Merlin

Name

The name Merlin is derived from the Welsh name of the legendary bard Myrddin that Geoffrey of Monmouth Latinised to Merlinus in his works. Medievalist Gaston Paris suggests that Geoffrey chose the form Merlinus rather than the expected *Merdinus to avoid a resemblance to the Anglo-Norman word merde (from Latin merda) for feces. Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville reduced it to the result of the "tendency of d to change into l in Indo-European languages."

'Merlin' may also be an adjective, in which case he should be called "The Merlin", from the French merle meaning common blackbird (Turdus merula). An association with this bird in French was deemed logical by Philippe Walter. According to Martin Aurell, the Latin form Merlinus is a euphony of the Welsh form Myrddin to bring him closer to the white blackbird (merle blanc) into which he could metamorphose through his shamanic powers, as was notably the case for Merlin's Irish counterpart. Folklorist Jean Markale proposed that the name of Merlin is of French origin and means 'little blackbird', an allusion to the mocking and provocative personality usually attributed to him in medieval stories. According to Jean-Charles Berthet, however, the analogies between Merlin and the blackbird are more akin to a later establishment than to a real etymology, since the French name of Merlin is later than the other forms.

Myrddin may be a combination of *mer (mad) and the Welsh dyn (man), to mean 'madman'. It may also mean '[of] many names' if it was derived from the Welsh myrdd, myriad. In his Myrdhinn, ou l'Enchanteur Merlin (1868), La Villemarqué derived Marz[h]in, which he considered the original form of Merlin's name, from the Breton word marz (wonder) to mean 'wonder man'. Clas Myrddin or Merlin's Enclosure is an early name for Great Britain as stated in the third series of Welsh Triads.

Celticist Alfred Owen Hughes Jarman suggested that the Welsh name Myrddin (Welsh pronunciation: [ˈmərðɪn]) was derived from the toponym Caerfyrddin, the Welsh name for the town known in English as Carmarthen. This contrasts with the popular folk etymology that the town was named after the bard (Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville, who questioned the historical origins of Merlin, concluded that the legend was fabricated to retroactively explain the name of the town). The name Carmarthen is derived from the town's previous Roman name Moridunum, which was in turn derived from the Celtic Brittonic moridunon, 'sea fort[ress]'. Eric P. Hamp proposed a similar etymology: Morij:n, 'the maritime' or 'born of the sea'. There is no obvious connection between Merlin and the sea in the texts about him, but Claude Sterckx has suggested that Merlin's father in the Welsh texts, Morfryn, might have been a sea spirit.

Legend

Overview

Commonly in his medieval appearances, Merlin guides, helps, saves, predicts, and judges through his great wisdom. According to Gaëlle Zussa, "Merlin's literary legend presents itself as a sort of great dump in which pieces of the myth are scattered. Contemporary authors come to draw their ideas and recycle this debris to recreate an ever-new Merlin, in motion." For Berthet and Walter, the legend was constructed in stages as the ancient Celtic character was continuously reinterpreted and reinvented by Christianity, with Merlin's messianism testifying to this religious influence. Villemarqué attempted to synthesize the known information around Merlin, beginning as a figure of bard gifted with prophecy. While Merlin's prototypes were originally those of both poet and warrior king, the familiar character from the French romances became the master of amazing magical knowledge. According to a summary of the legend by Danielle Quéruel of the Bibliothèque nationale de France,

R. Howard Bloch described Merlin's character throughout the legend:

Geoffrey and his sources

Geoffrey of Manmouth's composite Merlin, imagined primarily as a prophet, is fundamentally based on the North Brythonic poet and seer Myrddin Wyllt, that is Myrddin the Wild (known as Merlinus Caledonensis or Merlin Sylvestris in later texts influenced by Geoffrey), in turn inspired by either real or legendary figure from the Welsh oral tradition that appears in 12th-century written poems such as "Afallennau Myrddin" ("Myrddin's Apple Trees") or "Yr Oianau" ("The Piglet"). Myrddin's legend has parallels with a northern Welsh and southern Scottish story of the mad prophet Lailoken (Laleocen), probably the same as Myrddin son of Morfryn (Myrddin map Morfryn) mentioned in the Welsh Triads, and with Buile Shuibhne, an Irish tale of the wandering insane king Suibihne mac Colmáin (often Anglicised to Sweeney),  set after the 637 Battle of Moira.

In Welsh poetry, Myrddin was a bard who was driven mad after witnessing the horrors of war and subsequently fled civilisation to become a wild man of the wood in the 6th century. He roamed the Caledonian Forest until he was cured of his madness by Kentigern, also known as Saint Mungo. Geoffrey had Myrddin in mind when he wrote his earliest surviving work, the Prophetiae Merlini ("Prophecies of Merlin", c. 1130), a collection of prophecies consist of a long series of predictions concerning the reign of the Saxons and the independence of Britain, which he claimed were the actual words of the legendary poet (including some distinctively apocalyptic prophecies for Geoffrey's contemporary 12th century). However, the work reveals little about Merlin's background.

Geoffrey was further inspired by Emrys (Old Welsh: Embreis), a Welsh legendary character based in part on the 5th-century historical figure of the Romano-British war leader Ambrosius Aurelianus (Welsh name Emrys Wledig, later also known as Myrddin Emrys). When Geoffrey included Merlin in his next work, Historia Regum Britanniae ("The History of the Kings of Britain", c. 1136), he supplemented his characterisation of Merlin by attributing to him a story taken from the early 9th-century Historia Brittonum attributed to Nennius, which Geoffrey adapted almost without changes. In the source text, Ambrosius was discovered when the King of the Britons, Vortigern, attempted to erect a tower at Dinas Emrys (City of Emrys). More than once, the tower collapsed before completion. Vortigen's wise men advised him that the only solution was to sprinkle the foundation with the blood of a child born without a father. Ambrosius was rumoured to be such a child. When he was brought before the king, Ambrosius revealed that below the foundation of the tower was a lake containing two dragons battling each other, representing the struggle between the invading Saxons (the white dragon) and the native Celtic Britons (the red dragon). Geoffrey included the story in his Historia Regum Britanniæ, adding the new later episodes that tie Merlin with King Arthur and his predecessors. Geoffrey stated that this Ambrosius was also called "Merlin" (Merlinus), hence Ambrosius Merlinus.

Romance reimagination

Around the turn of the 13th century, Robert de Boron retold and expanded on this material in Merlin, an Old French epic poem inspired by Wace's Roman de Brut, an Anglo-Norman creative adaptation of Geoffrey's Historia, but not based directly on it. The work presents itself as the story of Merlin's life as told by Merlin himself to be written down by the "real" author, while the actual author claimed merely to translate the story into French. Only a few lines of what is believed to be the original text have survived, but a popular prose version had a great influence on the emerging genre of Arthurian-themed chivalric romance.

The French Merlin links the two British traditions, that of the fatherless child prophet and that of the wild man. As in the Historia, Merlin is created as a demon spawn, but in Robert's account, he is explicitly to become the Antichrist intended to reverse the effect of the Harrowing of Hell. The infernal plot is thwarted when a priest named Blaise (the story's narrator and perhaps Merlin's divine twin in a hypothetical now-lost original Breton oral tradition) is contacted by the child's mother: Blaise immediately baptizes the boy at birth, thus freeing him from the power of Satan and his intended destiny. The demonic legacy invests Merlin (already able to speak fluently even as a newborn) with a preternatural knowledge of the past and present, which is supplemented by God, who gives the boy prophetic knowledge of the future. The text lays great emphasis on Merlin's power to shapeshift, his joking personality, and his connection to the Holy Grail, the quest for which he later foretells. It presents him during his childhood as a being both disturbing and prodigious, describes Merlin's efforts to escape the influence of his diabolical ancestry, and contains many scenes in which Merlin laughs (especially when he practices magic). Robert does not give much space to Merlin's madness, but his laughter may reflect the otherness of his mind.

Merlin is thought to be part of a trilogy of Robert's stories that tell the history of the Grail over the centuries, sometimes dubbed the Little Grail Cycle. The narrative of the Prose Merlin is largely based on Geoffrey's familiar tale of Vortigern's Tower, Uther's war against the Saxons, and Arthur's conception. New in this retelling are the episodes of the baby Arthur being secreted away by Merlin (presenting himself successively as an old man to abduct the newborn Arthur, then as a young man to hand him over to be raised by Ector) and the young Arthur years later drawing the sword from the stone, an event orchestrated by Merlin in the role of kingmaker. Earlier, Merlin also instructs Uther to establish the quasi-religious chivalric order of the Knights of the Round Table for fifty members, handpicked by Merlin, following his own act of creating the table itself as a replica of both the original Last Supper table and the subsequent table of Joseph of Arimathea. The text ends with the coronation of Arthur. In the Perceval en prose (alternatively known as the Didot Perceval and usually attributed to Robert as the final part of his purported cycle), where Merlin is the initiator of the Grail Quest and cannot die until the end of days; he eventually retires after Arthur's downfall by turning himself into a bird and entering the mysterious esplumoir, never to be seen again.

Other aspects and developments

As the Arthurian myths were retold, Merlin's prophetic "seer" aspects were sometimes de-emphasised (or even seemingly vanish entirely, as in the fragmentary and more fantastical Livre d'Artus) in favor of portraying him as a wizard and an advisor to the young Arthur, sometimes in the struggle between good and evil sides of his character, and living in deep forests, connected with nature. The forest setting often serves as Merlin's natural and favorite domain, dating back to his origins in Welsh and Irish poetry. In the romances, he may take refuge from Arthur's court to live with Blaise in a forest in Northumberland, which over time became identified with Brocéliande. Through his ability to change his shape, he may appear as a "wild man" figure, evoking his prototype Myrddin Wyllt, as a civilised man of any age (including as a very young child), or even as a talking animal. His guises can be highly deformed and animalistic even when Merlin is presenting as a human or humanoid being. In that, Merlin recalls the tradition of pagan deities and creatures of nature and forests, such as Silvanus (who, like Merlin, can appear as an old man and possess the strength of a young man), Faunus (in the Post-Vulgate Cycle, Merlin himself actually tells a Christianised version of the Greco-Roman myth of Faunus and Diana), and the wild man.

Both Merlin and its continuations have been adapted in verse and prose, translated into several languages, and further modified to various degrees by other authors. Notably, the Post-Vulgate Suite (along with an earlier version of the Prose Merlin) was the main source for the opening section of Thomas Malory's English-language compilation work Le Morte d'Arthur which formed a now-iconic version of the legend. Compared to some of his French sources (such as the Vulgate Lancelot which described Merlin as "treacherous and disloyal by nature, like his [demon] father before him"), Malory limited the extent of the negative association of Merlin and his powers. Malory's Merlin is rarely condemned as demonic by other characters, such as King Lot, being presented as an ambiguous trickster.

The earliest English verse romance concerning Merlin is Of Arthour and of Merlin of the late 13th century, which drew from the chronicles and the Vulgate Cycle. In English-language medieval texts that conflate Britain with the Kingdom of England, the Anglo-Saxon enemies against whom Merlin aids first Uther and then Arthur tend to be replaced by either the Saracens or unnamed heathen invaders. The earliest Merlin work written in Germany was Caesarius of Heisterbach's Latin theological text Dialogus Miraculorum (1220). Among other medieval works dealing with the Merlin legend is the 13th-century French romance Roman de Silence, and the 13th-14th Italian story collection Il Novellino that pictures him as a righteous seer chastising people for their sins.

Merlin's prophecies

The works dealing with Merlin's prophecies did not end with Geoffrey's Prophetiae. Abundant prophetic literature attributed to Merlin is divided into two main currents, the prophecies of the British Isles and those of the European continent, different in their themes, purposes, and inspirations. Particularly in Britain, Merlin remained as much as a prophet as a magician up to and including the 16th century, when political content in the style of Agrippa d'Aubigné continued to be written using Merlin's name to guarantee their authenticity. For instance, John of Cornwall's 12th-century Latin poem Prophecy of Merlin contains a selection of 'updated' prophecies from Geoffrey's Prophetae that come with the author's interpretations relating them to his contemporary Cornish and English political affairs. The late medieval Vita di Merlino con le sue Profetie (1379), combining Merlin romance material and prophecies related to the author's recent contemporary history and politics, became the first Arthurian text printed in Italy.

The influential Prophéties de Merlin (later abridged and clarified in Pieri's Storia) was written in French but obviously by an Italian in Venice (falsely claiming to be one "Richard from Ireland") on the bidding of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and to propagate on his behalf. It contains long prophecies, mostly concerned with 11th- to 13th-century history and contemporary politics relating to Italy and the Holy Land, some supposedly told by Merlin's ghost after his death, interspersed with episodes recounting Merlin's deeds and with assorted Arthurian adventures in which Merlin does not appear at all. The German Sagen von Merlin from the same era, which included the War of the Keys between Frederick and the Papacy, contains prophecies directed against the Popes. The widely circulated short political tract Expositio Abbatis Joachimi super Sibillis et Merlino (c. 1240), falsely attributed to Joachim of Fiore, contains the praise of Frederick's miraculous birth, which backfired, making it look like the coming of Antichrist.

During the 15th century, old Welsh works predicting the Celtic revenge and victory over the Saxons were recast as Merlin's (Myrddin's) prophecies and used along with Geoffrey by the propaganda of the Welsh-descended Henry VII of England (who fought under the red dragon banner) of the House of Tudor, which claimed to trace its lineage directly to Arthur. Later, the Tudors' Welsh supporters, including bards, interpreted the prophecy of King Arthur's return as having been fulfilled after the Tudors' ascent to the throne of England that they sought to legitimize following the Wars of the Roses. Prophecies attributed to Merlin have been also previously used by the 14th-century Welsh hero Owain Glyndŵr in his fight against the English rule. The vagueness of Merlin's prophecies enabled British monarchs and historians to continue using them even in the early modern period. Notably, the King of Scotland and later also of England and Ireland, James VI and I, claimed his 1603 unification of Britain into the United Kingdom had been foretold by Merlin.

Tales of Merlin's disappearance

The Merlin stories often end with his removal from the world. In the prose romance tradition, Merlin's eventual undoing comes from his lusting after another of his female students: the one often named Viviane or Vivien, among various other names and spellings (including Malory's own Nyneve that his editor William Caxton changed to Nymue, which in turn eventually became the now-popular Nimue). The theme of Merlin's entrapment by a woman became one of the most popular and iconic in his legend. Her character and relation to Merlin have been added to the legend of Merlin in the prose continuations of de Boron's Merlin, identifying her with the figure of Lancelot's supernatural foster mother. She is also called a fairy (French fee), like Morgan, and is described as a Lady of the Lake, or the "chief Lady of the Lake" in the case of Malory's Nimue. In the Arthurian prequel Perceforest, the ancestry of both Merlin and the Lady of the Lake descends from the ancient fairy named Morgane (unrelated to Arthur's sister). Here, their bloodline had been cursed by Morgane (out of a false belief that her daughter was raped by her daughter's human lover), thus making her female descendant destined to kill a male one.

There are several versions of their story. Common themes in most of them include Merlin actually having the prior prophetic knowledge of her plot against him (one exception is the Spanish Post-Vulgate Baladro where his foresight ability is explicitly dampened by sexual desire) but lacking either ability or will to counteract it in any way, along with her using one of his own spells to get rid of him. Usually (including in Le Morte d'Arthur), having learned everything she could from him, Viviane will then replace the eliminated Merlin within the story, taking up his role as Arthur's adviser and court mage. However, Merlin's fate of either demise or eternal imprisonment, along with his destroyer or captor's motivation (from her fear of Merlin and protecting her own virginity, to her jealousy of his relationship with Morgan), is recounted differently in several variants of this motif. The form of his prison or grave can be variably a cave, a tree, or a hole, either within or under a large rock, or an invisible tower made of magic with no physical walls.

The scene is sometimes explicitly placed in the enchanted forest of Brocéliande, a legendary location today identified with the real-life Paimpont forest in Brittany. According to Le Morte d'Arthur, this happens somewhere in Benwick, the kingdom of Lancelot's father in Brittany. A Breton tradition cited by Roger Sherman Loomis in Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance (where he also asserts that it "seems almost certain that Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake were originally the same person" in the legend) has Merlin trapped by his mistress inside a tree on the Île de Sein.

Modern culture

Merlin and stories about him have remained popular from the Renaissance to the present day, especially since the renewed interest in the legend of Arthur in modern times. During the French Renaissance, Merlin would continue to be a uniquely appealing figure of theater and ballet even after the interest in Arthur himself had already waned. In William Rowley's play The Birth of Merlin, or, The Child Hath Found his Father (1622), for instance, Merlin is a son of the Devil that becomes an adviser to Uther, the young King of Britain. Since the Romantic period, Merlin has been typically depicted as a wise old man with a long white beard, creating a modern wizard archetype reflected in many fantasy characters, such as J. R. R. Tolkien's Gandalf or J. K. Rowling's Dumbledore, who also use some of his other traits. As noted by Arthurian scholar Alan Lupack, "numerous novels, poems and plays center around Merlin. In American literature and popular culture, Merlin is perhaps the most frequently portrayed Arthurian character."

According to Stephen Thomas Knight, Merlin embodies a conflict between knowledge and power: beginning as a symbol of wisdom in the first Welsh stories, he became an advisor to kings in the Middle Ages, and eventually primarily a mentor and teacher to Arthur and others in the works around the world since the 19th century. While some modern authors write about Merlin positively through an explicitly Christian world-view, such as Stephen R. Lawhead in The Pendragon Cycle, some New Age movements instead see Merlin as a druid who accesses all the mysteries of the world. For instance, Merlin appears in the teachings of the Montana-based New Age religious-survivalist group Church Universal and Triumphant as one of their "ascended masters". Francophone works since the end of the 20th century have tended to avoid the Christian aspects of the character in favor of the pagan aspects and the tradition sylvestre (attributing positive values to one's links to forest and wild animals), thus "dechristianising" Merlin to present him as a champion for the idea of return to nature. Other authors may make Merlin obsessed with the quest for knowledge through astrology and alchemy, or highlight the duality of the character from a demonic father. Diverging from his traditional role in medieval romances, Merlin is also sometimes portrayed as a villain, as in Mark Twain's 1889 classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. As Peter H. Goodrich wrote in Merlin: A Casebook:

Merlin's primary characteristics continue to be recalled, refined, and expanded today, continually encompassing new ideas and technologies as well as old ones. The ability of this complex figure to endure for more than fourteen centuries results not only from his manifold roles and their imaginative appeal, but also from significant, often irresolvable tensions or polarities [...] between beast and human (Wild Man), natural and supernatural (Wonder Child), physical and metaphysical (Poet), secular and sacred (Prophet), active and passive (Counselor), magic and science (Wizard), and male and female (Lover). Interwoven with these primary tensions are additional polarities that apply to all of Merlin's roles, such as those between madness and sanity, pagan and Christian, demonic and heavenly, mortality and immortality, and impotency and potency.