Merlin

British Library MS Add. Meladius 12228, fol. 202v.

Merlin is one of the most mysterious characters in the Arthurian pantheon: wizard, bard, soothsayer, prince. There is a chance that he was an actual historical person, a Welsh bard, living about 50 years after “King” Arthur, of whose poetry only fragments remain, but from which we can piece together something of his story. He was a contemporary of the sixth-century Rhydderch the Generous, a king of the Britons living near Strathclyde, who fought a battle at Arfderydd near Carlisle in the year 573. Present at this battle, according to the earliest tales, was a certain bard named Myrddin, who was driven mad by the din of the battle and ran, raving, into the nearby forest of Celidon.

Legends collected about this figure, just as they did about Arthur himself. From Nennius’ History of the Britons, Myrddin gained an adventure there credited to a certain Emrys. King Vortigern, the story reads, fled into the Welsh hills to escape from the Saxons, whom he had himself invited as mercenaries into Britain. On Mount Snowdon (Eryri), he built a fortress, but however high he built it, that night it would tumble to the ground. His wise men told him that it would never be built unless the foundations were sprinkled with the blood of a fatherless child.

Messengers were sent out, and came at last to Camarthan (whose ancient name was Caer Myrddin), where they heard boys playing in the yard. One of them said to another, “You have no father, you will come to no good.” So Emrys was brought before Vortigern. But he claimed that the fortress collapsed because it was built over a cavern containing a lake and two dragons. Digging deeper, the king's workers discovered the cave and the lake, and two dragons emerged, one white, one red. They fought, and eventually the red dragon won. This, Emrys claimed, was a prophecy that the British would eventually defeat the Saxons.

Another figure who contributed to the legend of Merlin was the northern Wild Man of the Woods, Lailoken. According to the Life of St. Kentigern, Lailoken had been captured by King Meldred, but he would utter no sound. On the third day of his captivity, Meldred came before him with his wife. The king plucked a leaf from her gown, and Lailoken laughed. When asked why, he said that the king had been more faithful to her than she to him, for she had collected that leaf when she had been in the forest with her lover, and Meldred, in his kindness, had disposed of the evidence.

The queen was angry, of course, and hit upon a plan which she believed would disprove Lailoken’s prophetic abilities. She sent a young man before him and asked how the man would die. Lailoken said he would fall from a horse. The next day, she disguised the man and brought him again before Lailoken, who said this time that the man would hang from a tree. On the third occasion, the prophet claimed that the man would drown in a river.

To Meldred, this proved his wife’s innocence, but soon afterwards that same young man rode out hunting. He was crossing a bridge over a river in a forest when his horse shied. He fell from it, and his ankle caught in the branch of a tree so that his head was submerged in the waters of the river, and he drowned. The queen, doubtless, was arrested at once.

These stories were collected in the twelfth century by a priest called Geoffrey of Monmouth, who attributed them all to a prophet whom he called Merlin (to name him according to his original name, Myrddin, would have embarrassingly echoed a certain dubious French word). The episode of Vortigern’s Fortress was incorporated into his mythological chronicle of the British dynasty, The History of the Kings of Britain, while Myrddin’s madness, the Leaf and the Laugh and the Triple Death formed the plot of his Life of Merlin.

Other legends gathered about Merlin. Geoffrey tells us how, at the coronation of Uther Pendragon, the king fell in love with Igraine, the Duchess of Cornwall. Finding out about this, her husband, Gorlois, whisked her away into Cornwall. He placed his wife in the castle of Tintagel, while he himself prepared the castle of Dimilioc for siege. Uther languished for the love of Igraine, and sent for Merlin. Merlin gave Uther drugs, which altered his appearance, so that he resembled Gorlois, and he and Uther rode off for Tintagel. Seeing them depart, Gorlois and a band of warriors emerged from Dimilioc, but were ambushed and slain by Uther’s men.

Uther, meanwhile, had reached Tintagel and Igraine, convinced that he was Gorlois, had slept with him. In the morning, a messenger arrived from Dimilioc with the news that Gorlois was dead. Nine months later, Igraine gave birth to a boy they called Arthur. This story is probably also of ancient origin, but traces of it before Geoffrey have been lost. It shows traces of a story in the cycle of mythological Welsh tales, The Mabinogion in which Pwyll, lord of Dyfed, exchanges places with Arawn, King of Annwn (the Celtic Other World; see also the Welsh poem “The Spoils of Annwn”) and sleeps with his wife for a year. In the version we have, he does nothing other than sleep, and it is upon another woman, Rhiannon, that he sires the Welsh hero Pryderi, on whose life the first four stories in The Mabinogion are based. It is possible that, in an earlier version of the story, Pryderi was born of Pwyll and Arawn’s wife, and this episode was the ultimate source for the story of King Arthur’s conception.

The success of Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain made imitators inevitable, and many of these extended the legend of Merlin. A story of his birth was provided which, for the marvelous, challenged Arthur’s story. According to Robert de Boron and his successors, Satan and the demons in Hell wanted to create an anti-Christ and so one of their number seduced the daughter of a merchant, and the child was endowed with prophetic powers. But his mother remained faithful, so Merlin, though retaining his soothsaying abilities, worked for good, and not evil.

He was born, the legend says, with the power of speech already in him, and it was this precocious eloquence which enabled him to save his mother from being buried alive as a heretic and adulterer. Merlin was also given a role in the creation of the Round Table. The thirteenth-century Story of Merlin (part of the immense prose cycle called either the Vulgate Cycle or the Lancelot-Grail Cycle) claims that he suggested that Uther Pendragon build a replica of the round table at which Christ and the Apostles sat at the Last Supper. At this table, one seat, known as the “Siege Perilous,” was to be left without an owner until it was filled by the knight who would find the Holy Grail. On Uther’s death, the Round Table became the property of King Leodegrance of Cameliard, who subsequently returned it to King Arthur as a dowry with his daughter, Guinevere. This version also claims that Merlin’s reward for providing Uther with the opportunity of sleeping with Igraine was the issue of their union, Arthur. Since he was born an embarrassingly short time after their wedding, and since the barons would be jealous of Uther’s child in those wild anarchic times, Merlin put the boy to foster with Sir Ector, a northern baron. He was brought up as the foster-brother of the surly Sir Kay.

When Arthur was fifteen, Uther Pendragon died, and in a churchyard appeared a miracle: it was a sword, driven through an anvil which rested on a block of marble, on which was the golden inscription “Whoso Pulleth Out This Sword of This Stone and Anvil is Rightwise King Born of All England.” Though many tried to extract the sword, they all failed because, of course, Arthur was destined to draw it. A tournament was proclaimed, and the winner was to draw the sword, and this would presumably ensure that the kingdom had the strongest king possible. Sir Ector and Sir Kay came to the tournament, bringing Arthur as squire to Sir Kay. But Sir Kay had left his sword behind, and Arthur was sent to fetch it. On the way, he saw the Sword in the Stone, drew it, and was crowned King of England—something of an anachronism, of course, since England didn’t even exist until several centuries after the death of the historical Arthur.

Of course, many of the barons contested this rather irregular method of royal succession, and Merlin helped Arthur overcome them. The chief king of the rebels was Lot of Lothian and Orkney. At one point, in the final battle, Merlin detained Lot with a tale of prophecy, so that he was unable to engage in the battle in time, and so lost the war. It was also Merlin, who, when all the battles were over, sent Arthur to the lake where the magical sword, Excalibur, was held aloft from the waters, by a maiden’s hand, clad in white samite.

In all the stories until and including Geoffrey of Monmouth’s books, Merlin has nothing whatsoever to do with King Arthur. The bard, Myrddin, was not a contemporary of the supposed historical Arthur who fought against the Saxons. When Arthur was alive, he spoke a language called Brythonic. Fifty years later, Myrddin wrote in a language descended from Brythonic, which was called Welsh; so they didn’t even speak the same language. Even in Geoffrey, Merlin leaves the story after he has attended to the conception of Arthur, but never meets him in person. The Life of Merlin takes place after the death of Arthur, and both Merlin and the other famous bard, Taliesin, remember how they bore the dying Arthur in a barge to Avalon, the Land of Youth, where his wounds would be tended by the Nine Maidens. This, according to Geoffrey, is the only time that Merlin and Arthur meet.

But in the French stories, as in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Merlin not only guides Uther to create the Round Table, but is the instrument of destiny by which Arthur is born, comes into his inheritance, establishes his right to the throne, and begins a system of justice and the golden age of chivalry. With this accomplished, he must be disposed of. So we reach the final chapter in the legend of Merlin.

The story of Merlin's demise is most familiar to us from Sir Thomas Malory’s account in Le Morte d’Arthur, completed in 1469; there, Merlin falls into a dotage upon one of the ladies of the lake, who is called Nenive or Nimue, depending on which version of Malory’s book you read. “And always,” Malory writes, “he lay about to have her maidenhood, and she was ever passing weary of him and would have been delivered of him, for she was afraid of him for cause he was a devil’s son.” At length, he shows her a magical stone, and she entices him under it; “but she wrought so there for him that he came never out for all the craft he could do.”

Malory, of course, didn’t invent the story himself. Rather, he based his account on an earlier one, that of the anonymous Suite du Merlin, a prose tale written in French in the early thirteenth century. Here, the lady’s name is Niviane, and beneath the rock is a chamber which housed once a pair of lovers in both life and death. According to this author, Niviane “thoroughly hated Merlin for being a son of the Enemy,” so she imprisons Merlin in the chamber, has a stone lowered over it, and seals the stone with her enchantments.

In the Story of Merlin, written a little earlier than the Suite, this lady is genuinely in love with Merlin, and begs him to teach her a spell by which she can imprison a man without walls or tower. Although he knows she will imprison him, he tells her the spell and, while he sleeps beneath a hawthorn bush, she casts the spell on him. When he awakens, he appears to be in a beautiful tower. Thereafter, Viviane visits him and cares for him.

There is only a hint of this story in any text earlier than the thirteenth century. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Life of Merlin, before he went mad, Merlin was married to a girl called Gwendoloena. During his madness, she remarried, but on her birthday, the story tells, he returned, riding a stag, to her; seeing her husband, he broke off one of the antlers and cast it at him, killing him instantly.

Merlin is a gift to the writer. His foreknowledge of future events allows for a great play of irony—Sir Thomas Malory has him predict the adulterous affair of Lancelot and Guinevere, and Arthur subsequently ignore the warning. His magical powers dazzle and amaze characters and readers alike. And he can be used as the mouth-piece of the author’s convictions. So, for Tennyson, Merlin embodies the force of poetic imagination, and it is only when these powers are at a low ebb that the wily Vivien (Tennyson’s Nimue) is able to beguile and betray him. For T.H. White, he is the loveable authorial self-portrait, a wise old man who, in turning the Wart (later known as King Arthur) into a succession of different animals, not only enables him to perceive the human race in a truer light, but also provides a wish-fulfillment for the author and reader. And for Mary Stewart, in her works of pseudo-historical fiction The Crystal Cave, The Last Enchantment, and The Hollow Hills, Merlin is a grand vizier figure, whose powers of prophecy, known as The Sight, enable him to steer the course of history.