish Suibhne and the Scottish Lailoken, and his subject is the ruin of his own people, not the glory of a king ⁷.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's Merlinus

Geoffrey's first Arthurian publication, around 1135, was the Prophetiae Merlini, a set of deliberately obscure political prophecies that circulated widely on their own and were later folded into Book VII of the Historia Regum Britanniae ³. To carry them he took the boy from the Historia Brittonum — the child without a mortal father whose blood Vortigern's advisers demand for the foundations of a collapsing tower, and who instead reveals the two dragons fighting in a pool beneath it — and renamed him. In the older text the boy is Ambrosius; Geoffrey calls him Merlinus Ambrosius, borrowing the Welsh name Myrddin ^1,3,7. The Latin form is usually explained as avoiding an obscene French word, a suggestion made in the nineteenth century and still commonly repeated.

In the Historia Merlin does three things and then vanishes. He interprets the dragons, he transports the Giants' Ring from Ireland to Salisbury Plain, and he transforms Uther Pendragon into the likeness of the duke of Cornwall so that King Arthur can be conceived at Tintagel ³. Geoffrey returned to the character around 1150 in the Vita Merlini, a Latin poem that restores the wild-man material, gives him the sister Gwenddydd as Ganieda, and has him discuss cosmology with Taliesin — including a description of the island where Morgan le Fay tends the wounded Arthur ³.

The Devil's Son

Around 1200 the French poet Robert de Boron answered the obvious question the chronicles had left open: what is he? In Robert's Merlin, a council of devils, alarmed by the Harrowing of Hell, conceives a plan to father an Antichrist on a virtuous woman. The child is born hairy and speaking, but his mother's confession and immediate baptism cancel the scheme, leaving Merlin with the devils' knowledge of all things past and God's gift of knowing the future ^4,8. It is an elegantly economical piece of theology, and it made the enchanter safe for a Christian audience: his powers are demonic in origin and redeemed in use.

Robert also gave Merlin his institutional role. He establishes the Round Table as the third of three tables, in succession to the table of the Last Supper and Joseph of Arimathea's Grail table, and he sets the test of the sword in the stone that identifies Arthur as king ⁴. Everything most people picture when they think of Merlin — the sword, the table, the making of a king — comes from this text rather than from Geoffrey.

The Enchanter at Arthur's Court

The thirteenth-century prose cycles expanded the role enormously. In the Vulgate Estoire de Merlin he is a shape-shifter and strategist who appears as a peasant, a stag or a child, arranges Arthur's marriage, wins his early wars for him and dictates his own story to his confessor Blaise ⁵. Malory's opening books follow this material closely: Merlin arranges the conception, claims the child as his fee, presents the sword, warns Arthur against marrying Guinevere, and predicts the destruction that Mordred will bring ⁶. He is the one character who can see the whole shape of the tragedy and cannot prevent any of it.

The Enchantment of the Enchanter

His removal is always the same in outline: he falls in love with a young woman, teaches her his own magic, and is imprisoned by it. She is Niniane, Viviane or Nimue depending on the text, and she is often identified with or attached to the Lady of the Lake. The prison varies — a tower of air, a hawthorn bush, a cave sealed with a stone — and so does the tone, from seduction and betrayal in some versions to a fair exchange in others, since Malory's Nyneve is a benevolent figure who afterwards protects Arthur ^5,6,8. What is constant is the irony. The prophet who knows the future walks into it anyway.

In Popular Culture

Merlin has had a busier modern afterlife than Arthur. T. H. White's Merlyn lives backwards through time and tutors the boy king, an idea carried into Disney's The Sword in the Stone (1963); Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (1970) and its sequels retell the whole legend from his point of view; Nicol Williamson's performance in John Boorman's Excalibur (1981) fixed a generation's image of him, and the BBC series Merlin (2008-2012) recast him as Arthur's secret contemporary. Through Tolkien's Gandalf and the countless wizards downstream of him, Geoffrey's invention has become the default shape of the figure in fantasy altogether.